Favorite board game obsessions of recent years part 1 - Talisman started it all

 Some time in 2019 after I moved to my new town and had gotten a nice little D&D group together (my first real dabbling in DMing 5th edition) I also started getting into a variety of board games in a way I never had before.

Outside of typical board games of my childhood (Monopoly, Clue, etc) I had really gotten into Talisman in the 90's. I mean, really into it. My buddy had a girlfriend who's roommate had the basic board and the dungeon. At our height of play I might go over for the weekend, surfing the couch, and we would play Friday night, finish that game the next morning, start another in the afternoon to finish that night, and then start a new game Sunday morning after breakfast (starting our days drinking with some Mimosa) to finish that late afternoon. We were bonkers for it. I eventually bought a used copy of the game and the dungeon of my own, and played it with folk all over the rest of the 90's.

Talisman had a ton of elements I loved. A bevy of fantasy characters with varied abilities to play; a ton of things that could happen based on encounters and event cards (very often game changing); and most games you could finish in about three hours. 

 Then in the early 2000's I pretty much retired from RPG's and gaming in general for several years, and my copy of Talisman went into the closet with my D&D stuff. 

In my later long running  group that lasted from around 2008 till I left Los Angeles in 2018, I think I only had maybe one or two occasions to break Talisman out from hibernation. But the one time we actually played a boardgame as an RPG alternative was Arkham Horror. I don't even recall which player had a copy. I mostly just recall what a long night it was. The game was so complicated and dense (far more than I felt it needed to be) I found it hard to enjoy despite loving Call of Cthulhu. That was about it for boardgames until I moved to this town almost three years ago. Then I met B and L. 

They were a local couple who I met off a local shops Facebook page because they wanted to play D&D, and pretty soon they had a adopted me (I didn't really know many people in town and hadn't been working yet) and were my besties pretty quick. Besides us having a D&D group for several months, we also started playing boardgames. They were already avid board gamers, being frequent visitors to a local bar that stocked games. There besides a bevy of microbrews, you could pull any number of their hundreds of boardgames off the shelf and play it. They have everything. 

But they had not played Talisman before, and after I first pulled out that old beat-up copy, they fell in love with it. Soon they had the most recent edition (that was by then several years old). I'll be posting about some other faves soon, but here I'll talk about the most amazing discovery of all that is Talisman related: Digital Talisman.

I had just made some offhanded Facebook post about Talisman, and a friend in Sacramento mentioned that there was a digital edition on steam. Zuh?!

I had no Steam experience, but within minutes I had an account and bought Talisman and a few of its expansions. Oh man, how amazing. This was an incredible discovery. Not just the main game, but they had a ton of the expansions. For physical copies this would all be about a thousand dollars if you could even find them. But on Steam the main game was like 6.99, and the expansions were that or less! Many of these weren't even available in physical form. Of all the fucked up things that happened in 2020, discovering digital Talisman was a highlight. And I have friends who love it as well. B and L left town to travel around the country in a huge luxury mobile home. But whenever they are somewhere they can get decent cell phone coverage for hot spots they are up for a game. You can even play it solo with the software running other characters (fairly intelligently as well). 

There are few downsides to this version. Of course there can be a glitch here and there, but rarely game breaking. And so far if you play a game online that game will be erased if you play another one before you finish. So you have to make sure you have plenty of time to finish. 

The upgrade in my Talisman playing has in a way changed my gaming habits. Digital Talisman, as well as the MMO Elder Scrolls Online (will post about that later) have in large part overtaken my desire to run D&D. These days there are just too many options.

2012 - a great year of just plain gaming

With the Temple of Demogorgon 4 year anniversary just this last week, I thought it might a good time to talk about some of my gaming from the last year (as seems to be the tradition). Mostly the last year was about focusing on actually running games over blogging or kerfuffling in the OSR, and I found it both peaceful and fulfilling.

In 2012 I didn’t do much in the way of gaming outside the regular group. After a couple of shitty experiences in the previous and other years both at tabletops and online (there were some good ones too), I dedicated myself to the regular group and to new campaigns with gusto, and kept my posts here to an average of 2 or 3 a month.

Pretty much started the year jumping right into my long-daydreamed about classic Runequest game. I did a lot of research, and dreaming up of my own stuff in relation to existing data for this campaign. It was a lot of work, but I love Glorantha and could not wait to portray my version of it. Though I used a lot of the Celtic imagery and some clarifications on locations from later editions, I did my best to keep my Glorantha very basic, they way I experienced it as a kid. There was a bit of work to be done with the crunch, as I almost immediately threw out some of the Strike Rank stuff and started houseruling to make the game and all it’s combat focus go smoother. I think that went well, as I’m pretty sure I captured the groups imagination with strong tribal-clan setting, a nice break from generic medieval Europe setting of D&D. I finally got to do the classic Gringles Pawnshop and Rainbow Mounds scenario’s, and it was all good. I think I left the campaign off later in the year with the players wanting more, and that is the feather in the GM cap as far as I’m concerned. I will for sure revisit the characters later this year.


In January regular player Paul brought a copy of Arkham Horror boardgame when we were low on players, and though lengthy (as most boardgames seem to be) it was fun, and got my juices flowing to do some Call of Cthulhu. We did eventually get a few sessions in, and it was good times. I called this part of the campaign “Fangs of New York,” with a classic New York setting. Byakhees and Chinese Gangsters over Times Square on New Years Eve, Cho Cho People and Chaugner Faugh in the Jersey Pine Barrens. Really great sessions, and as in the past some players hemmed and hawed about the genre, but loved it once we played. Quite honestly, I think I do my best GMing with Cthulhu. I’m really “on” when I run it. Looking forward to getting in some more of this soon. It is a good game for when you are low on players.


Just a quick video gaming mention as an aside. Around the earlier part of last year my video game of choice ended up being Fallout 3. I hadn’t played a video game with this much enthusiasm since Resident Evil 4. Just a great and immersive game, and a big time waster in 2012. Right now, into 2013, I’m putting a bit of effort into Borderlands 1 and Bioshock (I might have mentioned in the past that I am always 2-4 years behind on my video games).

My Knights of The Old Republic campaign continued. Despite the crunch, or maybe even because of it, the group on a whole seemed to really enjoy it. I cannot compare it to AD&D as I hadn’t run that for the group in over two years, but out of everything else I have done; Mutant Future, Champions, and Call of Cthulhu, this seemed to be what the gang liked best. I ran it right up to the holidays, but have set it aside since I want to do D&D so bad. We’ll hopefully get back to it later this year, maybe summer.

In addition to this new D&D campaign we are just getting underway, I also still want to do a mini-campaign with the high level dudes left over from the Night Below campaign I ended two years ago. The players seem very attached to these characters, and it seems a shame to not do the occasional outing with them, despite my mild dislike for high level play.


So we in the group have started my new AD&D 1st edition campaign, and the characters seem like a lot of fun so far. So my gaming wish list for lucky number 2013 is to do a bunch of this AD&D campaign, a smattering of the high level AD&D, More Call of Cthulhu here and there, a continuance of KOTOR later in the year, and…heaven forbid…maybe sneak a little Champions in? That would be a damn good gaming year for me.

Arkham Horror begats Call of Cthulhu

Being down three players last night (Dan Dan the Power Game Man is overseas for awhile, Little Ben has to take a month or two off suddenly, and Big Ben had a cold), we decided to finally play Paul’s copy of Arkham Horror he got for Xmas instead of my Runequest session.. In all honesty, I’m not feeling Runequest like I thought I would. I love the setting, but the super crunch of the combat rules really killed my buzz. I’m going to go back to the drawing board on that for awhile. Like I said a thousand times on this blog, my pet peeve in GMing it to feel like its work. I don’t wanna work during a game. I want to have a couple of beers and paint a picture. I’m all heart and passion at the center, not the crunchy shell. I actually was willing to carry on without using the mind-numbing, high maintenance Strike Rank, but with a couple of the guys being heavily for using it BTB, I just wanted to step back for a bit and take another look before we spent another session trying to adjudicate a battle with the characters and a couple of weapon snakes.

So we finally play AH (the latest version), and it seemed pretty cool. As the only real Lovecraft aficionado in the group, I had to hold back and not bore everybody with the back story of every side street on the Arkham map and all the monsters and books and such. What was weird was they, the Cthulhu novices, seemed to enjoy it a bit more than me. In all honesty, I like a board game to be a little simpler, and to be able to be played inside of three hours with 4 people or less. I’m actually surprised that we finished by 11:30, but I think we fudged a couple of things to be able to get to the battle with the endgame god (in this case it was Yig the serpent god, and we beat him with only one character dying).

We’ll have a better handle on it next time so it will go quicker, but one really good thing came out of this: we got the Lovecraft bug, and I’ll be running some Call of Cthulhu for my next session! Next week at Big Ben’s D&D I’m thinking of taking up a half hour or so for some CoC chargen so we can do less of that when I get the Cthulhu session underway.

Usually this would be a good time to get that weekly gaming in, but some of us are having our schedules become busier on weeknights than usual. Andy is getting involved in some kind of local politics, Terry is going to start bartending at her club a night or two during the week, and in addition to my usual once weekly music practice I want to start learning some new instruments – so all of a sudden we find ourselves dashing about trying to work it out for weekly gaming now. Once or twice a year we have a longer weekend session, and I suggested we try to make that once a month or so to make up for some lost weeknight sessions, so in the long run I think it will be all good and the group will carry on with standard operations bullshit for the foreseeable future.