78 February 2019
PLAYED
In a neat twist, you also might draw
a special token that allows you to
draw an extra token, either from
your own bag or from one of
your fellow players’. Perhaps
your warrior desperately
needs a wizard’s hat to
defeat that pesky cave troll,
and you know they’ve already
pulled out all their limited supply
of those. So what better tactic
than to delve your hand into your
wizard buddy’s sack and enjoy a
good chance of pulling a hat out of
the bag? On the downside, you
might draw tokens that instruct
you to move the time tracker
on, with time being this game’s
equivalent of health. While you
never get hurt as such, you can
have your time taken away from you- if you get to the end of that track, it’s
quest over for everyone.
It’s all very nice and gentle, and
designed to create minimal frustration
for the littler players at your table,
even if they do get turned into a toad.
Unsurprisingly, however, that means
there’s little depth to it, and with only
ve easy-to-complete adventures
included, it won’t hold your attention
for long, no matter how fond you
might be of Talisman’s world.
But then, as we suggested, this
game’s not really for you. It’s for the
kids in your life who you might want
to introduce to the co-op (or solo)
tabletop quest experience. And with
its light narrative arc, it may even
work as a kind of prep school for
RPGs, too.
DAN JOLIN
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED... STUFFED FABLES
It’s nowhere near as deep or smart as Jerry
Hawthorne’s ‘adventure book’ title, but is likely to play
just as well to the same (young) crowd.F
ew games o er a better
example of why you
should ignore the age
rating printed on the box than
Talisman: Legendary Tales. Despite
declaring itself as a 14-plus title, this
co-operative fantasy quest game is
aimed squarely at players below that
age. So much so, you could call it My
First Co-op Campaign Game.
Legendary Tales is the rst of
four Pegasus Spiele spin-o s to the
35-year-old Games Workshop roll-
and-move “Magical Quest” epic. It no
doubt hopes to bring together parents- who have a nostalgic urge to revisit
the world where they once scrapped
and scrambled to gain possession
of the Crown of Command – with
their o spring, who are lucky enough
to be coming-of-age in a far more
sophisticated era of tabletop games.
To be fair, Talisman lends itself
well to the co-op format, with players
here uniting to nd ve fabled
talismans before a Dark Lord-style
bad guy grabs them and snatches the
aforementioned power-bestowing
tiara himself. e artwork is bright
and fairytale cartoonish, and the
characters on o er (warrior, wizard,
prophet, elf, dwarf or troll) each come
with a single special ability and no
actual stats to speak of.
When battling monsters, no dice
are rolled and no cards are played.
Instead, designers Michael Palm and
Lukas Zach have concocted a rather
slick little bag-building system to
handle character progression and
combat. When a monster is revealed
(by ipping over a token on the
modular game map) it will display a
combination of sword and wizard’s
hat icons. In order to defeat it, you’ll
need to match those icons on three
tokens drawn from your character’s
bag, which might come from their
base token set, or from rewards you’ve
picked up along the way.It’s Talisman but, y’know, for kids
TALISMAN: LEGENDARY TALES
30m 1-6 14+ £40WHAT’S IN
THE BOX?
◗ 12 location tiles
◗ 12 hero figures
(six heroes, male
and female)
◗ Six hero tags
◗ Six hero bags
◗ 42 hero start
tokens (seven
for each hero)
◗ Five adventure scrolls
◗ 102 adventure tokens
◗ Six toad tokens
◗ Time counter
◗ Travel die
◗ Five health tokens
◗ 24 reward tokens
◗ Reward bag
◗ Reward tag
◗ 15 talismans
◗ Talisman
scoreboard(^) PLAY IT? MAYBE
This Talisman spin-off is far
more friendly and innovative
than its clunky old source game,
but is best appreciated as a
play-with-kids experience.
on, with time being this game’s
designed to create minimal frustration
30m