Talisman is both a brand and genre of game and I’ve been playing both since 1989. (For more in depth takes read this.) As a game it is long, repetitive, unbalanced, and somehow completely addictive to children’s brains. A decade ago, a Rachel and I were hosting British boys whose choir was touring Canada and, not knowing how else to entertain them, I pulled out Talisman and they were hooked, requesting that we play every chance they could. My kids likewise go through stages when they demand we pull it off the shelf so we’ve invested in various iterations that The OP Games has put out, including the Star Wars version.
The original game was fantasy flavoured with an expansion adding scifi elements lightly lifted from Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40k setting but the prototype design was based on British schools (no really) so the mechanics lend themselves to practically any setting and given the ubiquitous popularity of Star Wars, this pairing was, if not inevitable, certainly predictable. There’s also Batman version along with Harry Potter, My Little Pony, and Kingdom Hearts. As kf
In Talisman, you roll dice, move around a board, draw cards, fight monsters, collect followers and objects, level up, and eventually work your way into the middle (if you possess the titular Talisman or equivalent object) to win the game. The Star Wars swaps out swords for blasters, orcs for stormtroopers, good vs evil alignments for light vs dark side and graveyards for Mustafar. Otherwise, the only real changes are using the dark and light side alignment matter with interacting with different characters so you don’t wind up with Luke Skywalker going on space adventures with Grand Moff Tarkin and the end game which has players fighting the Emperor rather than each other.
The art is decent but not amazing. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a mash up like this. Some of the stats don’t make a ton of sense thematically but all in all it’s a solid workhorse game that gets you through all the beats of fighting folks and getting stuff which is the hallmark of these sorts of games. If you have any one iteration of Talisman you essentially know what any other kind will be like so collecting multiple versions isn’t particularly necessary but especially if you have kids with particular tastes, having options can be enjoyable.
I still prefer the clunky 80s-ness of the original.
Tragedy is a challenging theme for roleplaying games to explore. When pitching a game to friends, GMs often have an easier time evoking images of heroes and/or scoundrels gaining fame, power, and riches rather than offering up a literal descent into a turbulent , kaleidoscopic hellscape which will inevitably end in some sort of personal loss or destruction. However, I think GMs would do well to listen to my 5th grader’s teacher who was fond of saying, “you can do difficult things!” Rowan Rook and Decard agree and offer some enticing qualities in their Ennie award winning game Heart to help you make the pitch.
Set in the same drow world and literally the same zip code as Spire, Heart replaces the espionage and steampunk shadowrunning of its sibling for what at first glance appears to be a more traditional dungeon diving game. Players are a ragtag group of social misfits with dangerous powers and apparently no responsibilities to attend to beyond exploring, fighting, pilfering, and occasionally returning to society to recuperate and sell their questionably acquired goods. Like Spire, players have skills, areas of expertise, unique abilities, and questionable gear to help them overcome challenges while taking damage not only to their physical frame but to their sanity, souls, and credit score.
From the get go, this game departs from their well worn grooves of the mainstay of the hobby. First off, unlike most games, they are asked to explicitly state why they are choosing to forego the relative safety of uhhh not dungeon diving to their current occupation. This question of motivation is not just a fluffy one for drama majors to consider but has mechanical impacts, indeed it determines how you level up and gain new powers. It’s not enough to bash a requisite number of lizardmen, acquire enough diadems, or even just get to whatever chapter break your GM has written down; players have a laundry list of Beats and every session they give two of these beats to the GM like a sushi order. These can be to take a certain amount and kind of damage, to explore a particular locale, betray a loved one, undergo a ritual, etc. The GM is expected to take all these Beats and use them as guidelines to direct how a particular session or campaign goes. This means that whether the heroes are motivated by helping communities thrive, uncovering dangerous secrets, or because shady cultists are blackmailing them has huge ramifications on what happens in any given game and if they want to get the shiny new abilities that come with leveling up, they have to cooperate with the GM to reach those Beats.
The powers and abilities come with the player’s class which are a carnival mirror reflection of traditional fantasy games. Instead of Fighters you have Dogs who are sort of reincarnated members of a doomed regiment. Instead of Rangers you have Carvers who lust for the blood and viscera of the creatures dwelling in the Heart to imbue themselves with feral power. Instead of Clerics you have Heretics who can’t show their face in the City Above but are free to worship their seemingly indifferent lunar goddess in her various forms down here. Instead of Bards you can be a Deep Apiarist and just be full of bees. All of these classes have a tantalizing menu of powers that are unlocked by meeting the Beats. There are corresponding Minor, Major, and Zenith beats and abilities and deciding when you want to risk going after the higher powers is a huge part of the gameplay. In theory, players could swim in the shallows of minor Beats and powers indefinitely but the game breaking opportunities that always sing out from these lists prompt them to delve into deeper and stranger perils.
The process of delving is mechanically defined even as it’s given a lot of room for improvisation and on the fly storytelling. The game makes distinctions between Landmarks which are defined locations, communities, temples, dangerous and psychedelic abattoirs, etc and Delves which are the tunnels and passages and liminal spaces that connect them. Each of these areas are made of thematic Domains which provide color and also tie in to player expertise. Religious characters will be more adept at navigating Religious spaces while Wild characters will come into their own handling encounters in Wild areas and so on. The game suggests mixing and matching these Domains particularly in the connecting Delves which gives the GM the creative prompt of trying to imagine what a Wild and Religious space or Desolate and Technological corridor would look like. Another rule is treating the Delve almost as its own ongoing combat with the equivalent of hit points which go down as the players explore or overcome challenges, or use their ever increasing powers to blast short cuts. This is a clever way to abstract the travel process without having to map out every hallway or 10 by 10 room and let everyone have a sense of progress. It’s similar to the countdown clocks in Blades In the Dark which is a system I really like for making it clear to the table what’s at stake and how the pacing is ticking along.
Beyond the vivid setting and body horror, what truly gives Heart its unique drive is that commitment to tragedy and game architecture that takes you there. Characters can always give up and leave which is one tragic ending or they can continue to burrow deeper looking for what brought them down here and maybe even achieve it and that’s a different tragic ending. What gives it all potency is that, like all the great tragedies, it’s all built on the choices they make. What it loses in this structure is the potential for sprawling, long term play that often defines other dungeon crawlers. This is not meant to be a marathon but a sprint where players see the gory finish line practically from the start.
I like Heart and while I think it might be a hard sell for a lot of groups, the ones that buy in have the potential for an immensely rewarding experience. It’s an ambitious game that takes big swings and doubles down on its core themes over trying to have broad appeal and I respect its artistry and its passion and look forward to getting hot and messy with it.
Rachel and I talk about all the great TV that Mike Schur has been up to his elbows in over the years. First aired on Facebook Live on May 4, 2020
Topics discussed: Taika Waititi’s still as of 2025 untitled star wars project, The Mandalorian, Parks & Recreation, Good Place, Brooklyn 99, and The Office(s)
The first of our Lost Episodes series! Technically they haven’t been lost yet but with Facebook removing all old live videos at the end of the month, we wanted to make sure there was a home for our COVID-era episodes, starting with our musings on all things both musical and theatrical from April 27, 2020!
Topics discussed: Crazy Ex Girlfriend, The Sondheim Celebration, Les Mis, Hamilton, Hadestown, SIX, Come From Away, Wicked, Parade, Urinetown, Sweeney Todd, Phantom, Zip!, Into the Woods, Free Solo, 127 Hours, Avenue Q, Guys and Dolls, Oklahoma, Cinderella, Sound of Music, Gigi, Gypsy, Beetlejuice, Mama Mia, Galavant, Glee, Greatest Showman, La La Land, Buffy Musical, That Song In Every Musical That No One Likes, and Aladdin
There are many games where players move armies around a map to seize and hold territory in order to secure victory. These games can have a King of the Mountain energy where obvious winners inspire other players to set aside their differences to unite in dragging them down or neck and neck players try to convince everyone else at the table that their rival is the real danger, not them. From classics like Risk to Diplomacy to big chunky wargames like Twilight Imperium or Game of Thrones, these games are often big, long, affairs where hours of planning and maneuvering are rewarded or not. War of Whispers by contrast is a fast game lasting only 4 rounds and around an hour and yet in that time it manages to capture a lot of the elements that makes those larger games so compelling while also subverting them.
In War of Whispers, players are not representing the different empires and kingdoms at war but rather the secret societies, cults, and conspiracies maneuvering in the shadows and manipulating these larger forces. They’ll share control of the kingdoms and try to manipulate the wars to their favour.
At the start of the game players randomly shuffle their ranking of the different kingdoms that will determine how many points they’ll gain or lose depending on how the war shakes out. In this way the game has more in common with gambling on a horse race or buying stocks than with just straight up trying to grab Kamchatka before anyone else. These rankings are secret and keeping that information privileged helps prevent your rivals from sabotaging your goals. However, empires fall and sometimes it pays to switch bets so between rounds, players can swap their rankings between two kingdoms but in so doing they flip over their tiles and reveal what their new rankings are.
Every round, players assign agents to the different officers tasked with running this war which gives them the ability muster troops, draw cards, and attack rival kingdoms. There are no restrictions on how many agents from which factions can be on any given kingdom so you can very well see a turn where one player raises an army and another player sends that army in the complete opposite direction of where the first player wanted. Combat couldn’t be simpler with armies canceling each other out, no dice needed. The cards allow players to swap out actions or move armies around unexpectedly or can even cause dramatic upheavals.
As the game goes on, more and more agents get added and control gets more complicated as everyone gets a better idea who is in favor and who isn’t. By the end some kingdoms will be mighty empires astride their conquered rivals or burnt out war zones, or colonized husks of their former selves. When the smoke clears, players reveal all their rankings and score based on how many cities the kingdoms control.
War of Whispers is a deeply clever game that plays remarkably differently every time we bring it to table. There isn’t a great deal of table talk because so much of the game is trying to misdirect and hide your intentions although it can be a lot of fun to roleplay the hapless kingdoms who just can’t seem to catch a break. If players have similarly ranked kingdoms they can be unknowingly working together. Similarly when one kingdom is everyone’s bottom pick that creates hilarious devastation. It feels almost like a meta-war game with the grand schemes and bold tactics being reduced to opportunistic sabotage and sudden betrayals. The cards create the most unpredictable chaos and I can see them frustrating players with the way they can upend things but I appreciate the threat they pose and the arms race of collecting one’s own cards to have on hand to even things out.
I have the deluxe version which comes with the larger pieces which makes the board pop and apparently makes reading the board state a lot easier. It also adds additional cards that provide more variety. Not a deal breaker but definitely adds to the game experience. Whichever version, I have had great success putting this in front of my friends and heartily recommend.
Folks who have been following this blog know I’m a sucker for a strong theme that grips the imagination and tells a story. Given that, one would be forgiven for assuming I hanker for big campaign or legacy games but fortunately for my wallet that isn’t the case. With the exception of a semi-burgled copy of Pandemic Legacy a friend left at my house and King’s Dilemma I’ve largely stayed away from Legacy games. When I learned about Earthborne Rangers and the way it carried players through a story while also being a game of exploration and ecological management I jumped at the chance.
The game uses cards, tokens, and a campaign book with different read-aloud entries to tell the story of rangers in a far future where humans have opted to live in greater harmony with the environment largely by leaving it alone for centuries before returning to the surface to explore and see how nature has healed. It’s comparable to a cozier Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Players take on the roles of 1 to 4 rangers with skills, gears, and personality aspects that they draw on and play to overcome challenges, connect with the people, beings, and places they come across, and travel around this lush and living world.
Like the best dresses, this game comes with pockets! The creators not only wanted to explore ecological and sustainability themes in their game but produced it to be as environmentally friendly as possible. This leads to an incredible economy of component that feels slick and flexible and robust without needing armies of plastic. With a map, a book, some cards, and an assortment of tokens, players have all the tools they need for adventure and exploration. The storage system neatly allows for quick and easy set up and take down and the game state can be saved to allow for resuming the campaign easily without needing a ton of administration.
At the start of the campaign, players construct a personal Ranger deck either on their own or using a structured Prologue the campaign book provides that walks them through all the different types of cards that go into their deck (as a secret third way, you can also use the premade decks so you can jump right in to the action.) Decks are made up of personality cards, backgrounds that represent your early training, specialities that determines your Role and act like RPG classes, and then an outside interest that can be drawn from any of the starting cards to allow some flexibility and customizing. Along with these decks rangers also choose an Aspect card with 1 to 3 points allocated to four main stats that will get used to determine what all they can do – Awareness, Spirit, Fitness, and Focus.
The campaign is played out in Days which corresponds roughly with an individual game session. At the start of the Day, players draw their hand from their Ranger deck and put energy tokens on their Aspect card. Based on where they last ended their campaign they set out a Location card and create a Path deck based on the environment they’ve been traveling through (woods, grasslands, swamp, mountains, etc) adding in cards based on their location or Valley cards which add random challenges and opportunities. The Path deck will have obstacles, plants, animals, and other humans who will help or hinder the rangers as they travel from location to location. Based on the day, there will be a weather card that will also impact the Rangers as they travel. Finally players will shuffle and set up the Challenge deck that both adds some chance to Tests as well as triggering Challenge Effects on cards already in play.
The Day is broken up into rounds where players will draw new Path cards and play them either directly in front of them (Within Reach) or between them and the current Location card (Along the Way) which represents the range of the particular card and who it can impact. Players can interact freely with cards within reach but if they try to interact with cards further away they run the risk of getting Fatigue. On their turn, players can spend energy tokens from their Aspect card to either play cards from their hands or to attempt Tests on the cards already in play.
Tests are carried out by spending the relevant token and discarding cards with symbols that match the Test and then drawing a Challenge card to see if the total is equal to or higher than the Test’s difficulty. Tests usually result in placing Progress or Harm tokens on different cards in order to Clear them out of the way which makes it easier to interact with other cards, reduces potentially harmful Challenge Effects, and can trigger mission or campaign entries. Players can choose to attempt any Test listed on cards in play or from the four basic tests that are available no matter what. These basic tests allow players to add Progress tokens to the current location in order to travel, adding Progress tokens to animals or humans, avoiding animals or humans by Exhausting (tapping) them, or drawing additional cards from their Ranger deck.
As the players run around they will frequently take Fatigue which pulls cards from their Ranger deck and sets it aside. Other cards and tests can Soothe Fatigue which places those set aside cards back in their hand. Players might also get Injured which increases the rate of Fatigue they take. If they take on too much Fatigue or Injuries and discard their deck down to the point that they can’t draw new cards, that can trigger the end of the Day so managing your health and Fatigue is important to be able to accomplish all you want in any game session. There is no death although taking too many Injuries can lead to players having to add Malady cards into their Ranger deck which junks it up going forward.
The round ends when all players have chosen to rest at which point they can choose to Travel if they have placed enough Progress tokens on their current location. This resets the play area and creates a new Path deck for players to explore. Regardless of if they travel or not, players then draw a card from their Ranger, put energy tokens back on their Aspect cards, Ready (untap) any Exhausted cards and then every player draws a new Path card and the next round begins.
This repeated round structure of spending energy, playing cards, making tests, managing Fatigue, and drawing new cards makes up the real core of the game and players have a lot of choices about how they want to interface with this world and it’s those choices that really bring this game to life. While the game can be played solo it really sings as a cooperative game as players can focus on areas where they’re more skilled and help one another where they aren’t as proficient. If one player is surrounded by snarling predators, their teammates can race to their rescue or leave them to work it out on their own.
A huge choice players have to make is when to move on to their next location as things may be getting dangerous and crowded but there might be fun people to interact with or missions that need to be worked on. Fulfilling these missions is a way to get Rewards which can be swapped into the Ranger deck to provide new options and show progress.
And sometimes you just want to play with your ferret.
I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with Earthborne Rangers both as a solo game and with friends although I much prefer the latter. The game has all the fun of a choose one’s own adventure game, a roleplaying game, and a clever card game. The way the game triggers different effects and the various cards interact makes it feel alive. When you have a play space full of predators and prey and plant life all feeding or moving each other makes this feel like an ecosystem that responds to your actions as well as living and breathing on its own. There isn’t as much of an emphasis on fighting and taming nature but the possibility for that is there which makes the choice to try to live in peace feel like a genuine and weighted decision.
I’m already eyeing the various expansions but given what all this game starts off with, I will hopefully be able to hold off for some time but I could spend a lot of time in this cozy future. The folks who make it also have great online resources like music, printable character sheets, and standalone adventures if you want a break from the full campaign or want to gently introduce friends to it. Superb game. Highly recommended.
I love Susanna Clarke’s collection of whimsical footnotes with attached novel and for a longer conversation on the subject I’ll direct you to episode 71 of this very podcast. But today I want to talk about Osprey Games’ 2019 adaptation of what may very well be my favorite book.
Players take on the role of magicians vying to be the greatest spell-slinger of the age through the traditional method of accruing thaumaturgic power – attending parties and acquainting themselves with notable persons. The game plays out over 12 rounds that take on peculiar characteristics by drawing from a deck of Marseilles cards. On a player’s turn, they will accrue books, bolster their magic, travel across London or Europe, attend soirees and/or meet notables, and then if able, carry out Feats of Magic. To win, players must both have a greater Magicianship than their rivals and the Gentleman with Thistledown Hair.
The first decision players must make every turn is which of their six actions they want to use or if they want to refresh those actions. Picking an action makes it unavailable on a future turn until they have been refreshed. These actions include acquiring books, teleporting around the map, or giving the magician more options for doing magic. This last one is incredibly important and requires planning.
The most potent way to increase Magicianship and thus win is to complete Feats of Magic. Each of those feats has a slot for a specific kind of magic (hills, rains, stones, birds, wind, and trees.) To place magic tokens on those slots, players discard Invitation and Introduction cards that have those matching symbols (foregoing social obligations to prioritize their magic.) However, they can only place tokens that match the ones present on this round’s Marseilles card unless they chose to use their action to study the specific magic. Books can also grant some flexibility and allow players to transmute one kind of token for another or increase the tokens they can place. If all the elements line up and a Feat can be accomplished then it adds to their Magicianship and grants them a spell which can do any number of fun things.
As well as improving their magical prowess, players can also increase their Prestige by hobnobbing with figures of note either from history or from the pages of Ms. Clarke’s novel. While Invitations can be spent to either claim Feats of Magic or Introduction cards, Introduction cards are spent to gain Prestige. Prestige determines turn order, breaks ties, and also unlocks bonuses on the player board like faster movement, extra Magicianship, drawing cards, and the like. As mentioned before both cards can also be discarded to eschew society and do magic.
I was surprised when I saw that Osprey was making this game. I associate them more with war games and painstakingly detailed military history books. Nevertheless I was excited to see how they tackled the book and found the end result very frustrating. There are a lot of things I love – the look and design, the way players navigate society and study. Ultimately however the whole thing falls flat for me.
A big problem is the threat of the Gentleman with Thistledown Hair. In theory I like the idea of there being a collective threat everyone has to deal with and forcing them to set aside their own issues to take on but that’s not what happens here. Players don’t work together but just try to scramble on their own to build up their score and hope against hope that it’s high enough to both beat out their colleagues and this abstract figure. I would have found it more interesting if players had to choose between their own ambition and the good of the table like Archipelago or Kill Doctor Lucky. It would have also been interesting if the GTH more directly messed with the game like throwing out obstacles or complications instead of just looming abstractly. At the end of the game, if he’s won, players just compare their own scores and take that as the moral victory even as they know they didn’t really win.
The other problem is the number of roadblocks and choke points this game throws up. To fulfill Feats you have to hope the Marseilles card *and* your hand of cards *and* your action wheel options all line up and when they don’t you’re just stuck feeling like you’ve wasted one of a frustratingly few turns. The choices feel less like getting to choose from a bunch of fun things and just picking something in hopes you don’t slam into the various barriers.
Finally, for a game about dueling magicians there is precious little interaction beyond a bit of racing for available Feats and Books. There could have been an interesting tension if players could cooperate or directly mess with each other, particularly in trying to deal with the GTH but aside from a few spells that can poke your rivals here and there, there’s nothing. Not even being on the same space allows for trading or stealing secrets. You’re essentially just doing parallel play which is ok but feels like a lost opportunity.
I’m going to keep poking at this game and hope I find something more fulfilling than I so far have but until then, I’m more likely to reach for the book than the game when I want to experience this world.
I’ve been giving a kiss to build a dream on since the 90s when I huddled around my friend Cal’s PC to check out this game he was raving about where you fought giant rats and delved into isometric vaults and in the intervening years I have played every iteration of Brian Fargo’s brain child, including the lamentable Brotherhood of Steel PS2 game. I even logged many hours in the iOS base builder that inspired today’s board game review. Fallout Shelter on the iPad is an ok time waster particularly when you’re in COVID isolation but it’s cardboard and plastic version is a genuine delight and one I come back to again and again.
The conceit of the game is that players are competing to improve their shelter, overcome threats, and raise morale to be chosen as Overseer at the end of the game. To accomplish this, players take turns placing workers on the limited spaces in their vault, collecting resources, trading them in for gear, new workers, and new rooms to provide more options for workers to exploit.
As with many resources management games, the real balance in Fallout Shelter comes from pursuing a better engine for collecting and using resources vs going for Happiness which is this games victory points resource. Luckily there are a lot of parallel choices that help both goals so it’s not as stark as a game like Dominion where victory points literally clog up your hands. Still, given the cramped quarters, limited options, and constant blocking by your so called fellow vault dwellers, the game starts with and maintains a decent tension scrambling for the scarce resources.
Resource tracking is managed very cleverly with a player board that has slots for Food, Water, and Power and players slide cubes into those slots to clearly see what they have in abundance or scarcity. Water is mostly used to venture outside the vault and procure gear which can help fight enemies, convert resources from one to another, or provide points at the end of the game. Food is necessary to attract more dwellers and gain more workers and thus more actions every round. Power’s main use is building new rooms which gives you more things to do, earns points, and once a player’s floor is completely filled in, triggers the end of the game.
Threats are these special see through cards that show up at the start of every round and block one of the spaces workers can be assigned to. Most of them are defeated by rolling dice but a few like fires and black outs, require spending resources to handle. Clearing out these threats often earns points or but also risks injuring workers and bringing them back to health is a tedious process that keeps you from being able to do anything else so often there’s negotiations about who’s dealing with the radscorpions in the cafeteria.
For a game based on an iPad game based on a classic videogame franchise, Fallout Shelter punches well above its weight and is a fun and quick game that ends before it gets too repetitive. It’s easy for one player to pull ahead and there can be some frustration in trying to catch up but because it’s relatively short, it doesn’t feel too demoralizing and there’s always the possibility a deathclaw will show up and ruin the frontrunner’s day. All in all it’s a pretty fun game and the metal lunch box it comes in makes it feel all the more…. SPECIAL.
