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.