1st February 2022
LEGENDARY DECK DESIGN DEEP-DIVE
Howdy Talisman fans!
Soon we’ll be launching some exciting new Legendary Decks for Talisman: Digital Edition, but before we do we wanted to sit down and talk through the process of creating both the four original Legendary Decks, and the four new ones we’ll be launching soon. You can find out more about these new ones in our original announcement post!
If you’ve never encountered any of our Talisman: Digital Edition Legendary Decks, they’re rebalanced and remixed versions of the adventure decks that come with each Talisman expansion - especially designed to offer more challenge for the seasoned player.
We had a lot to consider when making these new decks, such as:
How can we improve the Talisman: Digital Edition experience for more hardcore players?
How can we best accomplish that by rebalancing each expansion?
What would players expect to see in a Legendary Deck?
And how do we do all of this in a way that keeps the core Talisman experience intact?
We’re going to go through each of these to explain how we crafted these Legendary Decks that you’ll soon be able to play with! We’ll also use some specific examples from cards to show how we changed the way they function, and better demonstrate our design choices.
Improving the game for hardcore players
Back before we made the Legendary Decks, we were brainstorming the different kinds of content we could possibly make for Talisman: Digital Edition. In order to narrow down what we could create, we decided to look at the different kinds of players who enjoy Talisman and what they get out of the game as they play it. It’s much easier to design something once you know who you’re designing it for!
One of the demographics we encountered was a group of players who specifically enjoy the challenge that comes from playing Talisman - the more difficult their adventure, the more they felt they’d accomplished by overcoming those obstacles that appeared during the game. We wanted to offer something that would give that group of players more flexibility to customise the challenge they faced as they play. We already knew that more experienced players tend to find the later parts of a Talisman game can become tedious once you’ve outclasses all the enemies and nothing can pose a threat to you.
The most obvious way to increase the challenge was to up the strength and craft of a number of enemies, in order to keep that danger around for longer! This helps mitigate the issue of longer games becoming boring, and also makes the earlier rounds much more deadly - a thrill we knew hardcore players would appreciate. Below are two examples of how we did this:
As another example, for a number of cards we removed the fact that they were discarded at the end of turn. This might seem like a small change but it drastically changes how players make decisions as they play. For example, these three fine fellows no longer go off to the discard pile after you encounter them for the first time:
Having the threat of landing on these cards adds a different feel to the game, and generally makes surviving in Talisman a harder job than it already was!
Rebalancing each expansion
When we came to creating the Legendary Decks for each expansion, it wasn’t simply a case of ‘make the numbers bigger and then it’ll be harder’. We wanted to update each expansion while still maintaining some form of balance to the game.
On the surface, due to the random nature of Talisman, it can be argued that it’s already an unbalanced game to begin with. However, once you dig deeper into the way each deck is balanced and the different possibilities for cards you can draw, there is an underlying balance to how the game is built. Even if someone gets lucky, the other players also should have an equal chance of being just as lucky (if not luckier!)
Recognising this balance is something that more seasoned players would be able to notice - as that was our primary target audience for this content, we knew we needed to make sure we didn’t cause any balance issues. As they would most definitely get noticed!
So while we wanted to make each expansion more challenging and increase the risk each player would face when drawing a card, we didn’t want to remove that feeling of each player having equal chances to be as lucky (or unlucky) as each other. We also had a chance to make the game scale a bit better compared to the original expansions - with stronger creatures, you don’t have to hunt down multiple creatures to trade in for upgrading your abilities.
Another one of the ways we rebalanced cards for the Legendary Decks is by changing the way they work in the game. Making sure that everyone is on a level playing field is important to ensure that the enhanced challenge stays roughly the same for everyone. If we take the Arnkell card as an example:
Spot the difference? The original specifically says moving normally while the new Legendary version says rolling the die for movement. While on the surface this might not seem like a big change, it’s actually quite the nerf! ‘Moving normally’ covers standard movement and covers movement behaviour within the inner region (where you move 1 space at a time instead of rolling the dice to move). This adjustment makes it unusable in the inner region because you don't roll the die to move there - and stops players skipping to the crown!
So while it’s still very useful during the game, players can’t skip straight to the end of the game while avoiding any challenge.
Managing player expectations
When we say “We’re making Talisman harder for you”, what do you expect that to actually mean? This is something that we asked ourselves before, during and after the design process. Firstly, we looked at the different expansions that people already consider ‘challenging’ such as The Dragon or The Firelands to see what people actually enjoyed or found challenging about them.
After talking to players and researching feedback, our main takeaway was that certain expansions don’t necessarily increase the ‘challenge’ overall, but instead make different stages of the game more difficult. For example, players often find that The Dragon expansion makes surviving in the early game more of a challenge than normal. Expansions like The Fireland increase difficulty from start to finish, and The Cataclysm increases the challenge by forcing you to be more aware of where you’re planning on moving in the future.
We also found a common consensus with our own experience of playing lots of Talisman - that even if an expansion is difficult, the more expansions you add the less of an effect is has on the game. By adding more cards into the pool of possibilities, you reduce the chances that players will encounter them. (So playing with just the base game and The Firelands expansion will be much more challenging that playing with The Firelands and 8 other expansions, for example!)
So in order to make sure we matched player expectations, we made sure that each Legendary Deck features a range of difficult enemies at all stages of the game. If we’d simply loaded up each deck with super challenging monsters, it’d make the early game too difficult. We also put a unique ‘foil’ finish on each Legendary Deck card, to help better visualise to players when they were battling a tougher enemy. We found that a small visual que like this helps players feel more accomplished for surviving an encounter, and also know where to avoid on the map at a glace.
Keeping the core Talisman experience there
We’ve already touched on this a bit, but keeping the core Talisman experience intact was something that we didn’t want to lose sight of while creating these new decks. As seasoned board gamers ourselves, we’ve played enough games to know that each one has an ‘experience’ it’s trying to create. From something as simple as Snakes and Ladders giving you the experience of scrabbling to the top of the board to more complex experiences like Hostage Negotiator, which recreates the feeling of a very tense stand-off with a kidnapper, even though you're just rolling dice and playing cards.
In The City expansion, we know that a lot of players use the Assassin to kill other players, as they can pay up to 3 gold and take a life from someone. Being able to take 3 lives from someone is mighty strong, so you can quite often just straight up kill people with it.
In the Legendary version of the City, we adjusted it so that the ability was more expensive and reduced the maximum life you could take. Have a look!
We didn’t want to remove the Assassin entirely, as we know a lot of players do enjoy using them as a way to eliminate other players - we just wanted to adjust how players were able to use them. We also made it so that the card is no longer discarded, so players can plan their next moves with more knowledge of where the Assassin will be. As we knew these decks would be played by more experienced Talisman players, we didn’t have to worry as much about filling up the board with cards that need to be kept track of.
Final Thoughts
This is the first time we’ve done this kind of design dive into something we’ve made, so we’re keen to hear your thoughts on it! Would you like more of this kind of thing? We won’t know unless you tell us, so pester us on Facebook and Twitter all you like.
We’re super excited to see what the Talisman community thinks of these new Legendary Decks when they launch - don’t forget to give us your feedback over on the Steam forums or our Discord!