Talisman

A "Bad" Game Might Still Be Epic

When I went to college my gaming horizons expanded. Some games good, others bad. Some epic, others dull. The funny thing: Some of the bad games were epic. I distinctly remember my first game of Titan: it put me off the game for nearly half a decade. (Since my re-introduction I’ve played it 250+ times). I also remember monstrously long games of Talisman, even though I stopped playing soon after its introduction.

Talisman Cover (Image by Wikipedia)

Robert Harris’ Talisman is a game nestled cozily in the tropes of fantasy. You pick a character¹, get a few starting possessions, and then wander around the outer ring of the board trying to get more powerful so that you can move into the middle ring, and at some point acquire a magical Talisman that lets you get to the center ring and finish the quest for the ominous sounding Crown of Command, which lets you win the game.

Most of the spaces on the board had you draw an adventure card which had an affect or maybe a combat; winning would let you improve a statistic or let you keep an object. Losing would cost you a life … but as in any fantasy, death is more of a temporary setback (at least, until you lost four lives). Other spaces were fixed events, often based on a simple die roll. Would that witch help you out or turn you into a toad²? As the game progressed, cards would build up on the board giving each game a (hopefully) different character.

Talisman is mostly just a luck-fest. When you roll a die you can choose to move clockwise or counterclockwise, but that’s pretty much it for decisions. Sometimes you can choose to interact with your space or not, or it will have a decision. Combat is dice. The characters aren’t particularly well balanced, but the worst could win.

What eventually banished Talisman from the rotation of games was …. all the expansions. Spending two or even four hours on a dice game might be fine when you have plenty of time (and drinks), but they just kept adding more and more to the game, mostly luck. (Often the game would turn a single space in the game into an entire sub-board, which did add to the decision making, but at a cost, and other expansions seemed even worse³). Slow games with lots of luck have their place, but eventually that place was not at my game table.

I turned up my nose at Talisman; and myself (and other) game reviewers labelled it a meaningless luck fest. But different strokes for different folks. Although I’d moved on, Talisman was still welcome on many game tables. There were reprints. Expansions were added at a furious pace⁴. Over three quarters of a million copies were sold last century⁵.

So even thought I might not play it again and “serious gamers” might turn up their noses⁶, Talisman deserves to be considered as one of the Top 100 Most Influential Games of the 20th Century. I look back fondly at the times I played it, although I might be “remembering with advantages.” Sometimes you just want to chuck some dice and laugh at old froggy.

Administrative Note — 20th Century Games will be on hiatus until October 3rd.

1. Such as … Assassin, Druid, Dwarf, Elf, Ghoul, Minstrel, Monk, Priest, Prophetess, Sorcerer, Thief, Troll, Warrior and Wizard, plus plenty more (in expansions).

2. Often a fate worse than death, as you’d hop around for a while to ‘un-toad’ whereas death was just a one-turn penalty, assuming you had some lives to spare.

3. I can’t remember which, but one of them turned the final space into a die roll to see if you’d get the crown of command or maybe just get teleported back to start or have some other challenge not related to the one you’d set up to complete. All I remember was it added hours to the game for little joy.

4. Wikipedia has the horrifying note that a mere three years after the game debuted it had an expansion that allowed for twelve players!

5. And is still going! Talisman was reprinted again in 2007 and Talisman is available on steam in both a 2014 and 2025 edition.

6. Peter Sarrett (author of “The Game Report” gaming ‘zine in the 90s) wrote the following memorable quote — “[Talisman is] a naked singularity, an event horizon from which fun cannot escape. It's a souffle that never rose, the fault-ridden pudding skin in the back of the fridge. It's Xeno's worst nightmare." And that was just a small fraction.