Welcome to Roll2Save the RPG history podcast, talisman.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Roll to Save the RPG history podcast that has a release schedule that has RPG, but definitely RPG adjacent, and a game that probably introduces many people to fantasy gaming, as Fighting Fantasy did.

I'm talking, of course, about Talisman, the magical quest game.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

Hang on, isn't this supposed to all be about RPGs?

Well, yes, but we've done a whole scattershot of episodes before.

So come on, consistency is not our strong point.

Talisman also occupies that fascinating space between board games and role-playing games.

It's got character progression and it's got that addictive.

Just one more ton quality that kept some of us up until five in the morning.

More on that later.

Kept some of us up until 5 in the morning, more on that later.

Talisman has actually been around for over 40 years, putting its conception right at the beginning of the RPG craze.

It's had more resurrections than Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees combined, and it's survived company takeovers, system rewrites and a decade where it basically didn't exist.

Yet somehow people still play it and it keeps coming back.

So grab your dice, pick your favourite character or, if you're like my gaming group, get one dealt to you at random, because otherwise everyone is just going to fight over who gets to be the prophetess.

And let's dive into the history of what might be the most enduring simple fantasy board game ever made.

So the story of Talisman kicks off in the early 1980s at St Andrews University in Scotland.

This is where a young man called Bob Harris and his future wife Debbie had the brilliant idea of clubbing together their student money to buy something called Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, harris himself was somewhat resident about this idea.

When first hearing about D&D, his remark was so you pretend you're wandering around a tunnel and you draw a map of it.

But they gave it a go anyway, ended up playing it for an entire weekend, barely stopping to eat or sleep, watching character after character get horribly murdered, only to roll up new ones and dive straight back in.

What was interesting about Bob, though, was, while his mates were busy drawing up elaborate dungeons and writing epic storylines for the future, he had a different idea brewing.

He liked all the excitement and character development that came along with Dungeons and Dragons, but he wanted to play a game where you could have all of that without all that faff of preparing scenarios and running games Now floating around in the back of his head was a game he designed while still at school called Erectocracy.

Yes, that is as wonderfully absurd as it sounds.

Players took on the roles of different teachers in a British secondary school, moving around the board, trying to work their way up to becoming the headmaster.

Now, this is actually crucial to understanding Talisman, because the early 80s had seen a few attempts at creating board games that captured some of that RPG magic.

You had things like the Sorcerer's Cave and the Mystic Wood, trying to bridge that gap between traditional board games and this new role-playing thing.

These games laid some groundwork, but they were missing something crucial.

The Sorcerer's Cave was a lot of fun.

You got a party together and you explored a dungeon, but it suffered from having no real objective other than who can get the most treasure at the end.

And Mystic Wood, well, it had character progression, but it was almost entirely luck-based.

Either you rolled well on the encounter table, you killed a monster, or you didn't, and you didn't get the bonuses.

Some of Mystic Wood's DNA may have made its way into Talisman.

I remember looking at Talisman when I first got it and seeing some similarities.

In Talisman, characters had two attributes strength and craft Mystic Wood.

They had two characteristics strength and prowess.

Also, some of the locations things like caves, chapels, castles they all seemed familiar to players of Mystic Wood.

But unlike Talisman, mystic Wood had no real concept of acquiring gold items and spells in any meaningful way to progress your character.

So, all that aside, harris set around creating something different.

His characters would be interesting as RPG characters because they would each have their own special abilities and moral alignments good, evil or neutral.

They'd have strength for physical prowess and craft for mental and spiritual faculties.

The board would be like a fantasy landscape where you'd have encounters by drawing cards and, crucially, your characters would actually progress.

They'd acquire gold objects, followers and spells while also increasing their core attributes, all of which was essential for winning the game.

Now, the original version was actually called Necromancer and instead of trying to reach the crown of Command, players were racing to get to some evil Necromancer island where they could gain the power to wipe out their opponents.

Even in this early version, something magical happened.

Now anyone who's ever played Talisman will recognise that.

Harris said in his playgroup that whenever someone was going to be turned into a toad by the roll of a dice and again, if you've played Talisman, you'll know all about that.

Apparently everyone would start chanting Toad, toad, toad, toad at the top of their voices.

This game was a hit with his university group and Harris started thinking that maybe this actually had commercial legs.

And this was in 1982, when Games Workshop was a really small operation when you think of the behemoth, the billion dollar company that is today.

Back then they were just shy of having actually been selling backgammon sets.

Out of the back of a van in London, harris spotted an advert for them in a gaming magazine and he sent off his handcrafted prototype and within a couple of weeks he found himself down in London having a nice chat with Ian Livingston and Steve Jackson about actually publishing the game.

Now Games Workshop wanted to change the name to Talisman, which it made sense given that the whole game revolved around finding a mystic talisman to enter the final area.

But let's be honest, necromancer is a metal as hell name and that would have been cool too.

Harris also mentioned in an anecdote that he said to steve and ian that he designed the game so you could easily add expansion sets if people wanted more content, and apparently everyone had a good laugh at this.

Those of you familiar with talisman will realize that mr harris probably was the one having the last laugh.

Anyway, launch day for Talisman was Games Day 1983.

Now, in a personal account of this, harris says apparently he had a massive hangover on that particular day, but it didn't dim his excitement.

He was going to see his game brought to life and indeed Ian Levinson himself handed him the very first box copy of Talisman straight off the production lines.

The first edition featured artwork by Gary Chalk and most of the cards were in black and white.

Bizarrely, the game also launched alongside a game that was something designed by Andrew Lloyd Webber about insurance.

Clearly that didn't have the same staying power as Talisman.

Unfortunately, talisman actually had a fairly lukewarm review in White Dwarf.

That was back in the day before White Dwarf became the corporate shilling bag for Games Workshop.

That it is, and they were actually giving objective, independent reviews.

But nonetheless it was embraced somewhat enthusiastically by the gaming community.

Here was a game where your character could progress, you could have a fantasy adventure, but you could set up and play in an afternoon without needing someone spending weeks prepping a campaign.

Anyway, the success of the first edition led to a proper deluxe second edition in 1985.

It wasn't a major rules overhaul, but the production values got a massive upgrade.

Chalk's black and white artwork was lovingly colourised and the board changed from one big folded sheet to four interlocking pieces, which made it much easier to store and much less likely to develop those horrible permanent creases that made your board look like one of your dad's AA roadmaps.

But it wasn't just the game components that got the deluxe treatment.

The cover art for second edition and its expansions was absolutely gorgeous.

Each box featured stunning fantasy artwork that perfectly captured the mood and theme of the game within.

Any of you who have seen the artwork for the basic box of Talisman 2nd Edition will know that it sucks you straight into that fantasy world.

You want to be that dude with the shield facing down the wyvern that's got its wings spread in a very terrifying manner.

In short, they had this epic cinematic quality that really made you want to dive straight into the adventure before you even opened the box.

But the real story of the second edition isn't the core game.

That was fantastic, but it was the absolutely mental expansion schedule that followed and the growing complexity that came with it.

Between 1986 and 1993, games Workshop released six major expansions for Talisman and with each set, the rules got more complicated and in 1986 saw the release of the very imaginatively entitled expansion set.

This was done by Bob Harris himself.

He added 14 new characters, including the Amazon, the Barbarian, the Gladiator, the Halfling, the Knight and the Merchant, along with 36 new adventure cards and six new spells, including favourites like Barrier and Brainwave Simple stuff.

He just built on what was there before and made it have a little bit more depth.

1987, though, that introduced what would become a recurring theme in Talisman, the Adventure.

It came with clarifications on two existing rules.

This was just the beginning, believe me, but the Adventure added 8 new characters, 37 new adventure cards and 11 new spells.

However, more importantly, it introduced six alternative ending cards, including the infamous Pandora's Box.

More on that in a moment.

This meant when a player got to the Crown of Command space, they didn't necessarily find the Crown of Command.

They might find something else there, maybe another magical artifact, maybe a vicious monster waiting to fight them, or maybe even a horrible black void.

That meant that they've lost the game immediately.

Interestingly, it wasn't designed by Bob Harris, which probably went a long way to explain some of the complexity that it introduced to the game.

Harris is very good at designing a game that was simple.

This added a lot more moving parts and levers to pull.

It did, however, have an absolutely epic cover featuring this massive dragon.

Again, it just made you want to go on the aforenamed adventure.

It also came with character sheets, which were fun ways to keep all your talisman stuff together on the table.

Of course, that meant you needed to take up more table space.

This was going to become a recurring theme with Talisman 2.

However, it did get good reviews.

White Dwarf's reviewer said that Talisman the Adventure was just a thing for those irritatingly smug people who always win at Talisman.

I think that was a reference to the horrible Light Void card In 1987, though this was where things started to get properly complicated with the dungeon expansion.

This expansion came with three separate sections in its rules explaining how the new expansion affected existing gameplay mechanics from the main game and the two previous expansions.

But that wasn't all.

It also included an entirely separate booklet detailing frequently asked questions and rules clarifications for everything released to date.

Why, well, it turned out, as mentioned before, that some of the adventure's mechanics were genuinely confusing.

Each of the adventure cards got its own section in the FAQ, but I particularly liked the one for Pandora's Box that basically said how does this thing actually work?

Faqs aside, the dungeon was actually a fairly special expansion.

It was designed by Bob Harris himself and it also came with a separate board.

Yes, more table space was needed, but it was this fantastic spirally dungeon that you could move around.

There was 36 little counter cards for the dungeon itself and you could actually get a shortcut straight to the crown of command if you did particularly well in the dungeon.

It added a lot to gameplay, completely different tactics and, of course, it came with 14 extra characters, because obviously we need more.

At that point, rave reviews from the Trolls at White Dwarf helped ensure sales and also helped ensure that in 1988, talisman continued the trend of new boards by introducing the Timescape expansion.

This sci-fi themed expansion was designed by Canadian Frank Bork I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly and was loosely based on Warhammer 40,000.

It added eight characters, including the archaeologist, complete with a whip and a fedora and, yes, he looks exactly like you think he does the astronaut, the cyborg and the space marine.

There were 42 timescape cards included and it had everything there, including alien, there including alien artifacts, to a mining laser, space marine power armor and also an anti-graph platform for when you absolutely just need to have a fancy way of carrying all your stuff around.

Unlike the main board, spaces on the timescape board were considered to be these vast separate realities, so characters couldn't encounter each other there.

It also had a teleporting mechanic, so when you left one reality you wouldn't necessarily know which other one you were going to end up in.

Hopefully you go back to the main board so you could actually carry on the quest.

In 1989, another expansion called the City came along, and that also included, as tradition dictated, sections explaining how the new expansion affected existing gameplay, because at this point, interactions between all those different systems were getting genuinely complex.

The city added the Minotaur and the Valkyrie as regular characters, but, more importantly, it introduced the concept of master level characters.

This was a purely second edition innovation innovation, but it gave you something additional to push for for your character, effectively a level up in terms of powers.

Now the city provided 72 new encounter cards, seven new Adventure cards, 20 new purchase cards and 10 new spells, along with you guessed it an entirely new city board that replaced that single city space on the main board.

The city had its own legal system, it felt kind of harsh.

Apparently, being penniless was a crime and could see you being arrested by the Watch.

Basically, you could commit all sorts of crimes and be chased around by cops in the Talisman City.

It was great fun.

There were four master level characters included with the game the High Mage, the King's Champion, the Master Thief and the Sheriff.

Now, the ways of becoming these characters varied wildly and some were, frankly, overpowered.

The High Mage, for instance, went to the first person who donated any magic item to the wizard's guild.

Those of you who've played talisman will know that magic items are in an absolute abundance, and that was it one magic item.

You became one of the most powerful characters in the game.

Now, a later white dwarf article introduced some additional master level characters.

One of those was the champion of chaos, who was stupidly overpowered, as the name suggests.

However, if you wanted to become him, you had to discard all your followers, all your gold and basically take a chance on a dice roll.

Likewise, the king's champion.

He was chosen by the king himself, who wandered the streets disguised as a beggar.

So basically, you had to give money to random beggars in the hope that one of them was a king would recognize your generosity and for some reason then make you his champion.

I don't know quite what the king in Talisman was looking for in the champion, but I generally find that philanthropy doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with hand to hand combat prowess.

Anyway, master level characters were essentially character upgrades.

You kept your original character's abilities and you added the new ones on top.

Now you could resign and go back to your original character.

Usually if you wanted to do another master level character though some, like the High Mage, were permanent appointments you couldn't lose.

However, one thing that the city expansion was controversial for was for significantly increasing game length.

In theory, the city added lots of options for letting players get closer to the crown of command.

In practice, I found that players had a lot of fun bumming around in the city and getting cool stuff and therefore often neglected the main quest.

The city probably doubled the length of time for what was an already very time consuming game.

The final expansion came in 1993 for 2nd edition.

This was called Dragons and it had four dragon themed characters and a mass of 84 adventure cards focused entirely on dragon encounters, dragon lore and other dragon related items.

If you like, dragons, this was an expansion for you Now.

From a personal perspective, I played Talisman Second Nation a ridiculous amount during my secondary school years, and I had a couple of experiences that perfectly illustrate both the brilliance and the absolute madness of this era of Talisman.

The first involves an absolutely epic game against my mate, bill.

That I'll never forget.

I'd managed to get to the Crown of Command and was merrily blasting him with a command spell every turn, slowly draining his life away.

I thought victory was in sight.

However, bill found an artifact.

I think it was the wand though this was a very long time ago and memory isn't what it once was but the artifact basically meant that he had always had at least one spell.

So what happened was this on his turn, he'd simply keep casting spells and drawing new ones until he got to some sort of healing spell that would restore his life.

Then my turn would come.

I'd blast him again and then it'd come to his turn and he'd repeat the process.

We were both far too stubborn to quit, and this bloody game went on until five in the morning because neither of us would back down.

That's what teenage boys do.

Eventually, he had a couple of turns where he couldn't cast a spell for whatever reason, and this meant he couldn't draw a new one and I was finally able to kill him off.

Brutal doesn't even begin to cover it.

The really funny thing about this was a later errata and I think this was in the City.

Expansion clarified rules around spellcasting, namely that you could only cast a certain number of spells per turn.

So I've got these images of bleedy-eyed Talisman players who'd endured similar mammoth games absolutely rejoicing when this clarification came out.

The other story that perfectly captures the spirit of second edition Talisman involves the city expansion and the humble mule.

These faithful creatures previously could carry an unlimited amount of items.

They were basically portable warehouses with four legs.

However, the city changed this, saying that mules could only carry eight items, which was fair enough.

That's a lot of stuff.

However, games Workshop felt the need to clarify that players had to apply common sense to what mules could carry.

For example, you can't put a warhorse on top of a mule, even though the warhorse is an item, if you think about that for a moment.

Somewhere in some gaming group, someone had tried to argue that their mule could carry a warhorse is an item, if you think about that for a moment.

Somewhere in some gaming group, someone had tried to argue that their mule could carry a warhorse, and the mind boggles about what sorts of scenarios prompted that particular clarification being written.

I like to imagine there was some sort of heated argument about pack animal logistics that ended with someone starting off to write an angry letter to Games Workshops.

Now, another thing that made Special Edition very special was the companion range of metal miniatures that Citadel produced.

Of course these weren't included with the game.

You got little cardboard cards that you put into plastic bases, but you could buy these proper miniatures for every character if you wanted to go all out, and the range was absolutely comprehensive.

Now, they never did anything beyond Talisman Timescape, but every character from every expansion prior to that they got their own miniature, from the basic Wizard and Warrior all the way through to Timescape, space Marine and Chainsaw Warrior.

There were even special Toad miniatures for when characters got transformed Remember Toad, toad, toad, toad, toad.

There was a Warrior Toad with a helmet, a Wizard Toad with a spellbook and there was even a Pirate Toad, because apparently even amphibian transformation means that you need to expect your chosen profession.

This city of ruins, I think, eventually included over 60 miniatures, and including all the Toad variants, obviously, and they were beautifully sculpted and I can imagine when they were painted.

They would just look absolutely stunning on the board and owning a full set was definitely a mark of serious talisman dedication.

Sadly, I never owned them.

I desperately wanted all of them.

I think it was a timescape expansion.

The back of the rulebook came with a little picture of all of them and I thought, god, those look so cool.

Never owned them.

Anyway, what was remarkable about this period is how each expansion actually felt essential rather than just more stuff.

They weren't just throwing more cards at you.

Each one added genuinely new ways to play, but they were also making the game exponentially more complex, as evidenced by the escalating need for FEQ documents and rules clarifications with every release.

I actually found out that that little rules questions and answers booklet can actually be bought online now, for I think it's six dollars.

Curious little collector's item, but some people will buy anything anyway.

By 1994 the gaming world was changing.

Games workshop, for those of you who are familiar with them, had gone absolutely miniatures mad, and when the third edition of talisman appeared it reflected this shift in a very big way.

The most obvious change was swapping out the little cardboard figures on the plastic bases for proper plastic miniatures, and this tied in nicely with Games Workshop's broader strategy of getting people to buy as many miniatures as possible.

They'd obviously been making the talisman figures previously, but now they were building the whole range right into the game.

But the changes went much steeper than just plastic figures.

The board got a complete artistic overhaul.

Lots of characters from the second edition got the chop and new ones appeared that were very much tied in much more closely to Warhammer Fantasy Battle than they were to talisman.

The inner region of the board became the wizard's tower and instead of a crown of command you had to defeat a dragon king to win.

The biggest mechanical change was adding a fourth attribute experience making the game even more RPG.

Like when you defeated enemies, you'd gain experience points equal to their craft or strength, which you could then spend to improve your other stats.

It was clever, but it also made the game a little bit more complex.

The third edition expansions also used realm dice.

These were die, with only the numbers one to four instead of the usual one to six, which made movement through any expansion area slower and more deliberate.

They released City of Adventure, dungeon of Doom and Dragon's Tower, which all added new boards and expanded the game's scope.

Trouble was, the third edition never quite captured the magic of its predecessor.

The Warhammer connections made it feel less like its own thing and more like a Warhammer spin-off.

The miniatures were nice, but they came at the cost of some of that distinctive character artwork that had made earlier editions so memorable.

It was professionally done, but it lost a lot of its original charm, and after it ran its course, talisman basically disappeared.

For a while Games Workshop had moved on to focusing almost entirely on Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy Battle.

The miniature market was absolutely booming and board games just weren't where the money was anymore.

Also, bob Harris, the guy who created the whole thing he got bought out as well.

The people running Games Workshop by then were completely different from the ones who'd originally taken a punt on a handmade game from a Scottish university student.

So for about a decade it was really difficult to get a copy of Talisman.

You certainly couldn't buy it new, and when this newfangled eBay thing came along, copies of second edition became like gold dust, and so did they expansions.

There was an attempt to make an unofficial computer game in July 2008, but Games Workshop in that litigious way of theirs ensued that that never saw the light of day.

So it genuinely seemed that Talisman might become one of those legendary games that old timers would bang on about but young players would never actually get a chance to play.

However, in 2007, black Industries Games Workshop's publishing arm announced that they were bringing Talisman back with a fourth edition, and this was going to go back to basics, based on the beloved second edition, but with some of the better ideas of third edition and updated production values.

The board was about 30% larger and came in six pieces instead of four.

The artwork was updated for modern tests, but it really kept that essential talisman character.

More importantly, it actually felt like talisman again and not like Warhammer wearing a talisman shaped trench coat.

Unfortunately, Black Industries' return to board gaming was short lived.

In early 2008, they announced they were getting out of board games entirely.

Fortunately, those nice people at Fantasy Flight Games they stepped in to license the game and they proved to be absolutely brilliant custodians of the franchise.

Their approach was methodical and respectful.

They released a revised fourth edition in late 2008, complete with an upgrade pack for people who'd bought the original fourth edition.

There were a few copies of that released by Black Industries.

They then embarked on an expansion program that, to be quite honest, made the original second edition run look positively restrained.

Between 2009 and 2016, fantasy Flight released 14 expansions for 4th edition 14.

And these weren't just cash grabs either.

Each one added meaningful content and introduced new mechanics.

Fantasy Flight seemed to understand what made Talisman special the variety and replayability.

Each expansion wasn't just more cards, it was new ways to play, new endings, new stories to discover.

The production values, as to be expected from Fantasy Flight, were exceptional, with gorgeous artwork and components that could survive years of regular play.

Anyway, in 2017, fantasy Flight's license ended and, after a bit of a gap, avalon Hill picked up the license from Games Workshop.

After several years of development, they announced 5th edition in February 2024, with release following in August, and 5th edition represents another thoughtful evolution of the game.

Like 4th edition before it, it's based primarily on that beloved 2nd edition foundation, but incorporates lessons learned from 40 years of talisman design.

The core mechanics remain familiar roll, move, encounter but they've streamlined things considerably and made some interesting changes to the end game.

A bit like third edition, instead of just reaching the crown of command and casting the command spell repeatedly until everyone else dies or gives up.

You now have to defeat an elder dragon that's guarding the crown.

It's a more decisive ending that should help with one of Talisman's traditional problems games that drag on forever because nobody can quite finish anyone else off and everyone's too stubborn to quit.

Eh, bill Avalon Hill has clearly put some thought into modernising the experience, while keeping what makes Talisman special.

They've trimmed the character roster slightly, streamlined some of the more frustrating random elements and generally tried to give players more agency in their fate.

Whether it will capture a new generation of players while satisfying the old guard remains to be seen.

Modern games design theory is about balance and people being able to compete on a level playing field, and it will tell you that in a race to the objective style game, you should avoid mechanisms that can completely wipe out another player's progress.

The worst thing you should be able to do to an opponent, the theory goes, is slow them down for a turn or two.

By those standards, talisman is absolutely terrible design.

You can lose all your stuff, get turned into a toad and have hours of progress completely undone by a single bad encounter.

But here's the thing Talisman isn't really about balanced competitive gameplay in the modern sense.

It's ultimately a game about telling a story, and a good story doesn't have to be that everyone is perfectly balanced and progressing at the same steady rate.

Sometimes the mighty warrior gets beaten up by that goblin.

Sometimes the wizard gets all his spells wiped.

Sometimes everyone ends up as toads.

Those aren't design flaws, they're features, because they create memorable moments and make for great stories.

So why has Talisman survived for over 40 years when countless other games have been forgotten?

Personally, I reckon it's down to a few key things.

Firstly, it's got that perfect.

Just one more turn quality.

Every turn offers the possibility of discovery A powerful spell, a game-changing artefact, a crucial encounter that can completely flip your position.

The random nature means no two games ever play out the same way, which is something you can't see about many board games.

Secondly, it sits in that sweet spot between complexity and accessibility.

You can teach someone to play in about 10 minutes, but working out the optimal strategies where to venture inward, which encounters to seek out how to develop your character, that can take years to master and, especially in second edition with all the expansions, sometimes you're not even going to get there.

Thirdly, it's genuinely about stories, not in that forced narrative way that some modern games attempt, but in the organic way that memorable moments just emerge from play.

This isn't a game where you get given a card with your character's story on it and then you play the game.

Everyone who plays Talisman has their own stories the time the minstrels somehow made it all the way to the Crown of Command.

Epic battles, with ancient dragons being turned into a toad just when victory was within reach, sitting up till 5am trying to get your friend to concede as you blast them with command, spell after command, spell after command spell.

Fourth, it's endlessly expandable.

The basic role-moving counter-structure is simple enough that you can bolt new content onto it without breaking anything.

Each expansion adds new stories, new possibilities, new ways for everything to go hilariously wrong.

In that period between third edition and fourth edition edition, a whole fan community sprung up that did just this.

They wrote new cards, new adventure cards, new character cards, and they kept the game going.

Finally, talisman doesn't take itself too seriously.

It's much more Terry Pratchett than it is JRR Tolkien.

Yes, it's about epic fantasy adventure, but it's also about being transformed into a toad by a pissed off sorceress.

It's also about having your treasure stolen by a sneaky thief.

And it's also about watching the mighty warrior getting beaten up by the lowliest creature in the game because he rolled badly, and these are things that everyone laughs at and talks about later.

It's a game that understands.

Sometimes the best stories are the ones where everything goes wrong in the most entertaining way possible.

So Talisman has now survived five editions, multiple publishers, technological revolutions and four decades of changing game fashions.

It's been translated into loads of languages, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and inspired countless imitators.

It has also fostered a remarkably dedicated fan community that's kept it alive even during the dark years.

As I mentioned before, sites like Talisman Island, which has been running since 1999, continues to provide news, custom expansions and discussion forums for fans.

The Talisman Expansion Database catalogues both official and fan-created content across multiple editions.

Board Game Geek hosts active communities where players share house rules and custom expansions, and there are countless Facebook groups that keep the conversation growing across social media.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing is how little its core appeal has changed since Bob Harris first sketched out that pencil prototype in his university digs.

It's still about characters going on adventures, facing dangers, growing in power and ultimately trying to claim the crown of command.

The mechanics have been refined, the artwork has evolved and the production values have improved massively, but the essential experience remains the same.

In an era of increasingly complex board games with elaborate mechanics and intricate systems, there's something refreshing about Talisman's straightforward approach Roll the dice, move your character, see what happens.

It's gaming distilled to its essence the thrill of discovery, the tension of risk versus reward and the joy of watching a story unfold through play.

Whether 5th edition will capture a new generation of players remains to be seen, but if history is any guide, talisman will keep on trucking.

After all, some games are just too good to stay dead and, honestly, that's just fine by me.

In a world that often takes its games very, very, very seriously indeed, we need something that reminds us that the best adventures are the ones where you might be turned into a toad but you'll have a brilliant time getting there, and that was our Talisman episode.

I hope you enjoyed it.

If you have memories of this game, let us know what edition you used to play.

Were you a fan of the more modern editions with their better production values and cool plastic minis, or were you more into the chaotic energy of 2nd edition and its glorious randomness?

If you want to get in touch with us.

You can so at rolltosavepod at gmailcom.

We are also on social media, on Instagram and Facebook Just search for Roll2Save.

We don't use that Twitter thing anymore, for all the obvious reasons that people don't use Twitter anymore.

We are an incredibly irregular podcast on the history of RPGs, but we have over 70 episodes in our back catalogue now.

So if you're a new listener and you want to get caught up in what we've released in the past, we've got a whole ton of history, episodes, roundtables, interviews, product reviews, actual plays and other nonsense going on there Plenty to keep you busy.

If you enjoyed this, please leave us five stars on your podcast platform of choice.

We really appreciate it.

It validates our fragile little egos and encourages us to put out more episodes.

Anyway, until next time, may you never be turned into a toad and may you always avoid the horrible black void.