Odd that the Talisman demo should arrive on the very same day that I write about Card Hunter, which does a similar thing in reverse. I blame, I dunno, Belgium for this freaky coincidence. While Card Hunter is a videogame designed to evoke a boardgame, Talisman is a boardgame redesigned into a videogame. Specifically, a boardgame whose rights are owned by Games Workshop even though a further company, Fantasy Flight, makes the current edition of Talisman.
If you don’t know Talisman, it’s a sort of stripped down, sped-up competitive D&D with miniatures roaming around a fixed board. There are stats, there is loot and there are randomly-drawn beasts to best. It’s trashy as all hell and it’s hilariously unbalanced – which is exactly why it’s a great boardgame for a beer’n'pizza gathering. I love it to bits, even though I could spend days listing its many flaws. An Xbox Live adaptation was due a few years back, but ended up spiralling into development hades, but now new UK studio Nomad Games, who spun out of the sadly closed THQ Warrington, have taken a crack at bringing it to PC at long last. They’ve got the official license, they’ve got pre-orders with instant beta access open and they’ve newly got a demo showing off their approach to this long-lived game of boards.
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