I'll preface this by saying that I'm a long time Talisman fan. I played the black and white first edition all the way through the lackluster 3rd edition from GW. I have not yet played the FFG edition, however.

That said, had a chance to get my 10 minutes at the table during Gen Con and I love this game! It has all the simple fun of Talisman, but includes some deeper mechanics.

The three decks that play off the different stats are a great touch, allowing players to focus on which paths will play to their strengths.

I love the missions system for gaining a Relic. Not sure if this is an FFG Talisman mechanic as well, but gets players heading to specific regions of the map or interacting with one another.

Individualized Relics (I heard this is already a part of Talisman) also very cool. As is the custom XP chart each character has. The corruption mechanic plays similar to the WHFRP critical hit system and is pretty slick as well.

All in all, if you enjoy Talisman, then this should be right up your alley. If you don't, then it probably won't. Simple as that. If you've never tried out Talisman or 'sorta' liked it I'd encourage you to give it a try.

Hi,

Can you remember what scenario card you played with? Did you get a look at any of the other scenarios?

The Mission cards you mention are called Warlock Quests in Talisman 4th RE.

My friend Mike and I also gave the game a try. We have been playing Talisman since 2nd edition and we love 4th Ed Revised. We came into the game VERY apprehensive and thought it would be just a re-skin. The guy running the demo was awesome and when he found out all 4 of us at the table played Talisman he kinda just let us play and answered quesions when needed. Ended up playing for 30minutes. When we were done I was kinda affraid to say it…but I actually liked the game more than Talisman.

Keltheos did a great job mentioning some of the details and I thought I would add or emphasize a few. First, the mission cards were very awesome and fun and not just "Warlock quests." Second, you actually WANTED to get to the inner region to help yourself level up faster once you could rather than it simply being the region of "I have to pass through before I can get to the inner." Third, by having the three stats it made it very hard for one character to be completely dominant over others and also gave characters a chance of losing a combat from most any deck. Also, if you try to simply grind up one stat you get boned when it comes to trying to end the game because a lot of the inner region spaces make you take the difference between your highest and lowest stats. Finally, I loved how some of the weapons and equipment were limited use. This really helped balanced out things if someone got a lucky draw early on because they could only use their uber-item twice.

There is really a lot more I want to say but I'll simply end it by saying that I'll be getting this game day 1 and I hope that FFG makes a "Dial" expansion so we can have more than 4 players without resorting to pen and paper