Crowned

Graeme brought along a copy of 4th edition Talisman after Colin badgered him about it. Originally a Games Workshop production it is now released under license by Fantasy Flight. I can remember playing this a lot when it was the old 2nd edition.

All three of us randomly drew characters and we all started evil, Graeme the Ghoul, Colin the Assassin and Tel the Sorceress! Colin's assassination ability lead to him being avoided like the plague, but I did manage to use my beguile ability on him a couple of times. The ghouls ability to zombify defeated monsters did seem pretty weak in comparison to ours.

It had to happen to someone eventually and the Ghoul finally got turned into a toad. I took advantage of his new state and managed to grab all the stuff he was forced to drop before he could reach it again when back in Ghoul form.

The inner circle seemed easier than I can remember it, there is the one section where bad die rolling can send you back outside, but most of the rest are either roadblocks or minor loss of life tokens, which since I managed to grab the Runesword was not a problem for me. It was a good job I got to the Crown of Command when I did as Colin soon managed to get into the inner ring (but got kicked out by failing a strength test) and Graeme's new character, the Monk, was cleaning up all the good stuff left on the outer ring, and had rapidly built up his strength. But not his lives and with the Crown in my possession they both fell to its life draining ability, and at the same time so no one was left hanging about.

The game has generally good production values and all the counters stack baring the rather cheap looking gold coins of which there did not seem to be enough; some 5gp coins might of been handy. I think the writing on the board has shrunk a bit as it was quite hard to read some of the more verbose instructions, maybe the background is different? They also obviously think that toad turning is a major thing as they have included no less than four toad figures in the set.

With the later editions of the game the expansions started to get a bit silly and even included spacemen. Hopefully with future development being in the hands of FF, with their experience of expanding games such as Runebound, will hopefully keep the excesses in check. From what I can tell of the first expansion, 'Reaper', they seem to be keeping to this philosophy.
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