17th February 2025
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - JANUARY 2025
Hello everyone, and welcome to the first 2025 issue of our monthly Nomad Games Studio Round-Up! We launched into 2025 strongly with a lot of exciting things on the horizon, and we’re glad that we can once again take the time to look back on everything that’s happened to us over the past month.
It feels like we keep saying it every month, but not only does our monthly round-up give you a good way of catching up with all the things our small games studio have done, it also gives us a chance to look back on everything that we’ve done too.
January really set the tone for how we want to carry ourselves into the rest of the year - with lots of hard work going on to make Talisman: Digital 5th Edition the definitive digital Talisman experience for everyone. New exciting content is on the horizon in the form of The Reaper Classic and Talisman Alliances: Fate Beckons, and we’ve spent a good amount of time interacting with you all, our awesome community too.
Keeping up a good pace with cool Talisman: Digital 5th Edition stuff and chatting to you all is exactly how we want to spend 2025, so we’re off to a great start.
Now, enough about the rest of 2025… let’s get through the round-up for month 1 first!
In January, we spent most of our time working on the upcoming Reaper Classic expansion for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition! We’re planning to launch it in early February, so by the time this round-up goes out, chances are the release date will be revealed (spoilers, it’s out now!), so make sure you go check out Talisman: Digital 5th Edition to play with this iconic expansion in a whole new way.
The Reaper Classic represents a lot of exciting things for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, including:
The first expansion we’re releasing for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition.
The first expansion we’ve remastered from Talisman: Digital Classic Edition.
The first time we’ll be syncing across content from one game to another via the Nomad Account system.
A new version of the very first expansion we ever released as a studio.
Because of all these firsts, we’ve been able to properly put to the test all of the systems we originally put into place when developing Talisman: Digital 5th Edition to make sure that adding new content would be a much smoother process than it ever was in Talisman: Digital Classic Edition.
And while we still hit a few interesting roadbumps along the way (of course!), we’re pleased to report that the remastering process went relatively smoothly! Not only that, but we’ve already started work on remastering the next Classic expansion that we’ll be bringing to you all. So, keep an eye out for that getting announced soon!
Alongside working on The Reaper Classic, our team here at Nomad Games have been tirelessly working on more updates for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition base game at the same time.
From revamping how the ending selection screen works to behind the scenes work to make sure everything is ready for our next remastered Classic expansion (our art team have been making sure that features we design now are future-proofed for when expansions add more information to the board, for example).
Not only that, but back at the end of December we expanded our group of closed beta testers to include a whole bunch more players. This meant that when we came back to the office at the start of January, we had a big list of improvements and fixes for the team to dive head-first into! So, in January we spent most of our development time working through that list, which resulted in one of the beta updates having the longest list of patch notes we think we’ve ever published.
Well, maybe not as long as the Immortal Update for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition (you can find those patch notes here if you’re curious), but pretty close!
To kick off the new year, we rolled out a special Talisman sale over on Steam, with discounts on both Talisman: Digital 5th Edition and the DLC for Talisman: Digital Classic Edition.
Alongside the deepest discount on Talisman: Digital 5th Edition so far, there were also a bunch of historic lows for some fan-favourite classic expansions and more. If you picked up anything in these sales, thanks!
In January, Tom once again took to our official Twitch channel to stream some Talisman: Digital 5th Edition for you all. In the stream, he discussed the differences between 4th Edition and 5th Edition, how development of The Reaper Classic is progressing and much more. Well worth a watch!
Not only that, but we also hosted a special stream where we played with some awesome community members! Tom teamed up with Glen One N and LordZodz, two great Talisman content creators to play a special, themed game of 5th Edition using a very unique custom deck. Check it out!
If you’ve followed our studio for a few years now, you’ll know that one of the big things we like to do at the end of each year is a full Studio Retrospective, where we go over all the major events, releases and more that happened to us over the previous year.
Not only that, but we specifically went over our Lessons Learned, covering how we’re going to make improvements in how we do things in 2025.
Rather than explain the whole thing, it’s easier for you to go read it - so check it out on our website here.
We got another good batch of questions over the Christmas break, so lets dive into answering them!
From Elizabeth Hurley via our website
“When the adventure deck runs out, do you shuffle the discard pile and create a 'new' draw deck?”
Yes.
This might be the easiest and quickest answer we’ve given in all the time we’ve been answering community questions, so congratulations on setting a new record!
From Robert Aronsson via our website
“One thing that I often find hard to do in digital Talisman is clicking my way to a spell card to counter an effect before time limit runs out. I don't want the limit to be too long as it makes every round longer, but rather hoping for a quick way of clicking the right spell card without having to first click to change to useable cards, reading my cards to see if it is useable and then use it. How about a function that, if the game detects that I have a card that may alter an effect, the spell card (or other cards that can be helpful) pops up, ready to just be clicked on?”
This is a very fair point! We do currently show a notification dot on the usable cards tab as soon as a card becomes usable - then if you click that tab it glows cards that you can use. This question did lead to a fair amount of discussion from our dev team, including whether or not we should auto-switch to the tab instead of relying on people clicking on it.
We also discussed adding more choices to the right hand menu, but we’d need to make sure they fit.
Basically, there are a number of different ways we can approach making this spell selection system smoother, which we’re going to be investigating. We want to make sure whatever system we decide on works not only currently, but also in the future as we add more expansions and content.
But thank you for prompting us to start this discussion!
David Earle via our website
“Curious what will happen in the digital realm of 5e if Avalon Hill/Hasbro releases a remastered/revamp of a 4e expansion (reaper, bloodmoon, etc.) If Hasbro/AH were to release the Reaper expansion for 5e, what would Nomad do about the digital 4e Reaper expansion remastered for digital 5e? Would you end up creating 2 reaper variants to choose from in the expansion menu? (4e [ ] 5e [ ] )
Would you just change the 4e remaster to the 5e to keep things faithful to their respective editions? Also, unsure if this has been asked, but, will we be able to have 1 nomad account to go cross-platform from PC/iOS/android/console for 5e or will you still need multiple Nomad accounts? Thanks!!?”
This is a very tricky question, and that’s largely due to the fact that we don’t really know what’ll happen in the future yet!
What we do know is that because of our close relationship with the awesome folks over at Games Workshop and Avalon Hill, we’ll know what they’ve got planned for the physical game far ahead of it being announced publicly. So we’ll have time to figure out what works best for everyone, Talisman fans included!
For your second question, you’ll only need the one and only Nomad Account across Classic and 5th Edition, no matter what platform you’re on.
And that’s the end of this months update! Don’t forget, if you’ve got questions you want to ask the Nomad team, you can always send your questions to questions@nomadgames.co.uk, or fill in the form below! We answer each and every question that comes in, so don’t worry if you want to ask us something weird. In fact, we’d encourage it!
Remember, to keep up with everything Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, make sure you follow us on all the places we are online!