MAKE A WAY TO RESUME ONLINE GAMES.

It's absolutely ridiculous to be playing online with friends, investing several hours in a game, and then an internet blip causes one or more people to be booted, and the only person who can resume is the host. Essentially, hours down the tubes. Now none of us want to even play this game at the risk that we will just end up losing hours to a game that will end up not being able to finish together. It's a complete waste of time. A complete waste of money. And of course, I can't return it because I have already invested time in this game. This game is completely useless if you want to be able to play online with friends because of this one feature.

They refuse to make it so that online games are saved because of experience gained. THEN MAKE A NONEXPERIENCED VERSION OF ONLINE PLAY THAT PEOPLE CAN SAVE AND RESUME. IT'S ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS TO NOT BE ABLE TO SAVE A GAME THAT BY ITS NATURE IS HOURS LONG. FIX THIS.

I'll give this game a positive review when the developers finally add an undo function. That will help me and my game group live with all things that go wrong from unclear rules and funky UI/UX.

I asked the support team about undo and they said they were worried it would be abused in public games. I've thought about that and here's my answer: just make it an option at game setup time. Boom.

I love Talisman. If you're okay with random chance dictating a good chunk of what can happen, it can be a blast. Wacky crap can happen and every game can play out considerably different, especially if you're playing with the expansions. It is an old game, though, and many of your turns (particularly early game) will wind up being "land on a space and pray you draw something good". You'll end up with memorable stories like, "that one game where the demon kept rampaging around the board and eating all the other monsters, which added to his strength" or "the time all 6 players got turned into werewolves and it ended with a lycan brawl on the crown of command".

The amount of different cards you can encounter in the deck is staggering and only gets increased with each expansion you add. You might find a free great sword on the floor that can only be wielded by good characters, a wizard might teleport you across the map, a scribe could become your follower and help you gain new spells, a demon and a dragon might team up and attack you with a score that you have 0% chance of beating. The list of characters are pretty varied as well and have quite a range of effects. I recommend playing with random characters for everyone, including getting a new random character on death.

You can also attack other players you land on or mess with them indirectly with spells. You might sit there watching your bud have a gnome handing him free weapons while he picks up gold of the floor every other turn, meanwhile apparently every damn dragon in the land caught the smell of your firm, medium-rare buttcheeks and decided to shoot their shot in the small corner of the map you're just trying to survive in. You'll hate your friends and the game itself more than Mario Party and Dokapon combined but you'll have a begrudging smile on your face while you do so. Also, fair warning, the game can go on for quite a while so set aside some time.

For anybody wondering about expansions (there are a lot), I'd recommend playing Vanilla first. If you enjoy it, I'd say the Reaper and Blood Moon are good ones to add. They put more cards into the deck and introduce 2 NPC monsters that you can send after other players if you roll a 1 for movement. After that, I'd look at The City, Dungeon, The Highlands and Woodlands. These each add a new corner to the board to explore, expanding the map and the available strategies. Cataclysm is great but it replaces the main center board with an alternate one. The original is a bit more constant but the Cataclysm version will offer more variety between games. Many see this as a straight upgrade but I think you should play with the vanilla a bit first. The Dragon and Harbinger expansions are arguably the only 2 that totally change how you'll play the game, where as basically every other expansion just adds more on top of what's there so you might want to be wary of when you decide to add them in. The rest (more or less) just add more "stuff" or options into the game.

So why is this a thumbs down? The digital edition friggin sucks. I'm not one to complain about bugs too often and generally I overlook them as long as the experience is still fun overall. The problem is, this game has so many issues that I can't even play half the time. It's bad. I mean it's actually embarrassing for a game to have bugs so serious that they break the game so consistently. Just a few examples:

• Every time my friends and I start up a new lobby, something goes wrong. Accepting the invite does nothing or they accept and then they appear in a new lobby all by themselves. I'm not exaggerating, this happens probably between 1 and 5 times every game before we're able to start after multiple retries.
  
  
• A player lands on a space and then everyone is booted out of the game because of an error. Even if the game can be returned to (sometimes your two hour long game is just nuked at this point), you don't get to take back over until the start of the new turn, meaning the AI takes 1 turn for you regardless. This could totally screw you and it can be very frustrating.
  
  
• A player casts a spell that requires them to select a card from another space. You can't select anything for a solid minute and a half and then when the option finally shows up on screen, everyone is booted out of the game because of an error.
  
  
• A player has text no longer appear for him on the UI so when he's prompted with a selection he has no way of knowing what he's choosing. He fixes this by leaving and rejoining, which instantly restarts the current player's turn, removing the dice result they just rolled and causing them to lose a fight that they already won while also losing their own turn to the AI, as stated above.
  
  
• My personal favorite: At the lobby screen I was trying to invite my friends. None of them were receiving my invites. So I kept trying. We logged in and out, restarted the game, etc and I kept trying to re-invite them but to no avail. Eventually I get a steam message from a guy I haven't talked to in over a year, asking me to "please stop spamming me with invites, I don't even own that game". It was sending my invites to completely wrong people.

I love Talisman and I own the entire set in real life. It's a great game that can be hilarious, frustrating, chaotic and fun and you can't take it too seriously. The digital version is horrendously put together. My group hasn't played it in over a year despite wanting to, because of the bugs and the desire to not have a multi-hour game ruined by a single bug. Just today we finally came back to play again since we've been gone so long, hoping that it maybe works a bit better now. It booted us all out before turn 20. This is not acceptable. I don't think I'm wrong to be upset that the game I bought can't even be played 50% of the time. The game itself is fun, this version is a buggy mess. You can still try it out and if you do I hope you have a better experience. Good luck.

TL;DR:
Talisman is a great game that's chaotic, unpredictable and will make you hate your friends. The digital edition has consistent bugs that very well may break the game and make it unplayable.

I've demanded Nomad Games honor my purchase of Season Pass as a means to get all future DLC as was the conditions I purchased it under or give me a refund, I will update this with the results; I suggest you stay away from Nomad Games as their current practices constitutes fraud.

A good game but it uses spyware( amplitude.com ) to track user. I ask for the reason in the community but the thread was deleted without answer. Play it only if you have no problem that it takes your data or if you block the connection like me(do it with pihole).

Talisman: An easy-to-pick-up-and-play, hard-to-master game; is excellently digitised in this version, and the devs should be proud of having done a good job with it.

Why is this review negative then? The base game and approach is straight-forwards: roll a dice, decide a direction, potentially play extra abilities from cards in your hands, etc. All well and good. But in practice, it's a loooong slog to the end of each game, and I got bored before the first game I played was even a quarter done.

Typically, one/two (at most) player(s) will start doing well rapidly, powering up, gaining good items or gaining stats rapidly, allowing them to stay ahead of the curve and do better and better - while all the other players drop behind and can't keep up - and worse, if they get something good, it's relatively easy for one of the top players to come and stomp on their face, steal their stuff or just outright kill them.

It reminds me of Monopoly's issues - it's not a bad game as such, it's just monotonous, and once you get a picture of who's going to win, that's probably not going to change. It might, I grant you, but given that to do so doesn't require skill - it requires a run of bad luck on the top-player's part or good luck on the underdog's part (or both!).

Yes, there are particular cards/characters/etc that excel at reversing fortune in such a manner, and in the hands of a skilled players, they might turn it round... but you still rely on getting 1/6 to land on the right spot, and if you don't, there's a really limited degree of choice in what you're doing: you end up hovering round until you can pull it off - and on a typically more-and-more dangerous board too.

In which time, the top-player has been amassing even more, giving them more and more options and the more they get, the higher the chance that they have an instant counter for your reversal-of-fortune, while you haven't got a hope except in a single very specific circumstance. Like them landing exactly on Mayfair while they own the entire West and North of the board (fingers crossed for Free Parking!).

That's not to say there's not skill involved, and the decision-making in it is excellent - my complaint is that you only have to make that kind of choice maybe one turn in every six thanks to the implicit RNG in every move which actively disfavours less-well-off players and favours those who are ahead - both in terms of the dice-roll for movement and the events that occur when you move. Add to that that one-in-every-six turns means you have to sit through 5/6 slow turns of failing to do so while other people play out lengthy turns and you'll be there a while.

So while this is an excellent version of Talisman, and I can't disagree that it may appeal to many, it's not for me, and I couldn't recommend it to anyone: it's slow, monotonous and there are much more entertaining and engaging board games out there.

If you don't mind slow and monotonous and enjoy a build-up of achievements, a heavy RNG element and both pummelling helpless players and/or getting pummelled by less helpless ones repeatedly, don't let this review stop you, it's a great game. Otherwise, something like Scythe or Ticket To Ride are much more appealing to me.

Developer blocked the game listing, so Now I can't introduce new fans to the game :(

So now the Season Pass doesn't include the new content that is being released. That's something of a cheap move (pun intended) but that's not the first time that happens with a game on Steam. They don't even set up a new Season Pass so if you want the new content you have to pick the DLC individually. They don't even set up a bundle on Steam for that matter. What do they do? They release a stand alone single player spin off with extra DLC and expect us to fall for that. Thanks but no thanks.

Removing this game from steam, forces people to buy multiple licences of the new version, if they want to introduce a new player to the game, rather than just a licence for the new player.

Do you love:
*board games?
*fantasy settings?
*roleplaying Games?

If you answered "yes" to more than one of the above, go ahead and buy this game while it's on sale. You'll enjoy yourself thoroughly. To everyone else, I must say...


Talisman is a hard game to recommend. My partner and I enjoy playing and we laugh hard at the antics which play out over the board, but there are still way too many things not working as intended, too many bugs, too many instances where the user interface doesn't do what you may want it to do.

They're charging a lot of money for content that isn't even created yet, and the stuff that is already there often does not work as advertised. I've had a lot of fun with this game, but as yet it still acts way too much like a beta version for Nomad to be charging full price.

I can recommend this game only to hardcore fans of the genre like myself. For everyone else, I'd have to say... wait for them to finish the game and maybe get it on sale at a deep discount.