Last night I snagged
Talisman Prologue and spent about an hour with the game. Here's the skinny.
First off, for those of you not familiar with the game, let me tell about Talisman. Per the subtitle, Talisman is a "magical quest game" that has been around for thirty years. Here's what the board looks like:
Each player has a character with different attributes (strength, craft, starting gold, starting lives, and fate) and different special abilities. These characters start on the outer ring of the map and roll randomly to move around and encounter each space. In most of the spaces you draw a card and encounter what's there, which usually involves finding stuff, having to fight a monster, meeting a follower who will join your character and give you abilities, or encountering something that makes you lose a turn, increases an attribute, or what have you. There are also spells that you can toss around, generally at each other. The goal is to get stronger, progress to the middle ring, and then on to the inner ring. The catch is that to enter the very center of the board you need to have an item called a Talisman and there are only four total in the game. So, when you're playing a six player game, things get exciting.
(As a quick aside, for those of you who are Familiar with Talisman, I've been playing the game for about twenty-five years, going back to the Second Edition. I've also kept up with the current
Fourth Edition published by Fantasy Flight Games, which Talisman Prologue is built on, and have all the expansions, play periodically, and so forth. Boy, howdy, do I love me some Talisman.)
The thing about Talisman is that it's very luck based. You may draw cards that give you nothing but swag and jobbers to beat up on. Or, you may get shafted over and over again. Also, some characters are simply better than others, so your starting draw has a lot to do with how well you're going to do. The structure of the game means that the more powerful you get, the easier it is to become even more powerful, and before long you're steamrolling everything in your path. Alternately, if you get too far behind, you're probably hosed - though the come from behind victory isn't impossible.
So, here we have Talisman Prologue. This is a faithful re-creation of the Fourth Edition of Talisman, using the same board, cards, rules, art, the whole nine yards. The folks at Nomad Games have done a bang up job of creating a digital version of Talisman and it plays more or less just like the real game, except with a lot less setup time, card shuffling, and arguing about what character everyone gets to play.
There are oddities, however. For example, the Fourth Edition of Talisman comes with unpainted grey miniatures as your playing pieces. I can't imagine why the Talisman Prologue creators didn't think to use painted versions of the miniatures as your token instead. Also, in a game full of spaces where you have to draw a card when you land on it, there's a mechanism where you have to actually tap on the "draw a card" button rather than having the card pop up automatically. This may be important when you're sitting there playing multiplayer Talisman and other folks might need the opportunity to cast spells at you partway through your turn or what not, but in the solo game it mostly seems like extraneous tapping.
Edit:
A developer answered why the game doesn't autodraw cards: "Because you can choose not to draw a card. If, for instance, you're on your last life and are worried that the next drawn card will kill you, you can drop a card on the space first and then you don't have to draw one."
Another thing that should be automated is combat later in the game when it's mathematically impossible for a creature to defeat you. For example, if I've got a strength of 7 and I'm fighting a boar with a strength of 1, even if I roll a 1 on the die and the boar rolls a 6 it can't defeat me. Combat is fast paced and this isn't a deal breaker or anything, but I'd just as soon see the game say, "Yeah, you slaughter this critter, let's keep going." Again, I can see how you'd need to go through each step of combat in multiplayer when spells can be tossed around, but for the single player version, maybe not so much.
The real problem here is that this isn't a multiplayer version of Talisman. Instead, it's a single player game where you have quests (read: challenges) to overcome (i.e. go get a particular item, defeat all of the monsters on the board) rather than getting a Talisman and being the first to the center. Depending on how quickly you complete the quest, you'll get get a score of one to three Talismans, three being the best, and you'll also unlock other quests. There are ten characters you can play (though at the start you can only choose the Warrior) and fifty quests total. After that, presumably they'll sell you some more quests, characters, and expansions to the game.
This makes for a pretty weird experience. Most of the point of Talisman is to compete with the other players, so it's not really the same if you aren't running around attempting to screw everyone else over. And, while I've played solitaire Talisman before, that involves running multiple characters. Competition is a large part of what Talisman is all about. Another major part of Talisman is the random luck factor - and, let me tell you, this is a game with a lot of luck built in. In particular, the cards you draw or spaces you encounter often cause you to lose a turn. In a multiplayer game, this means that everyone else is getting ahead while you're twiddling your thumbs and the loss of a turn has some teeth to it. On the other hand, in Talisman Prologue losing a turn just means that your potential score is a bit lower. But, since the mechanism that made you lose a turn is generally utterly random, the penalty to your score doesn't reflect on how well you did or did not play. You just got screwed, and therefore you may only get two points instead of three. Another example of cards being nerfed is the toad effect. When you're playing a multiplayer version of Talisman and get turned into a toad you drop all your stuff, can only hop one square at a time for three rounds, and the other players all rush to grab your loot before you can turn back and rescue it yourself. It's a major pain in the ass and a potential game changer in the regular game, but here it's only a mild nuisance at worst.
Also, I'm pretty sure that the game isn't using a full set of the Talisman encounter cards from the base game for your quest. When I was going through quests as the Warrior I was generally encountering monsters I could fight reasonably easily, I wasn't encountering major craft based monsters that would just nuke me, I was consistently getting the same familiars following me around (such as the guide and the pixie), I kept getting the "get a strength each time you land here" card rather than the one for craft, and in a quest to kill dragons the Holy Lance made a point of popping up. On the one hand, I can see how the designers wanted to give you an optimal subset of cards to draw from as part of the whole scoring mechanism. On the other hand, it's not really much like Talisman if you aren't just drawing completely random stuff that your character can't really deal with, such as a Craft 8 demon rather than a bunch of Strength 3 giant apes. Then you wind up with pitfalls scattered around the board that you have to avoid, while also staying out of the way of the other players; so far in Talisman Prologue I haven't really had anything particularly nasty hit the table and, even when a tough card was on a space, having the board to yourself makes it easy to avoid.
Now, this isn't to say that Talisman Prologue is completely borked. It's reasonably fun running around the board, seeing how quickly you can power up and make for the center (or, in this case, achieve your quest goals), and experiencing the different cards in the game. That said, the variety of cards isn't as entertaining to experience when you're the only one encountering them, especially when the only actual effect is "my score may be arbitrarily lower". Also, while I'm only most of the way through the Warrior path so far, I have to say that the quests you're given aren't as entertaining as playing through a full game; I kept feeling that I was beating the quests about the time things really got going, at which point I'd have to start all the way over again with a fresh character on the next quest.
I'm enough of a fan of Talisman that I'm willing to sit down and play through all of the quests with the different characters and possibly shell out for more stuff down the road. However, I have no idea why this product was launched without multiplayer. It seems like every thing you'd need to add either pass-the-iPad multiplayer with friends or AI opponents could already been in the game with no difficulty whatsoever. I like that they tried to add solitaire game challenges (even if I'm dubious about how well they work), but I'd like them a lot more if quest mode was in addition to a full multiplayer version of the game.
Also, I find it particularly disappointing that, so far at least, there doesn't appear to be a mode where you just pick a character at will and see how quickly you can find a Talisman and fight your way to the center of the board. For a game called Talisman Prologue it's weird that so far I have yet to encounter the actual Talisman card. (For anyone wondering, I did complete a Warlock's Cave quest, but the game game me a time bonus rather than a Talisman.) It may be that something like this will be unlocked at some point in the game, but I got as far as unlocking the final challenge on the Warrior quest tree and the goal looked to be "kill everything on the board" rather than "get a Talisman and get to the center". I'll need to play that final quest before I can really say so, however, so hopefully my bitching here is premature.
Edit:
SteveWD40 reports that, per the developers, once you complete all 50 quests a free play mode opens up where you can pick any character and play the traditional "go for the center" version of Talisman. This is good news, but it's mildly annoying that I have to jump through 50 hoops to open up the game mode I really want to play. (
Here's the designer confirming free play mode.)
Talisman Prologue is a weird beast. The game is currently five bucks and for that price I'm happy to tool around in the game's quest mode without having the full-on multiplayer experience. If you've never played Talisman and are curious to see what it's all about then this version of the game will teach you the rules (not that they're particularly complicated) and give you a taste of what the full game is like. However, I'm not sure that the quests here are all that entertaining in and of themselves unless you're already familiar enough with the game to focus on knowing what to do to try to optimize your score. Finally, the lack of multiplayer is fairly inexplicable. I'd say Talisman Prologue is worth a fin if you're curious as to what Talisman is all about or if you're an old hand who is fond enough of the game to enjoy romping around the board unhindered by competition. However, when the full game price hits a sawbuck I'm not sure that I could really recommend this version.
FnordChan