Fun as it might be to imagine Talisman in the Big City as a fish out of water comedy starring an unwieldy board game, crashing into commuters and spilling its dice all over the sidewalk, eyes locked with a beautiful stranger as the pair reach for the same adventure card, well – that’s not what The City is. Sorry.
You’ll find more turn-based fare among the best strategy games on PC.
Publishers Fantasy Flight have been flooding the dinner table mainstay with shrewd embellishments since they took the baton from Games Workshop years back, and Nomad Games have been folding them just as quickly into the digital version.
They’ve now reached The City, and have spent nine months transposing it for PC. The expansion adds a new cul de sac of shops and encounters to the board, deepening the game’s already-convincing approximation of an RPG. You can now play with six people, too, and win (or lose) in three new ways.
I’ve been playing quite a lot of Talisman, which stands up surprisingly well vs AI. It’s definitely on an extreme end of the RNG spectrum, even for a Games Workshop classic. But it’s a fantastic story generator – the unpredictable rolls producing drunk wizards and power-crazed paladins.
The new expansion is £4.99 on Steam. Think you’ll take your coin to The City?