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| Well, after a week or so of unbridled excitement (in this house at least), and some sneaky spoilers being hunted down, we got the first look at some of the components of the new licensed game in the Talisman series coming from USAopoly. | |||||
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| The first task I undertook this week was to squint really hard for a loooong time and identify the title, which I wasn’t totally convinced was correct, but was confirmed today!
Talisman: Batman – Super-Villains Edition! |
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| Fast forward to tonight and we are gifted a sneaky peek by USAopoly, which I first saw on BoardGameGeek, but then realised that I’d had an email an hour before! That’ll teach me to update the email settings on my phone!
It’s taken a little while to work out in my head what exactly I was looking at, so I thought the best thing to do was go through the picture and make some notes about what we can see… |
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| (1) First off we can see that the board is displayed in a standard layout, with the three regions in three colours. The board spaces appear to be imitating comic strip panels and the dark, gritty colouring shows what a dreary place Arkham Asylum is…
We can identify familiar spaces from the original game. The Kitchen here is the Tavern, with the Temple being transformed into the Psychiatrist’s Office. Further along you can see a Patrolled Corridor (Desert) space next to a Blind Spot (Oasis). |
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| (2)Standard space text has been replaced by iconography, which is something a few fans have looked at doing over the years.
It’s clear that the spaces above want you to roll a die and check the result, draw 1 “Adventure” card or draw 2 “Adventure” cards. |
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| (3)The attribute dials, first seen in Fantasy Flight Games‘ game Relic, feature the attributes Health (Life), Cunning (Craft) and Strength (umm… Strength).
I can only assume that whoever put the mockup together isn’t that familiar with the game, as why you would put the dials in that order is beyond me! |
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| I couldn’t help myself and used the gap shown in the image to see how many numbers are likely to be on the attribute dial, and it appears there are 8! I presume this means that attributes are capped, but we shall have to see when more information is available.
(4) The sculpt for this Batman (AI) figure looks fantastic, and I only hope that the 12 (yes twelve!) bad guy miniatures are in the same style. They’ll certainly be of interest to fans of the Batman world! (5) Next up are the cards, which I’ll try to cover in one go. The Harley Quinn character is obviously based on the Sorceress and here’s what I can make out – Harley Quinn – Strength: 3, Cunning: 3, Fate: 3, Coin: 1, Health: 4 – Alignment: Chaotic (Evil), Start: Morgue (Graveyard) You begin the game with one ??? and a Baseball Bat. When you attack another character, you may choose Cunning instead of Strength. You may not do this when you are attacked by another character. You may take any one Follower from a Character that you land on, except Hush, Court of Owls Member or the ???. The missing Follower reference looks like it could be the EMT, but there’s no Follower in the base game that heals. If it is EMT it could be that they’ve made a Shield or Armour card into a Follower…? I presume the missing word in the first ability is this game’s equivalent of Spells, as the text I can make out in the card to the bottom left of her card is – Foresight – ??? – Use at the start of your turn before you move, take one secret look at the top ??? cards of the ??? deck. **UPDATE** Thanks to Marcin and Scott via Facebook, it seems that the new word for Spell is Feat and you draw from the Encounter deck. Any more? |
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| (6) On to the tokens, we can see that Fate is represented by what looks like the coin used by Two-Face, which makes perfect sense. We’ve also got the standard gold coin, which will be familiar to everyone and ties the game to the larger Talisman universe.
(7) The next token appears to be for Alignment, given that Harley starts off as Chaotic, and is now Righteous! (8)This leaves us with a very important card, the Talisman of the Batman universe, or the Security Key Card! It sports a Talisman logo, plus the standard wording – Security Key Card – Legendary Object – (Encounter Number) 5 – You may only enter the ??? Room at the top of Arkham Asylum Tower if you have a Security Key Card. |
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| …so that’s the lot!
All in all I’m really quite excited for this title, though I was originally a little worried when I heard that we would see licensed versions of the game. The Batman universe is something I can get behind, and the fact that you are playing a villain with Batman as some sort of AI-controlled “Reaper” is very exciting to me. Having now seen the components, or at least the style of them, this is just going to be like any game of vanilla Talisman and I hope that we see expansions down the line! Over the next week, we should have a few more questions answered as the game will be featured on BoardGameGeek‘s livestream coverage from GAMA Trade Show on Thursday, and it might even show up tonight on USAopoly’s livestream which will be featuring Talisman: Kingdom Hearts Edition. I’m not sure I’ll need to make one of these “ponderings” features about that one, but we’ll see how it goes! **UPDATE** The OP Live Twitch stream has just finished and although we didn’t get to see any components, we did get to see both boxes for the new Talisman licences! |
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| They did confirm that they will be spoiling the new character models from the games in the run up to release, with Batman being slated for June and Kingdom Hearts looking like it’ll be out at San Diego Comic Con in July.
Also mentioned was that in both games, the play time has been reduced with the introduction of new rules, however for old school players, you can use the original ruleset and play to your heart’s content! More as we hear it! |