First play of Talisman: Harry Potter Edition

On removing the sleeve we saw that the box was more as you would have expected, and we wondered if it was down to the regular artwork perhaps being a bit ‘scary’ to put on display in a regular game shop, whether it was to keep the packaging in keeping with other items from the Harry Potter range, or indeed a mixture of both.

It must be said that it does free up a fair amount of space on the table for player areas, so I’ll be interested to see if the trend continues.

I needn’t have worried though as the 8 characters that are included are double-sided and have two different sets of special abilities technically giving 16 possibilities, but obviously only one version of each at a time.

I’d also seen a few posts leading up to the release about how this character or that character wasn’t included in the game, but I guess they have to draw the line somewhere and it’s possible that certain characters didn’t really fit thematically with the supposed timeline of the game within the Potterverse.

Funnily enough, cute little Dobby turned up in our game but I soon found that although he adds 1 to your Magic, he also limits your movement like the Poltergeist from the regular game! I know where I’d like to stick his sock!

The dice are nice and colourful, but sadly this time around there’s no fancy logo on them and there are only 4 supplied which might be a little problematic when you play with a full complement of players. I’ll probably look to add to these in time.

As with the earlier Talisman: Star Wars Edition, which in turn was borrowed from Talisman: The Horus Heresy Edition, any cards marked as Enemy or Follower that you encounter along the way will either fight you or become your Follower, depending on your (and their) Alignment.

We ended up deciding to shout the names of the spells aloud when they were cast and waving imaginary wands around, which was a lot of fun. We also shouted out the Dark Lord’s name [VOLDEMORT!] every time a 1 was rolled for movement so it ended up a little noisy around the table!

Purchase cards mirror the regular Talisman deck, though you’ll find a few changes to the normal game text. It was a little odd imagining that some sweets were going to save you in the event of a lost battle, but we managed to roll with it.

When we played, it wasn’t immediately obvious from the rules or board space whether you are teleported back to the Quidditch Pitch after completing a quest, so we ended up just being given one wherever we were at the time.

The Ferret card you can see is the HP equivalent of being turned into a slimy Toad, but sadly only 2 cards are included. I know that it’s not a regular occurrence in the game, so having all 6 players Ferreted would be rare, but I do like to have all possibilities covered!

They also appear to be about the same scale at the miniatures used in Knight Models‘ Harry Potter Miniatures Adventure Game should you wish to add some characters of your own making.

I do wonder what was going on with the second sheet of cardboard tokens for the game as there seems to be a fair amount of blank space. I realise that there are no components missing from the game, but it might have been useful to include tokens for when a character is turned into a Ferret, or similar.

I can’t think how we ended up playing with these particular characters; a rotund, bearded man and a slightly deranged woman… “I shouldn’t have said that. I should not have said that!”

About halfway through the game we also discovered that you are only supposed to have a maximum of 3 Followers at any time, but we weren’t too worried about this as it allowed to endgame to come a little sooner than it would have done.

During play, whenever Voldemort [VOLDEMORT!] was activated, we had the player that rolled the 1 make the roll for his movement, but the other player actually moved him to make it a little more ‘interesting’!

We didn’t use the rule where he can cross Regions at will as we felt that there was enough tension having your opponent move him around!

I was left to shuffle about trying to get my attributes high enough to make the dash, and in the end struggled 3 times to get through to the Moving Staircase and had to watch from the sidelines.

The test to enter the Inner Region is the same as in the regular game by rolling 2 dice under your chosen attribute, but instead of single space movement after that you use a d6/2 (rounded down) for movement, which meant that Katie only took 3 turns to get to the Room of Requirement and then onto the Great Hall.

She easily outgunned Lord Voldemort [VOLDEMORT!] and won the game!

Well, I really enjoyed the game and as normal there was a lot of chat and laughter all of the way through. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is a great match for the mechanics of Talisman and there are some changes which help the game move along a little quicker.

Some spaces allow you to take a Spell in addition to Encounter cards and you can also exchange Fate tokens for Spells using one of the Encounter cards. There seemed to be an awful lot of Encounter cards similar to the Magic Stream, where Fate tokens were used as markers so that you could gain attributes and setting the Trophy cash-in at 5 points meant that levelling up was quite speedy too.

Katie particularly liked that a lot of the characters that might have been included in the game were used as Enemy, Observer or Follower cards. In our game, Neville Longbottom got his own back and defeated Bellatrix Lestrange during an encounter for instance!

We noticed a couple of errors in the rule book, but nothing we couldn’t figure out – Trophies were referenced as being on Page 7, but should have been Page 10, and there’s a little confusion between the use of British and American English in general rules and card titles, but that will only bother pedants (Me!)

As seasoned players of Talisman, we found it difficult not to try and translate cards and effects in the new version to the original, but I think we did this less as the game went on. It’s probably something to do with not actually having much physical play going on in the last year or so.

As I have mentioned over on Twitter I found that Katie and I got a few things wrong as we played, but as is usual in a game of Talisman, this didn’t detract from the fun we had in any way!

In case you have trouble getting hold of a copy, or any other of the licensed games, then I’ve added a link to Meeples’ Corner who are currently taking preorders. There will be loads of places online where you can snag it I’m sure, but they are probably the nearest thing I have to a FLGS so they can have a shout out!

Perhaps The Op can find their way to utilising some of that empty space on the second punchboard in order to add some to further printings? We can but dream!

So, how much scope is there for the life blood of Talisman that is homebrew creations?

Well, it would be easy enough to add in your favourite wizards should you so wish and I’ve already been playing about with a little twist on Transfiguration which harks back to Duane Haut‘s excellent Transformations expansion that he created some time ago for the Second Edition game. I’ll be posting more about that at some point in the future no doubt.

Don’t forget that thematically, there are certain personalities from the books that won’t have been around at this particular time in the series, but it is all about magic, so knock yourself out!