Point 2: I Googled you a month ago to see where you were in L.A. Unfortunately this city is HUGE and you’d be nearly two hours away from me

Point 3: I always felt like Twilight Imperium threatened to take forever and then was over in an hour because of the points victory system.

Talisman drags on forever. It’s nigh-unwinnable, but not in a good way. Throughout play, the ratio of will-thwarting moments to awesome moments is so far skewed to the will-thwarting as to be laughable.

I dunno about that…We used to finish the game off in an hour or two…but that is with 2 or 3 expansions (I think, I know we had the dungeon, the city, and later on we added the dragon one) which probably changed the duration. I know one of the expansions dramatically altered the endgame scenario.

We considered it a good game for a quick night of gaming and drinking beer.

If you want to talk about long games we can go into AH’s Civilization (we ended up figuring it was an hour, plus an hour per experienced player or two hours per newbie) or Pax Romana.

You live in Southern California…I live in Southern California…I own a copy of Talisman. Actually, I own copies of the 3rd and 4th editions of Talisman. We can play that sometime if you’d like.

I do recommend only playing until someone gets the Crown of Command. Playing with player elimination is just lame, but playing to “first past the post” can be amusing.

There are better dungeon crawl games out there, like Runebound let’say, but I’m always up for a game of something.

That’s a question I can answer.

Talisman drags on forever. It’s nigh-unwinnable, but not in a good way. Throughout play, the ratio of will-thwarting moments to awesome moments is so far skewed to the will-thwarting as to be laughable.

If what you’re looking for is a game whose pacing is worthy of a steady stream of MST3K-style heckling, and you’ve got more than six consecutive hours to throw at it, then Talisman is the perfect choice.

I know, because that’s what my college gaming gaggle used it for. One of us had a night watchman gig at the campus infirmary for his work-study job, an 8-hour shift from midnight to morning on Fridays. In solidarity, the rest of us would alternate Fridays, in twos and threes, keeping him company over the Talisman board so he wouldn’t fall asleep on the job. After about 4am, our brains would start turning into mush, so the conditions were wrong for playing games that were actually good. Talisman was perfect, though, because it was no worse after the brain-mush stage than before it. In fact, once we started getting giddy and stupid with sleep deprivation, the game started to emanate the illusion of being slightly more fun.

It had the makings of a really awesome board game. Maybe more rigorous playtesting or more flexible designers could have brought out its potential. Maybe someday a future edition will.

Sounds like, if you had to choose between Talisman and Mystara, you made the right call.

It’s fantastic. The Elves of Alfheim book is one of the best sourcebook examples of how to have elven culture in your game. The Northern Reaches…oh, the Northern Reaches…

Glantri…Glantri..Glantri…! With the edition of the Creature Crucible books, Glantri goes from awesome to even more awesome.

The world is Hollow…has a moon where a humanoid cat culture based on Feudal Japan lives…

You can tell almost any story on this world. I love it.

Even though I spend most of my time playing in Eberron and Greyhawk…both of which are also quite good…there is something truly magical about Mystara.