We played a game recently with 5 players. 3 of them were the Merchant, Leprechaun, and Alchemist characters. Needless to say, gold became EXTREMELY scarce. We ended up using pennies when we ran out of pieces. We thought to ourselves "gee, I sure hope FFG releases an expansion with more gold pieces soon..."

Then today I was browsing the rules for Talisman and found this on page 15 of the main rules book:

LIMITED RESOURCES

All resources are limited to the number of components provided with the game. For example, if all Strength counters are in use, no additional Strength can be gained until some of those counters have been returned to the Strength counter stockpile. If a character is able to trade five 1–point counters for the corresponding one 5–point counter, he must do so.

Sooooo...does this means that Talisman has a set economy? and once all gold pieces are in someone's possession, that's it? A depression sweeps the land?

If you're out of gold counters then that's it, you can't gain any more gold until someones loses or spends some.

Hard times for all!

I've reached 30+ Gold in the game, but then, the BI base game (which I have) came with 60 Gold . Sadly, apart from the Alchemist, Gold is borderline useless unless you get something like Academy out there. And if a rich character is in the game, I'd be tempted to hit that card with Destruction or Obliterate before they can get there, or better yet, after they've paid 30 Gold but haven't received the benefits .

Dam said:

Hopefully the Stable-based cards in The Sacred Pool will help a little with coin excess. And the forthcoming City Expansion (don't get excited, I'm only assuming it's forthcoming! I don't know any secrets!!)

Well the gold must be limited otherwise some tactics would be useless.

For example

Leprechauns entire strategy evolves around trying to empty the "bank". by emptying the bank you do several things.

* Cripple the person having mercenary
* Cripple all non-spell cycling chars from buying spells which is common on a lot of cards.
* You creaple healing by a ton.
* And ofcourse if you draw the academy you are pretty much set for the win.
* the all mighty Alchemist become useless
* In some cases you will force chars to take gold from you instead of items if you are beaten.

I actually won with Leprechaun twice with this strategy

Cheers

*&(^% Leprechaun

the group i play with have had games where economics have become a weapon. not just by making gold scarce but also by buying all of a certain item from the purchase deck. not as effective as hording all of the gold but incredibly frustrating when someone wants a mule or a sword and none are for sale... i have been burned by the Leprechaun/Academy combo three times now. i have had this game for 3+ months now. my brother has gotten the Leprechaun 4 or 5 times now and has won every time. too bad i don't keep more accurate stats...