Recent reviews by I-Mah Mister Dummy

I had played this game a long while ago, stopped for years, then began playing it again recently, wondering why I had stopped. Oooh boy do I remember now. Talisman is a board game dictated by dice, and thus luck, but this has to be one of the most frustrating board games I have ever played in my life.
Some people will say that this game is not only about luck, and that strategy plays a great part towards achieving victory.
No. Just no. This game is all about luck, and only luck.

You and your opponents are on a board. You roll a die, you land on a space. On that space, either you roll another die with various results, or draw cards. On these cards, either you get sweet equipment or followers that will greatly help you during the rest of the game, or encounter pointless events that can benefit the other players, hinder you, or simply send you in a forced to battle against NPC enemies who sometimes have ridiculously high stats.

In the end, most games finish with one player being the luckiest and getting all the sweet loot that increases their Strength and Craft (= Magic) stats, which can hit ridiculous proportions. Some players will have so many inflated stat points that they will become near-untouchable; and should you manage to miraculously win against them once, they will have won five times against you in the meantime.

At this point, the game just turns into a bullying simulator, which is amplified by the fact that in a PvP battle, the victor can either make the defeated lose one of their lives... or steal an item from them.
Yup. This is where the fun part begins. The strongest can become even stronger by stripping others of their useful items, and then keeping them for themselves.

If you are stronger than the others, only the worst of lucks can strike you down, such as rolling a 1 against the Reaper DLC NPC (which means instant death, and restarting from scratch), and then rolling another 1 by using Fate (a feature allowing you to re-roll the die).
But besides that, pretty much nothing can stop people in the lead, as the remaining players would do better to start praying for this agonizing game to come to an end swiftly. And the games can sometimes drag on for a while... a long while. I have had 4-player games take over two hours long. This is too much, especially when you've been used as a mop for two thirds of the game's duration.


TL;DR : Way too many luck-based factors that ruin the experience and make the unlucky ones feel like completely powerless punching-bags.
I'd rather play Russian Roulette with 5 bullets in the chamber than play Talisman ever again.


Besides all that, there are other negative points about the game :

- The interface is quite clunky, and mistakes can be easily made when choosing which action to take, as the same action is not always at the top of the list of available moves. Mistakes that cannot be rolled back, with the game taunting you afterwards by requiring you to make an extra click for finishing your turn after making that blunder.

- Between the several years of not playing the game, Nomad Games Accounts were added. A cool feature that added many detailed stats over your entire playtime... but which also completely erased your prior progress, post-game awards, experience points and runes earned.

- And lastly, if you scrolled through the review page, you might have noticed the major complaint : the developpers selling a Season Pass that was supposed to feature ALL future DLC to be released... which was then changed later on to not feature them anymore. Personally, I consider this kind of practice a scam.