I was home sick a couple weeks ago on a Monday and decided to give Attila Total War another go. I played it for awhile when it first came out and it was just too hard to get into at the time. After a fairly static and easy time (for the most part) with Rome 2, Attila and is insanity incarnate for a 4X game, a true successor to Rome: Barbarian Invasion from back in the day, and it’s fucking awesome.
There are a few very hard Total War games, most are pretty easy to play, even on the hard or very hard difficulty. Of the ones I’ve played, Attila and Shogun 2 rank up there, with maybe Napoleon in there somewhere. The main thing about these three games is that your imperial designs are not pre-determined at all in the face of all the shit that will be going on in the game. In Shogun 2, even if you made a move to attack your neighbor, the other neighbors will instantly pounce and attack your stronghold, so you needed to be patient to start to be able to build up a group of provinces. And if you do, you will likely attract attention of the larger factions that will swat you like a fly early on. Attila is similar. Even if you play as one of the three big empires (eastern and western Rome, Huns) you still have a tough time of it with both the Roman empires collapsing on all sides, and the Huns in one big horde to begin with. If you play as one of the minor factions, you will be lucky to even survive a few years with some really pissed off neighbors. In Rome 2 and other TW games, factions nearby typically have to get ‘triggered’ before they come after you. You don’t start in a massive war with the Achaemenid Persian empire and all their allies at the beginning of the game in Rome 2 for instance. In Attila, you basically start at war with all the big factions and are surrounded by pyssed off little factions. While some of them get weaker over time, some do not. If you yourself are a little faction (like the Franks or Jutes) it is essentially a street fight to see who is going to survive long enough to even interact with the larger factions. This is golden.
Getting hit with a giant stone is no fun.
Yes, Shogun 2 is a hard game, but what happens in Attila that makes Shogun 2 a bit of a cakewalk is the fact that factions pushed out of their homelands will become hordes and start ravaging wherever they are in order to raid for money, or try to find an unprotected city or village to take over and settle down: and that could just as well be yours as anyone else’s! You can be sure that your conquests will create these hordes, but even worse, the conquests of others will fire these guys up as well, especially as the Huns move West. Everything will be going OK and then bam!, two hordes show up on your doorstep and either need to be dealt with, or just waited out, accepting the path of destruction that they will cut through everything. The Hunnic hordes are different as they do not peter out, but get stronger and stronger until Attila himself is killed at which time they become normal hordes. Since horse archers are the absolute best unit in the game, the Hunnic hordes are very, very difficult to deal with.
The weather is another factor in the game, as in Climate Change. During the early Dark Ages, the northern hemisphere got colder and places like Greenland, Iceland and Northern Germany became places that could support far fewer people than centuries before. This happens during campaign game, making anything north of Italy subject to severe winters and reduced crop yields. Think you have your food shortages handled after 15 or 20 turns? Nope. This has the effect of forcing everyone south and west to grab up the arable land.
Lastly, a rather new mechanic for TW games is razing settlements. Basically if you, or your opponents, win a siege battle against one of your settlements, they can completely destroy it, so that it has to be recolonized entirely. Much like bombing planets in MOO, this has horrifying potential if you are backstabbed by an ally or have an angry horde come over the horizon. The Caledonians in my campaign were reduced to a single fleet that I ignored. It ended up in Southern Britain and destroyed two of my provinces before I caught and slaughtered them. Thankfully, the viking reavers will rarely Raze, hoping only to pillage so that they can come back the next year and do it again.
I started play as the Saxons and I think I had to restart 4-5 times before I was able to even survive past the first few years. You begin with the Franks and Langobards nearly at war with you from the outset, and all of the northern pre-viking factions aiming directly where you know you need to go: Britain.
Spear fuchery
Over the campaign, I was able to make some friends with the proto-vikings in the north and solidify my hold on Britain and Fresia (Belgium). The South of Europe and East were in total chaos with everyone just running away from the huns. Nearly all of eastern Europe, including Italy, was a complete wasteland. The Western Roman Empire was stuck in southern Spain and many of the major migratory factions (Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals) were hiding in Northern Africa. Eventually my expansion met with the Hunnic horde and they declared war and it was on! Saxons vs Huns, just like it was supposed to be.
What’s unique about Attila is that this scenario may not have happened. While the Huns always attack, they may have spent most of their time vs the Eastern Romans and never came into Europe, or the Visigoths or Vandals may have created an empire strong enough in central Europe that was able to hold them off. This not knowing what the fuck will happen is a major draw.
You go girl
Overall, like Rome: Barbarian Invasion of old, after suffering through the early difficulty and realizing the TYPE of game that it is, I like Attila more than Rome 2 and it could be one of the best Total War games. While I really enjoy the classical battles vs the Macedonians, Persians and Gauls, the absolute chaos as well as the remorseless destruction of the Western Roman Empire over the course of the game, just puts Attila as one of those special Total War games that will get years of play. It doesn’t hold your hand and it lays out it’s challenges early on and says: here they are, see if you can handle it.
There’s been teasers for DOW 2 and the like and now footage is coming out so the game must be hitting in Winter/Spring 2017 or the hype machine wouldn’t be this fired up yet. I must say I’m pretty excited for this one. I played a lot of DOW 1 as it’s in the BEST RTS lineage of Warcraft 3 > Company of Heroes > Dawn of War (a lineage that Blizzard has since abandoned for the very boring Starcraft 2 style). Below is a run down of the factions and main characters in each. It’s the best three of course: Orks, Eldar and Marines.
This is based on a Few Acres of Snow / Mythotopia except in SPAAAAACE. Looks great and while I need to pare down the boardgame collection quite a bit, I’ll be making space for this one.
Fuck yeah. I may have to work a bit next week (from home) but otherwise I’m off for the rest of the year. It will go too fast, I will get nothing I wanted to get done DONE, but I’ll at least get to try. We’ve had a bit of a snowmagedon here in Wisconsin and so I leave you with this, SNOWBEAST 1977.
General plans are to try to play a 6-man Blood Rage game, play something Martin Wallace (probably Struggle of Empires or Moongha Invaders), paint some miniatures, play some Warhammer 9th Age (am I allowed to say that in the same phrase), get some more time in with Attila Total War and Guilty Gear XRD Revelator.
and lastly, run a D&D game with the kids. They probably aren’t ready, but what the heck.
First off, I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able to play and review a new Master of Orion game. From my youth, MOO1 is still one of my favorite games and frankly stands the test of time just fine vs other 4X. Props to NGD for taking this project on and putting the resources and time into this game that so many people love. The shoes they are trying to fill are vast and were filled with space piss from MOO3.
So, I’ve got over 30 hours into the new MOO and I figure it’s about time for a review. I just finished a medium sized game and I’ll use that as a backbone to discuss various systems in the game and how they work. I have a lot to say, but I’m going to keep this at near exactly 2000 words! This is PRE-ANTARAN update, which changes the game in a few ways (and crashed on me too much this weekend to update this review).
If you don’t want to read further, I like the game and I cannot see going back to MOO2 ever again. MOO1: I would play that again for kicks, but there’s a lot of jagging around getting it to work right in DOSBOX with the himem sys and shit like that. The new MOO is an easy game to play, it’s not extremely complex and it plays fairly fast, but it’s a slow game compared to MOO1. You will finish a medium size game in about a week of playing a couple hours a day. This is in keeping with what MOO1 was– a lighter (and awesome) 4X game. It has elements of MOO2, but not overwhelmingly so.
This is what the fuck I’m talking about.
This is not a review of multiplayer. Haven’t gotten a game of that yet. Maybe soon.
Aliens!
First off, I like playing Humans. I’ve always felt that the AI attacks the player-controlled races more than the others, and Humans have some abilities that stave that off so you can better choose when to go to war. They are fairly average in everything except shield tech, diplomacy and trading but really what do you need the most? Money. So this is with the Humans. Think they are boring? Fine. I also dig on the Meklars for just out producing everyone (even the Klackons).
The other choices are pretty standard because originally, they SET the standard! Most of the alien races, in MOO style, equate to some sort of animal. Dogs, Cats, Birds, Ants, Lizards are all represented and the designers didn’t hold back in the redux trying to make them NOT be directly anthropomorphic. A few of the aliens don’t fit the animal mode, and generally these are the stronger races in the game. Psilons, Darlocks, Meklars and Silicoids are all stranger aliens.
Darlocks looking good
Planet Management
I lean towards the Total War style of ‘base’ management as in, I don’t want to do all that much of it, nor do I want to deal with a bunch of CIV style tricks that are required for optimal play. I just want it to be enough planet management to feel like I’m making interesting choices, and not too fuckn detailed.
I miss the sliders, but planet management in the new MOO is fairly easy. You pop open your planet and move your little guys around from farming to science to production (sorta sliders) and queue up what you want to build. Planets, based on their size and environment, dictate the capacity of the little guys you move around. Switch your environment for the better or pollute the shit out of your planet until it’s envirofucked (like our planet earth), and your amount of little guys goes up and down.
Buildings are pretty much what we had in MOO2. Hydroponic farms, Automated factories, research facilities, planetary shields, missile bases. What MOO does well is not having the same building being rebuilt in an incremental upgrade, like the lazy design of having Missile Base v2, Planetary Shields V, etc. When you get a tech level that allows a new type of planetary defense, it’s usually something very unique and non-mutually exclusive from what you’ve already built. The old building doesn’t go out of style to build, because it’s usually cheap!
Pollution is an important, but not too annoying concern. Production planets where you constantly build stuff get polluted and you need to dedicate time to clean them up. Leave pollution to hit a certain threshold and the planet will turn to shit, population will die, less production in the future. Simple and also a useful mechanic for disasters and invasions/bombardments. There has been an update since I started this review where you cannot explicitly ‘work off’ pollution like you used to could– so I’m not sure how that effects the game, yet.
System Management
Moving out from the planetary level is the system level that can hold multiple planets. Systems are just like the ‘points’ in MOO1, except they have specific points within them where they connect to other systems. Your ships can only move from systems along these ‘tunnels.’
You will need a colony ship to inhabit the other planets in your first system, you can’t just jump people over there with transports. This means it’s as costly to colonize in-system planets as out of systems.
At each tunnel entrance, you have the ability to build military installations or ‘listening posts.’ Military installations block any non-allied aliens from moving past into the system. While easily destroyed, they are a good idea to build all over the place to stave off nasty surprises. Anything built at the entry-points of systems will stave off the enemy for a turn as they will typically destroy whatever’s there instead of hitting the planets right away.
Overall, system management is more complex than MOO1 because there are multiple planets within each system. However, fleets fight it out within systems and not just at ‘points’ in space, increasing the ability for tactical play. Sometimes you will share systems with other races in harmony. Most times not.
Galaxy Map
Outwards from the systems is the galaxy map. This is where most of the action takes place from a strategic level. There are various configurations of galaxies, some of which start with a mosh, and some are turtle-esque. What to watch out for is if your race is bounded by RED warp lines as these can only be traversed by your ships much later in the game. I’ve been cornered off from most of the galaxy instead of thrown into the plague pit from the start and it’s a different game.
While most ship movement is forced along the warp lines, you can build jump gates that connect two different systems in a straight line. Your ships still have to move at their rate between them, so it’s not instant.
I can’t find a way to AUTOMOVE built ships from my factory systems to the war front. Need to look into that.
Overall I dig the look of the galaxy map.
Make the fucking text bigger!
Diplomacy
The diplomacy in MOO1 was built to piss you off so you attacked all the aliens relentless. They would talk shit, make stupid requests and be generally annoying when you were trying to deal with them in any meaningful manner. In newMOO, I found the AI not annoying, more logical but more silly. They still have stuff they say that will pysse you off, but not at the same level as the old MOO games. You can make much better and more robust deals with them, and other than most strategy games I’ve played, they actually sometimes accept these deals instead of never accepting anything. The “What would make this work” button helps a lot to speed up diplomatic actions and guesswork, which I appreciate. Playing the Humans, I use diplomacy a lot, and have no complaints here.
Ship customization
MOO1 had two types of useful ships. Big ones with the massive weapons that would destroy whole stacks, and small planetary bombers that you could build thousands of and clear out whole areas of space of aliens by bombing their planets, and leaving their fleets to rot.
The new MOO has almost an Ascendancy level of customization, where you add on modules and hope for micronization tech so you can fit more shit on a ship. I really don’t care about this part of the game very much, so did little customization, feeling that if I built enough of the stock ships, it would be fine. You do not have many ship slots, so if you build a custom ship type, it better fucking work well or you will be deleting it before you get many of them into space.
I think a key part of making custom ships is that you run them in real time combat. Otherwise, just build and upgrade the base models and build enough shit to overwhelm everyone!
Combat
This is where MOO1 has it over MOO2 (and MOO3). The way the turn-based system worked in MOO1 was excellent, where you could make a couple moves, then let the AI take over to finish off the battle with out dealing with the tiresome grinding and moving when you know you’ve won. You could still see what’s going on with your weapons’ effectiveness, but you controlled what you wanted and then stopped when your control didn’t matter much.
In the new MOO, the designers chose to go the Total War route: real time battles. I think this was a good move as certainly I have a shitload of mileage in TW games and really enjoy that part of the games the most. Like Gratuitous Space Battles, it’s all about those key battles with massive fleets that take up the whole screen. While the combat is certainly better than say, Endless Space, MOO2 and Birth of The Federation, I have some issues with it being sorta fuckin boring.
Coming to new MOO as a Total War fan, I expected the real time battles to have benefits to some tactics and maneuver. In TW, you can win battles or cost the enemy dearly if you use the correct tactics for the situation at hand. For example if you are a non-horse archer empire in TW (I pity you!) you’re going to be hunkering down in your castles a lot. If you use your army to attack and destroy a horse archer opponent’s infantry (of which he won’t have much), he will have a very, very difficult time in later sieges against you, allowing you to whittle down the rest of the horse archers at you leisure. So far as I can see, there’s nothing like that in the real time battles in MOO except kite around and shoot missles, which I’m not a fan of doing, it bores the shit out of me. You can target specific ships and try to take them out, but I found in the games I’ve played that it just didn’t matter that much. You throw your ships across the void and just watch the explosions. Making a couple choices here and there. Overall I just run most combats without going into the tactical view. I hope they improve this (just fucking copy Dominions 4).
Spying
It’s there, you put dudes on planets and try to do stuff. As you succeed, your spy starts to unlock more bad stuff he can do. I didn’t do very much with spying in my games, but it seemed fine. I’d have to play as the Darlocks to really get in on this as a ‘catch up’ mechanism. I like all the different spy portraits for each race– there are tons of them and they are beautiful.
Aesthetics
Space monsters look stupid with the exception of the Guardian. The alien portraits and animations, voice, all that stuff that gives the aliens character: it’s grown on me. When I first saw the cat lady there was an OH JEEZ, yet MOO1 was campy and they’ve followed through with that. There’s not much you can do when more than half the alien races are anthropods right out of the gate! There are races I hated in MOO1, that I would always destroy immediately (Silicoids, Sakkra, Klackons) that I feel differently about in MOO1 based on their graphics and presentations. They’ve captured the feel of the aliens, but if there’s one thing that MOO3 did well (and only one thing) it’s the alien design/animations. It was great.
Ship designs are descent, but not really inspired. We just don’t see the level of art here that Endless Legends has. All ship levels have two types of chassis so at least you can tell your carriers from your warships, bombers from frigates, etc.
Overall, it’s functional, looks fairly good and most importantly, isn’t annoying.
Final thoughts
Unlike MOO3, MOO is not a cascade of space piss into my open mouth, nor is it the greatest 4X game ever made (like MOO1 is). That said, MOO is a really good game and I’ve been playing since early release. There have been a lot of addons and changes to the game that has fleshed it out quite a bit, so I don’t think they are done with development (and the recent Antaran patch proves it). They have made some LARGE shifts in the gameplay based on player comments since early release, ripping out minor races and then putting them back in fixed up, which is pretty cool. Despite having to suffer people pissed off because new MOO is not a direct rip of MOO2, over– very vitriolic complaints as people on the internet are wont to do.
MOO does not grab me like Empire or Rome 2 Total War* did where I can’t stop playing for months, but I do not believe that was the ultimate aim of the developers; MOO is a lighter 4X. I can sit around on a Sunday, put a few hours in and get a good game going that I can finish up by early the next week with a few more hours of play. The game has enough depth to feel meaty, but it’s light enough for me to just want to jump in and not feel like I have to relearn the spreadsheet like Civ players do.
Lastly, the game crashes and hangs up fairly often late game, and sometimes games cannot be recovered. This is no different than MOO, MOO2 or Birth of the Federation, but I think we’d all love if this didn’t happen!
*my favorite thing in TW games is the real time battles within the campaign context. For example, to be fighting an enemy for a long time on the campaign map and finally catch their big army short or in a bad position where you can watch the slow, methodical slaughter of their entire force for 15-20 minutes or so is just my meat and potatoes. Especially when you trap a huge amount of them in city streets and slowly grind them down where they have no where to run. The battle was over in the first 5 minutes, the rest is just raw butchery.
I typically hate D20 microlites. There are a shit load of them reaching for some perfect design goal of streamlined play that in my opinion has already been done by Moldvay and further improved by Lamentations of the Flame Princess. There’s only so much you can strip away before your game becomes boring as fuck or, worse, Dungeon World.
However, Into the Odd is where I’ve eaten some crow on this hatred as it’s one of the best designed RPG’s to come forth recently, and it’s squarely in the microlite sub-genre.
That said, character generation takes about 2 minutes, such a long time right? But with the online generator below, not only can you generate your character in seconds, but you can make all stat rolls right in the browser!
This is Alberta, about as good as you are going to get, and I don’t know what she’s scared of because she’s quite the badasche.
ALBERTA “SCARED” BICKLEY
STR
10
DEX
15
WIL
18
HP
5
Harpoon Gun (d8), Fire Oil, Mirror engine (arcana), Grappling Hook, Magnifying Glass
We had a bad experience at Gamehole con with our 5e game and it wasn’t completely because the GM was terrible (he was tired, wasn’t too great at adapting to three extremely experienced players at the table) but more because the module he was running was completely derivative crap. Orc attack on a village, cave with orcs in it, Zzzzzzzz….
Since the game I’ve been thinking of what the main issues with that session and did the 5 whys with myself to suss it out.
Session sucked, why?
Adventure was boring, why?
Generic ho hum: Orc attack, Orc cave, why?
In a setting where that’s obviously common and accepted. why?
Forgotten Realms. Why?
It’s the default setting for all D&D 5.
The root cause of this, and it’s not my normal whipping boy Pathfinder, it’s Forgotten Realms.
I started D&D when there was no real campaign world, it wasn’t even slightly defined for us when we bought the box sets at Hobbyhorse. There was Greyhawk and Blackmoor and stuff like that, but unless you looked hard for it, kids starting with Holmes or Moldvay didn’t get that full in the face– it was OUR world to create and it started small with the first adventure. Whether it was X-1 (I worried about where on my world map that island was quite a bit in grades school), Hommlet, or with just characters at the entrance to a made up dungeon or trapped in a chateau that had no fixed location or full placement in a realm at all, the setting grew outward from the first adventure as the DM and players desired or required from that initial small kernel adventure and became more defined by other kernels like Castle Amber or the G series. The monster books also defined our world, with tons of odd things on my map coming out of the acquisition of the Fiend Folio. Death Knight empires were now laid down on hexes! What we had was a ton of space for imagination and very little constraint by over definition of the setting by the modules at the time’s authors. This is exactly how Greyhawk came into being. Dungeon first, then local environs, then out from there. I really appreciated in INTO THE ODD how the author has the first expedition start at the dungeon entrance and has a local map on pages after that and the larger area maps/keys after that in the book; implicitly stating that this is the order in which players should encounter such things. Dungeon – near environs – realm. The onion is peeled from the inside out.
While I was vaguely aware and mildly interested in Greyhawk, I never much looked at it while in my very hardcore grade school and early middle school days of playing D&D. Later came Dragonlance and while people must have loved it, I felt all of it was garbage in a really shitty setting. Dragons can be cool and horrifying (see Dark Souls and Glorantha), I run them in my 13th Age game as either incredibly violent fiends or …something totally different. But when you have dragon men and little dragons and big dragons and an empire of dragon men it’s all just shite to me. The closest I got to it was the gold box games on the Apple 2E, which were quite good.
Dragonlance must have sold a lot because next we got Forgotten Realms and D&D has suffered for it ever since. Yes, this likely had to do with Gygax’s ouster from TSR in 1985, and the end of Greyhawk at that point, but Dragonlance had paved the way a couple years before for a default, shytte setting.
I’m certainly not the first person to say this, but Forgotten Realms is the absolute essence of generic fantasy. It has every trope one can possibly imagine rolled into one ‘land’, every race is represented, all screaming out ‘potential’ for great adventure, but ending up absolutely mundane. The pseudo-medieval culture, architecture and technology levels are extremely trite, and border on the shear horror of steampunk. For awhile there I thought I was just jaded and had experienced too much to enjoy such simple things in Forgotten Realms (for example, the lackluster Neverwinter nights games), but then I thought back about how much I disliked Dragonlance as a kid, wasn’t interested at all in the Greyhawk box-set after I got it and had switched instantly to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay as soon as I became aware of it. This was as a pre-teen, so it’s not like I had some eclectic, jaded taste or anything. I just looked at the WFRP cover with it’s punk-esque adventurers in a vicious Early Modern setting and found it incredibly awesome compared to some Clyde Caldwell, Elmore or Jeff Easley’s unicorns and dragons paintings that adorned Forgotten Realms stuff. Not surprisingly, I don’t think my tastes have changed that much since late grade school, and if anything the forgotten realms has gotten more generic, less interesting and certainly more treadover trite!
Now we have 5th Edition D&D established, dare I say loved, and clearly superior in all ways to Pathfinder, yet as much as 5E has going for it, the game has a core problem that for me make it much less appealing than it could be– it’s still stuck in Forgotten Realms. It may not be forever, but for now, everything out for it is set squarely in the totally generic fantasy, risk free, “base” D&D setting.
What’s also sad is that the sandbox adventures that are being put out for 5E are exactly what I want in a campaign: sandboxes, cool optional encounters, lots of characters, gazetter shit when you need it and not just gazetter shit for the sake of gazetter shit, and a huge lack of railroading in most of the adventures. The two that are IMO the best: Strahd and Out of the Abyss, are the least Forgotten Realms of the set. Strahd actually feels very out of place in the context of Forgotten Realms, which is solved by it being a pocket dimension rather than a real part of the map (which is stupid). I’m not saying any of the adventures are automatically bad because they are set in FR, but I am saying that they are automatically generic, mundane fantasy in many ways, and will take work to rip them out of FR.
With the newest Against the Giant’s 5E module, I think it’s time for Forgotten Realms to be left behind by 5E forever, with the exception of the Demonweb pits. There are other settings from the TSR era that are far more compelling, notably Dark Sun, and I would really like to see something sword and sorcery, maybe Stormbringer /Hawkmoon, maybe at this point WOTC could get the WFRP license and meld that and 5E. Others have suggested stuff like Pendragon. Low fantasy works well in 5E. Or shit: STAR FRONTIERS! Despite what 5E has done with clinging to the high fantasy, generic setting, D&D is not Forgotten Realms in the same way that Vampire the Masquerade is set in the World of Darkness and only World of Darkness. It’s not just a craving for OSR or nostalgia to openly state I’d love to see more of THIS:
Howdy. I’ve played a lot of Talisman. Hundreds of games with the Games Workshop 2nd edition and maybe a tenth of that with Fantasy Flight’s version. They came out with more expansions than the number of times I get to play in a year for a bit there, but now that FF and GW have ended their long, fruitful relationship, Talisman will again be in limbo and eventually prices will start to rise and things will become scarce. Here is a list to help you spend your ducats.
The following list and thoughts are not for collectors, but may help you determine what may be sought after by players. For the completionist, just buy everything. If you didn’t get the print on demand stuff– ouch! I would AVOID Deep Realms unless you are the most ardent collector. However, the Nether realm Expansion is fantastic.
For players, if you are new to the game or new to this version of the game (from 2nd or 3rd editions), here is what you really need to buy, what you sorta need to buy, and what you shouldn’t buy.
CORE game
Make sure you are getting the Fantasy Flight version of the game and not the Black Industries version. The FF box is ‘less black’ than the Black Industries version (see above). If you do end up with the Black Industries version, you will need to purchase/find the upgrade kit with the fate points and stuff in it. These will likely be SCARCE. Obviously, you need the core set, but in my opinion it’s not enough for the full experience of Talisman. The base set doesn’t have enough characters, nor spell cards and the adventure deck is too small.
ESSENTIAL EXPANSIONS
The following are what I feel are the absolutely essential expansions to Talisman. There are very few of these that you actually need to have to get a good experience forever with the game. This will likely run you about 100$ retail.
#1 The Reaper expansion
This is stuff that really could have all been in the core game. While you can leave the actual Reaper and his rules in the box, the cards and characters in this expansion flesh out the base game enough for me to say, “yes, you are really playing Talisman.” By far, this is the most important expansion to the game, with the absolutely essential adventure, spell and characters as well as the Warlock Quests. If you get only one expansion, Reaper is it.
#2 Frostmarch
Frostmarch is the first of the “more stuff” expansions that fits very well with the core game, Reaper and Highlands for a base set to play with forever. It has few new rules (unlike Firelands or Harbinger), just cards and spells and a few more characters. Because this is just ‘more stuff,’ one could argue that it’s not essential, but if you are going to expand your Talisman and have Reaper, this is the next one that you will want to get, especially if you are going to play without the Board expansions and keep your Talisman SANE.
MauriceBastard: Meh, I can’t think of anything great about it, I bet there are some good items in the pack but I don’t associate them with it, I most likely just assume the good items in this pack come from The Reaper.
#3 Highlands
Highlands is an ‘extra board’ expansion that has a lot going for it. Why this instead of Dungeon? First, it does not offer a pathway to the Crown of Command, so players will still need to go up the normal method. What happens when you have a lot of boards in a Talisman game, and especially if you include Dungeon, is that players scatter all over the place and have no interaction with each other at any time during the game. Sure they may cast spells up against each other late game, but the concept of landing on another player is totally moot if there are four separate boards (and deep realms) in play. Characters like the Thief and Sorceress become fairly useless in these situations and once someone gets rolling and chooses to chase down the other characters to destroy them, it’s a lot more difficult with all the boards. You have to decide on whether or not you have the table space and also want to have your players all over the place by picking up the board expansions. If you are going to get one, Highlands is the one to get first. It has few special rules that effect the base game, critical characters to the game (Valkyrie and Alchemist for example) and does not have that egress to the Crown that Dungeon has, while still giving brutally strong magic items if you win the board.
MauriceBastard: Makes the outer region of the main board almost completely useless as this area is good for starting characters.
With the core set and the essential expansions, you have 28 characters. Fantasy Flight, compared to GW, were REAL stingy with the characters they put out in each expansion (compare 8 in 2E’s Talisman: Adventure to FF’s expansions at on average 4 each), probably because they came with miniatures instead of having them sold separate, so this is not a massive list. However it covers the basics: varied strength attackers, shitty trick characters (elf/dwarf), and the all important craft attackers (ghoul, wizard) and lastly, spellcasters.
This, like Frostmarch, is another ‘more stuff’ expansion with more Adventure, Spell and characters to include in the game. Because it has rules that do not mess with the core gameplay, I place this as one of the best expansions to get. What’s more, if you are trying to stick with just the main board, this is a good one to get after Reaper and Frostmarch. I like all of the characters that came with this one.
MariceBastard: Ya again the items that are worth it in this pack I attribute to The Reaper.
#5 Dungeon
The 4E Talisman Dungeon expansion is far and away better than the 2nd edition one, with awesome monsters, great magic items, good characters and a means to get to the Crown of Command to boot, circumventing the entire randomness of the middle region with a straight up combat instead. Many players B-line it to the dungeon as soon as they feel strong enough to farm it for goodies and strength/craft. Unlike the Highlands, the Dungeon is not an easy board to make it through, and many characters will die if they go in before they are ready (usually after 2-3 stat upgrades). That said, Dungeon is not an essential expansion because it’s a new board section and while some people may like it, the fact that you can circumvent the inner region’s perils and get the the crown of command changes the game drastically, adding to the sad fact that more boards = less player interaction.
MauriceBastard: Fine. Allows a end round run to the center for overpowered heroes which is a needed mechanic late game.
oh yeah!
#6 Nether Realm
The Nether Realm expansion is one of those funky print on demand ones and when it came out, I thought that was the end of support from FF for Talisman (i.e.: no new expansions). The components were very good quality and this expansion is fantastic. In the new victory condition, instead of a Talisman, the players must kill a certain number of Nether Realm creatures and get to the Crown of Command. The creatures are represented by a Nether deck that has some of the nastiest stuff I’ve ever seen in the game! This win condition also promises a shorter, tighter game, so I like it a lot. This expansion also adds back in the Pandora’s Box card for the inner region, using the NetherRealm cards in place of Adventure cards! Once out of print, this one will be very expensive, but if you can get it no for 15$, it’s great.
MauriceBastard: Great shit, excellent way to change up the center region for extra challenge, make sure to exclude The Dungeon so you can’t end run the mosh pit of the center.
#7 Blood Moon
Like the Reaper expansion, the Blood Moon expansion has a guy that goes around and does stuff to people independent of the characters. This is less optional if you are going to play with everything from this expansion than the Reaper is. We’ve played with both the Reaper and the Werewolf and that was a clear mistake that slowed the game to a crawl. This has some interesting characters and most importantly, it has the HORRIBLE BLACK VOID card which makes the first trip to the Inner region even more dangerous than before. We play that once the void is drawn, it goes away for the game and at that point no other characters can be drawn. This gives both players going through the dungeon or up the inner region method a bit of pause about hitting the Crown of command space.
In addition to the Werewolf mechanic, Blood Moon introduces the Day/Night cycle to the game with +1 and -1 vs monsters during this time. This is one of my most hated mechanics that has been added to Talisman. Don’t bother with it.
MauriceBastard: We’ve entered the arena of where expansions stop working when you are playing completionist, while there are some good cards here the day night and werewolf shit becomes too much to keep track of if you play with reaper as well.
#8 Talisman City
There are a lot of options that open up in the City, and a lot of strange new cards. I like the pets and I like the fact that with the City expansion GOLD actually starts to have value again where normally it was pretty useless mid to late game. You can pay to win using the City, with very powerful cards on sale. We’ve enjoyed this expansion but you have to make a choice: do you go the standard Highlands/Dungeon configuration or do you remove one of those, or do you make the game board MASSIVE and play with all three. Frankly I would probably play with Highlands/City at this point and leave the Dungeon out.
MauriceBastard: Overpowered shit galore the Alchemist will gape you.
The NON-ESSENTIAL
#9 Firelands
While this has some interesting cards and characters, because it fundamentally changes some of the rules of the game with the firelands tokens, and does not mix well with everything else (if you play with EVERYTHING, the firelands cards won’t do much in the game), you do not need to get this expansion. “Destroying spaces” is a mechanic we started to see a lot more of in nearly all the later expansions.
MauriceBastard: Great expansion that needs to be played without other shit to help keep shit manageable, extra punishing late game.
#10 Woodlands
We have only played with Woodlands 2-3 times. It is another big board to add, so you have to decide which to play with and which to leave behind. Most of the time I would choose to leave the Woodlands in the box except that it’s new and we need to find out what the designers were trying to do here! The board comes with a new mechanic where players draw Fate cards, which are quite cool, but it’s yet another mini game– and since Talisman tends to be beer and pretzels, some players are not keen on it’s complexity. If you use Woodlands, I would use it alone with just the main board for a few games and see how you like it. There are some really interesting and cool characters in this set like the Leywalker and Spider Queen. The art in this expansion is superb.
MauriceBastard: Shite, feels completely shite / haven’t played it enough because there tons of great content already so who wants to bother with Woodland.
#11 Cataclysm
This is really new, and I’ve only gotten one game with it so far. What I like about it is that it’s Fantasy Flight’s artists going to town on the main Talisman Board. They inherited the main 4E board from Black Industries and the art on it, while OK, was not up to the normal Fantasy Flight standards. Just compare the older main board with all the art on the other boards and you can see the difference.
Cataclysm fundamentally changes the game in that none of the spaces you are used to going to are going to be on the board at first, nor will they end up in the spaces that you normally get to them. Depending on the card draw, there may not be any place to heal, there may not be any place to get FATE points back or buy stuff. I think the best way to play this is to play without the city, with the Dungeon and possibly the woodlands/highlands. Since this is an expansion late in the development of the game, it will be very hard to divorce the content enough from player’s sets to see how it stands on it’s own. Overall I would say this is probably a good buy to get, event though the characters in it are a bit trash; much like Harbinger, there’s nothing that great except for the Barbarian and maybe the Scavenger. The Arcane Scion is powerful, but I hate the art on that card.
While cool and a bit of a must have since it’s the last blast we’ll ever see of FF’s Talisman, it’s not essential.
Mauricebastard: A last gasp at keeping Talisman fresh, a honest attempt to switch some shit up a lot, played once and it seems FINE.
#12 Dragons
I do not own this expansion, but probably will someday. The brilliance of the 2nd Edition Dragons expansion is that it was just a set of cards that went into the main deck which shifted the way the game played without fundamentally restructuring the entire experience. You knew there were dragon problems in the 2E game because dragon cards kept coming up and destroying you and stuff on the board.
FF went full bore on the Dragon’s expansion and it’s a totally different game, one which I would not play with any of the other expansions, including none of the other game boards. There is a lot of book-work between turns and Dragons will be a slow slow game compared to normal Talisman. This one is almost in the Don’t Buy section, but not quite. It does make for an interesting game if you are prepared for it.
MauriceBastard: FUCKING BROKEN EXCEPT WHEN PLAYED BY ITSELF WITH THE BASE, a way to switch shit up if you are playing weekly, a attempt to spice shit up that fails in a completionist “play with all expansions” game.
Mouth: My dragons is still sealed, and I think I may have only ever played it once, and maybe just the heros [sic], which were Meh at best.
PROBABLY DON’T BUY THESE
Only two on this list.
Harbinger
Totally forgettable. The characters in it are pretty dumb and I just don’t even want to integrate the adventure cards from this, let alone the added mechanics. I may comb this for adventure cards to add to my CORE SET+, but probably won’t play with the rest. Collectors only.
MauriceBastard: Unsure what this one is, I own it and have played it once I think, fucking can’t remember what it is, expansion fatigue has set in fully, old man who plays once or twice a year.
Deep Realms
Collectors only. It’s just a total mess in play physically– it just doesn’t work well with another board between boards. We tried it once and it’s been in the box ever since. I’m not even sure I would recommend ever playing with the boards you need all together to make this work.
MauriceBastard: Shitcakes with a side of diarrhea.
The End papers
There wasn’t and there will never be a Talisman Timescape expansion for 4th Edition. Instead FF decided to make Relic which, yeah, no interest at all. We will never have the Astronaut, Space Pirate, Cyborg or essential ASTROPATH to round out the what used to be the top three characters in the game (from 2E :Prophetess, Monk, Astropath).
I also make this post with some emotional feeling that FF’s run is over despite at the same time thinking: THANK the GODS since there was just too much coming out for the game for awhile there (right around Firelands I was overwhelmed). I’m proud of what Fantasy Flight and John Goodenough did with Talisman. They did right by the license, for the players and obviously it was lucrative to some extent! I was happy to support them by buying (nearly) every single expansion the day it was released.
With the end of the Games Workshop relationship we are absolutely at the end of an era with Fantasy Flight (though that could be said when they were sold to Asmodee too). They will be putting out some great individual games for sure (like the new Game of Thrones: Iron Throne), but their Golden Age is over as they will never have a license so rich with possibilities and an amazing board game back catalog as the Games Workshop one: not Star Wars, not Warcraft, not anything. Lament though we might, what we need to do is pick up the GW licensed stuff that we want right quick!
Maurice!Bastard:
Talisman has become a pick and choose your expansions game, different from v2 of Talisman which played WONDERFUL when you used everything. Version 4b can’t be played in total, or perhaps it can if you are 16-24 years old and don’t have true responsibilities and can focus fully on playing epic turn maintenance cluster fuckery. Now some people want Talisman v4 to be like v2, to have a “complete” version. A version that includes the best expansions that play well together. A version that you keep “shuffled” together and play over and over, ignoring the expansions that add too many new rules or to much turn maintenance bullshit. Fucking just play v2 if you want complete. Perhaps my picks for a complete V4 would be: Base The Reaper The Frostmarch The Sacred Pool The Dungeon The Highlands
Mouth:
For the small boxes… The reaper, is essential. Frost March and Sacred Pool are also good… More endings and the warlock quests were good additions. The blood moon is a little Meh and managing the whole day/night mechanic is tedious. Firelands is cool, but the flame shit and destruction of everything is again tedious, but can prove both beneficial and Terrible all at the same time… I think it’s a keeper. I have no experience with the harbringer.
For the big boxes… Dungeon and Highlands are both great, borderline essential. City is better than the original and makes gold worth having, but not essential.
Other… The neither realms is cool, and brutal… It’s good. No knowledge of the deep realms.
Also, I purchased the conversion kit for the original black library release of talisman. This gives you a complete second set of cards for the base game so it matched the ff version. I selectively added duplicates of the adventure deck cards to the base game. Basically adding all of the monsters and events… And I think some of the bad cards like the poltergeist and hag. I did not duplicate any of the magic items or bags of gold… But I would have to check to be sure. This was necessary when 4ed come out, as the base set was not balanced enough for a good play through, deck cycling was too frequent, and monsters scarce because people were holding them for trophies. I think it was also good for the first few expansions… At this point I could probably take all of the duplicate cards out since the adventure deck is massive with only half of the expansions in use.
