Talisman Gets Multiplayer At Last, But Not Quite

If I had one complaint about last year's PC adaptation of wonderfully unbalanced boardgame knees-up Talisman, it was a complaint I made at length and repeatedly, like a boring old man whingeing about the escalating price of Fisherman's Friends. An inherently multiplayer game was released as a purely a singleplayer one, and framed as an extended tutorial at that. Rab was less put out about this than I, which I at least partially attribute to the fact he played it on mobile rather than PC, but also perhaps because he has more time and freedom to play boardgames in real life so wasn't quite as desperate for a from-home replacement as I was. In any case, the good news is that the more full-fat Talisman Digital Edition has arrived on Steam Early Access.

The good news is that is has multiplayer; the bad news is that it lives up to the current 'what is this actually for' grumbling about Early Access by not including online multiplayer just yet.

LAN's in, however. Hamachi or GameRanger or whatever the kids use these days to the rescue, hopefully. There's also AI play, which I is where I expect to spend my time unless I can somehow teach a five-month-old baby to use a laptop. Despite the earlier griping, let me stress - adopts Tony Blair Fingers pose - that I'm extremely excited about the concept of being able to play gloriously silly old Talisman in snatched hours here and there. This being early access rather than release, online will arrive, but I'm certainly inclined to wait for a release version rather than put the hours in now.

If you want to make an earlier start, it's £12 on Early Access, with a free but now perhaps now somewhat unnecessary copy of Prologue thrown in too.

Here trailer here:

I'm very glad to see they've replaced the images of grey, unpainted miniatures with colourful painted ones. Makes a big difference, and makes the whole game look less like a marketing pamphlet.