+100 - just having the ability to use all the characters without the expansion packs is huge to my little group since we'll usually turn on the corner boards (City, Dungeon, Highlands) and then pick and choose between the rest which slims down the pool for characters. Such a nice QoL update
I actually emailed support to ask about the orbs of prophecy/knowledge/flame not working, and found out that you need to double-tap them from the context menu at the bottom of the screen, instead of selecting them from your inventory (which seems to me to be the way it used to work). So, no bug there, but I have seen other, minor ones here and there. Bug fixes are good fixes!
The double-tapping of cards to use them is in the tutorial, but I understand that lots of people either don't read it or haven't read it for a long time. It has always worked like that though. You should hopefully find that it helps make the game easier to play and that you can react better to other players' actions.
It absolutely does! A great implementation. But I could have sworn I used to activate those cards from my inventory. This is certainly easier. My latest gripe is the mechanics of the inner board. The Challenge for the Crown ending, where entering the Crown of Command leads to the first square of the Dragon Tower board, is my favorite. The issue is that the board is switched out not only for the first player to enter, but for ALL players. Although unfair (and it takes away from the idea that the tower is actually built in the Crown space), it wouldn't be a huge deal -- EXCEPT whenever the blasted Dragonspire or Great Portal cards eventually come up, which allow characters to warp directly to the Crown. Twice now I've lost because I've entered the Crown, then entered the Tower, then a character was able to leapfrog me BECAUSE I had entered first and flipped the board. Then the last time I played, I ended up just moving around aimlessly waiting for someone else to enter first so I'd have a fair shot at it, which was just boring and awkward. My favorite solution would be to allow banning the dragonspire/great portal cards. For now I think I'm gonna play with the Dragon turned off. But I'm STILL loving the expansion just for giving me extra characters -- that I can now play without the expansion being turned off. Well done, guys!!
I understand your point, but that is kind of the essence of Talisman isn't it? That rare occasion when a card is drawn that allows someone to leap-frog other players and skip to the end is part of the experience and the drama of the card draw. The same goes for the Gong of War card, which can pull a player OFF the Crown of Command, the Displacement spell which you can use to let someone else get all the way to the Crown and then cast it on them to swap places (if you're in the Inner Region that is), plus several others. The Horrible Black Void is an ending which punishes players for being first to the centre. It's almost like Talisman's version of Mario Kart's Blue Shell! But anyway, we'll take a look into it, as we always do with comments and suggestions, and see if there's a fair solution. Thanks!
Yeah, Talisman has a HUGE luck factor, which is at the heart of its charm. I feel that this is different, though, because it's predictable: once the card is there, it stays there. At that point, it's something that's just waiting to be exploited, and that exploitation boils down to "be the second person to land on it." But these are such tiny gripes, really, and just come from having spent SO much time in the game. And not in the game: researching, reading up on character tiers, looking at future expansions. This game just scratches so many different itches (board game, fantasy, RPG, adventure, strategizing/planning) that it almost always fits my mood. And really, the bugs just seem to come from the mind-boggling number of ways that cards interact with each other. I can't even imagine playing the physical version of this: my adventure deck now has, what, 700 cards? I don't even want to know what setup and clean up would look like.
I should also mention that I did mention this to customer support, and they said it was due to presentation/programming limitations. I totally get that.
Looking forward to the last three expansions! I hope Nomad adds some of those survey features after all the expansions have been released. Some of those ideas sound really cool.
Oof. An expansion's an expansion, and this one is as flawless as ever! But I don't think I'll be playin with it very much. Really feels like the game's on a timer now; the board gets incredibly hostile, and pretty quickly. I felt that my character scaled with the difficulty with the Dragon expansion, but in this one I'm fighting for dear life. Which is the point, I think: but not my cup of tea. But anyhow: another job well done, guys!!
It is a tough expansion, that's for sure. There are some interesting cards in it which help you kill off other players, which is fairly unique to the Harbinger. But yes, like Firelands, it makes the game pretty tough so you have to think carefully about which expansions to use alongside it.
This is, however, the beauty of a digital port as could you even IMAGINE shuffling the physical deck of Adventure cards if including all the exps?
I've done it. It was not fun. Break up the deck to all players, everyone shuffles and passes a cut to the right and repeat a few times. This is why we now play digitally
I can't even imagine. Not to mention cleanup. Not to mention shelf space. Not to mention cost! But I will say this: I had somehow never even heard of Talisman until Digital came out, and it's made me a fan. While the completionist part of me would never let me even get started collecting the physical games, I have thrown a couple dozen dollars at Digital Edition that I would never have spent otherwise. And after all that, I actually am considering getting Cataclysm, which (if I'm correct) works better as a standalone than together with all the other expansions.
Using expansion standalone or sparingly is likely true with a good many of these as their special features, often by way of a few new adventure cards, could easily be lost in a deck of 600+ cards.
