I started playing Talisman in the late 1980s, when the second edition was widely available at gaming shops across the land. My friend had a copy of it, as well as all the expansions, and between sessions of Paranoia, Dungeons and Dragons, Car Wars, or Tales From the Floating Vagabond, we played Talisman. It’s quicker than an RPG campaign, but has a great fantasy theme to it, and an epic feel that always kept us entertained for hours of play.
As teens, my friends and I had a hard time getting together every week to play RPGs, but the great thing about Talisman was that you could choose a ready made character and get adventuring right away—there’s no lengthy campaign and if some of us couldn’t make it, we could play anyway, without a well thought out campaign getting messed up.
In Talisman, you draw cards, attempt to level up, and move across the land until you are powerful enough to challenge the center region of the board. If you try this too soon, you’re liable to be quickly destroyed, so a lot of the game tends to be adventuring and trying to kill monsters and increase your strength or magical ability. The title of the game refers to the magical object you need to enter the final space on the board, ‘The Crown of Command,’ where you can cast the command spell and kill everyone else on the board.
The game encourages you to backstab and attack your friends, which is part of the fun, as long as everyone has a sense of humor about it. (I learned through experience that not everyone does.) Most of the fun was messing around, joking about whatever werewolf or dragon or ghoul you had to fight, losing your gold, losing lives, and generally just roaming the board, trying to improve your stats. Some people find this boring, but my group of friends loved it. It was perfect for us, and would always become a lengthy game of improv, with the knight making dramatic pronouncements as he attempted to banish an evil spirit, or a troll grunting his way through combat with a giant spider. We’d feign outrage and hurt feelings as our friends attacked us, stole our gold, or assassinated us. As soon as we could we’d try to even the score and level up. Some of our friends only played once, as they took it more seriously and didn’t enjoy the verbal sparring, but I could never understand why. If you’re an adventuring warrior, you must expect some chicanery now and then.
I absolutely loved this game, and had a million laughs in many, many hours of play with my friends. We continued playing it in college, but as time went on and friends moved away, our group stopped gathering, and that, as they say, was that. After college we all had jobs and too much to do to spend an entire Saturday goofing around in taverns and trying to fight monsters. Some years later, I asked my friend what happened to his game, but it was long gone, likely cleaned out of the attic by his mom.
I always found time to play other games, and have had copies of Catan, and others hanging around for years. Occasionally I’d play a one off rpg with friends. When I saw that Fantasy Flight had done a 4th edition of Talisman, I immediately got it, and played it often with friends and family. Some of my old group enjoyed it for nostalgia’s sake, and it still has a wonderful fantasy theme to it. To be honest, the 4th edition is a fantastic game, probably more involved and better than the one I played in the 80s.
Even so, there was something I missed about that Games Workshop edition. I wanted to have it, loved the art, and it had imprinted on me at such a young age that I was overcome with nostalgia whenever I saw an image of it. Alas, copies of it went for hundreds of dollars.
Today, we live in a golden age of boardgames. There are a great many good ones, award winning wargames and eurogames and cooperative ones and everything in between. I’ve become something of a collector of games and play them as often as possible with my children. I’m particularly fond of Tolkien themed boardgames; there were only a few of these back in the day, and now they are everywhere, and they’re all great.
Yet even as I acknowledge that these newer games are more sophisticated, I miss the simpler games of my youth, the ones that have a short rulebook, some evocative fantasy art, some simple mechanics, that allow a lot of free reign to just mess around with your friends. I really enjoy plenty of current games, but I truly love the ones I played as a boy.
There’s something to be said for a simple hack and slash fantasy experience, a real meat grinder of a game that encourages reckless aggression and where a bad roll of the dice can kill your character off forever. It’s funnier this way, more chaotic but just as enjoyable to me, or more so, than a game that rewards careful, smart strategic play.
Let’s say you’ve played a conservative game and outmaneuvered your friends. Guess what, Einstein? You just rolled a one. You’re dead, and you have only two lives left. Next turn, you roll a one again. Now you lose all your possessions and become a toad for three turns. On his next turn, your best friend comes and steals everything you worked for and then squashes you. Back to the drawing board, genius. You’re done. It’s hilarious. I love it.
You may also find yourself in the lead for the entire game, only to have some bad rolls in the end and lose to your friend who had been running so far behind the entire game you forgot she was even playing.
As board games go, Talisman is chaotic neutral, the funniest and greatest alignment you could possibly have. It’s unreliable, irritating sometimes, kind and generous one moment and brutally vicious the next. Kind of like life.
And so, of course, in my middle age, I could not resist getting a copy of the second edition. Some poor soul out on ebay parted with this beauty for a reasonable price and made me very happy. I can’t wait to get the old gang together so we can share some laughs and maybe a dagger in the back.
Christopher Tuthill 