Blaugust 2022 – Talisman Digital – Scratching that Boardgame Itch
Posted on August 23, 2022 by Aywren
I’d been in a bit of a lull in gaming over the past month. I’ve been waiting for FFXIV 6.2 to drop, and while I’ve been playing other things on the side (and none of them were bad), nothing had been super gripping to me either. And then… I saw Talisman on sale at Steam.
Note: The sale is over with as of writing this, sorry! But it’ll probably be on sale again!
I’ve never played Talisman, which is one of those oldskool board games that my mind lumped in with games like Hero Quest. This wasn’t exactly accurate I found, but that’s just fine.
Clicking through a Twitter announcement about the Talisman sale, I saw the base game was being sold for about $1.50 – and a 6 pack was a little over $7. Seeing that it was online multi-player, I figured at that price I couldn’t go wrong. So I picked up the 6 pack and sent it off to folks in the Posse to see if there would be any interest in trying it out.
There was, much to my surprise, that very day. And so we set up a board and jumped into learning how to play Talisman completely blind. No one had ever played, and I might have been the only one who’d even heard of the game.
We stumbled our way through and had a good time. Dragons were fought, frogs were had, frogs fought farmers. Yeah, it was surprisingly more engrossing than I expected!
The only problem was that while Talisman saves multiplayer games at the last player’s turn, you can only have one ongoing game at a time saved. That meant that unless we could get everyone back on the board at the same time, we couldn’t continue playing the game we started (or we’d leave someone behind).
But my sister and I certainly had the itch to keep playing after that first night. That’s when I discovered there’s a Switch version, and it, too, was on sale for $2. What I didn’t know was that the base game on the Switch included a couple of expansions as well.
Anyhow, Vix and Xaa both picked it up for the Switch since they have Internet play. When Syn was busy and couldn’t be around, we set up multiplayer games on the Switch instead – that gave us a second multiplayer save. And boy did we go around the board!
What I really enjoy is that if you set up an account with Nomad, and you link it across platforms, you earn rewards and bonuses for finishing games and completing challenges. This can turn into titles, avatars and points for the leaderboard. While the leaderboard is of no interest to me, it does take the sting off of losing a turn when you know it’s working towards an achievement.
Also, we didn’t realize that linking accounts opened up expansion content across all games that you linked. The fun thing about expansions in Talisman is that if anyone in your group owns an expansion, everyone can play that content whether they own it or not. They just won’t have access to any special characters that came with that expansion.
This is super nice and was what prompted me to purchase the entire content pack of expansions and characters on the Switch version. I didn’t know at the time this (appears to) carry over to the Steam version, too, since I’ve linked my accounts.
I don’t often like making an account with a third party gaming company. While it wasn’t forced for Talisman, I’m so glad we did because these achievements and statistics are part of the fun that carry on after the game is won.
The only thing we didn’t particularly care for was the PvP nature of some of the endings – namely, the default ending. While this isn’t a co-op game, and we knew that, it’s not a lot of fun for our group to sit there and be forced to battle to the death or continuously cast a spell that whittles other players down a life each turn.
We got around that by playing the Race to the Crown version – the first one to the middle wins. And with other expansions, I know we have other options for less competitive ending requirements.
At the end of the day, I hadn’t been looking to play a digital board game. But once I started, I also started looking through other titles – especially board and card game combos.
I picked up Mystic Vale by the same publisher, which is pretty fun. I’ll write something about it eventually. I also reinstalled Wingspan and have been working on re-learning to play that again.
While we’re far from done with Talisman (I hope), my sister and I also started playing the newly released Across the Obelisk. This feels like a blend of Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon. Again, I’ll have to write a post about that one sometime in the future.
I’m still on the lookout for awesome digital board games and deck builders – though I prefer things that go easy on a noob of this genre. If you have suggestions, I’m looking to hear them! Thanks!