5th June 2024

TALISMAN: DIGITAL 5th EDITION - RULES UPDATES DEVELOPER BLOG

Hi Talisman fans!

After our last developer blog, we’re back to talk even more about Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, which you can wishlist now over on Steam!

This time, we’re going to be going through how we’ve handled all the rules changes and updates from the 4th Edition of Talisman to the 5th Edition. To give you a peek behind the curtain, we actually had access to the Talisman: 5th Edition rulebook long before it was officially announced, so we’ve had a good amount of time to figure out how we’d handle all these changes and new rules.

Not only did we have early access to the rulebook for 5th Edition, but we’ve also been working closely with the designers at Avalon Hill to ensure our implementation of the 5th Edition rules is an exact, 1:1 recreation of what you can expect in the physical game. We’ve had regular contact with them to go over edge-cases, odd-interactions and much more - they’ve been incredibly (incredibly!) patient as we’ve pushed their each and every 5th Edition rules interaction to the absolute limit. But it’s thanks to that great relationship we’ve got with them that we’re confident that Talisman: Digital 5th Edition will be a fully faithful adaptation of the board game.

In this developer blog, we’re going to go through some specific examples of rules and gameplay changes between the 4th and 5th Editions of Talisman, how we’ve handled those changes and what that process was like - so let’s get to it!

The Talisman symbol on the dice

While this isn’t a rules change, it’s still something we needed to keep in mind, and is a good example of a change that would be easy to overlook if you weren’t paying attention! If you’re lucky enough to already own a copy of Talisman 5th Edition, you’ll have noticed that the dice look a little different than they did in 4th Edition.

For those of you who aren’t in the know, the 5th Edition dice feature a Talisman symbol to represent ‘6’. After more than 10 years of seeing a single dot represent the ‘1’ on a dice, it took some getting used to for our team to recognise this new 6 roll at a glance!

Character Updates

Did you know that in Talisman: Digital Edition, when you add up all the expansion characters and the extra characters from their respective character packs, you end up with more than 100 characters to choose from? It’s true! Originally, we programmed each character in Talisman: Digital Edition individually, but some years ago we changed how characters were defined by the game - we made each of them modular, which allowed us to easily swap in-and-out different abilities. This means that instead of programming each character from scratch, we can start with a modular template and add abilities to that - which proved massively useful when making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition!

You see, alongside getting a fresh new look, many of the iconic starting characters have had their abilities adjusted or stats changed to rebalance them for 5th Edition. So, we compiled a big list of all those changes, and went through each one to make sure they aligned properly with their 5th Edition versions.

Thanks to the modular nature of characters in our Talisman engine, swapping out abilities and adjusting Craft/Strength values was made much easier than it would have been otherwise, and testing them took much less time too.

Death and the Returning

In 4th Edition, when you were killed, your character returned to their Starting Location, and rejoined the game in the same state as if they’d just started. One of the reasons we made The Realm of Souls expansion is specifically because the harshness of death in Talisman was such a big point of contention in the game.

Now, when your character is killed, they are placed on the Village space and keep all of their items. You then have to spend your next turn buying as many lives as you can for 1 gold each (up to your characters starting life value).

This is quite the big change, but making it so that all characters follow the same rules when it comes to death actually helps to streamline the dying process quite a bit! And if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that dying needs streamlining.

Updating how fate lets you move

In the 4th Edition of Talisman, you could spend fate to reroll whenever you got a die result you didn’t like, as long as you had fate to spend. This remains true in 5th Edition, but now the rules for how you move around the board after spending fate have been changed. Specifically, In 5th Edition, after rolling your movement die, you may pay 1 fate token to ignore the roll result and instead move your figure up to six spaces in either direction to a space unoccupied by another character.

Thankfully, being able to choose how many spaces you move is something that you could do in 4th Edition with the help of certain abilities or cards. One of the biggest benefits of using the Talisman engine that we’ve worked with over the past 10 years (check out our last developer blog for more information on that!), is that for a lot of common effects, we’ve already got a working framework that we can reapply to different situations.

So instead of having to entirely make this new movement system from scratch, we were able to apply the ‘choose how many spaces you move’ ability so characters can use it when they spend fate to reroll for movement. As a side note, we’ve found this rule change has been one of the biggest for the impact it has on the speed of a game - there’s a lot less jumping over the same item you’re trying to grab over and over again!

Fighting for Fate

Another additional rule that didn’t exist in earlier editions of Talisman, but is now in 5th Edition: ‘When two characters fight, the loser now gains 1 fate afterwards.’

Similarly to the new movement fate rules, this is a blanket rule that applies to all characters at all times, and is using rules/interactions we already had in the Talisman engine, albeit in a different context!

Applying this blanket rule into something like the current version of Talisman: Digital Edition with all the edge-cases, card effects and character interactions that can happen with 15+ expansions would cause all sorts of issues with it not working 100% of the time. However, making sure that this rule is applied all the time from the ground up in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is much easier, as we can make sure that absolutely everything we design and implement related to combat takes this extra fate for the loser into account - much less messy!

Making the Warlock Less Social

One of the most common rules issues that players would come to us specifically about in the digital edition of Talisman was that to cross the Portal of Power, you cannot have an active Warlock quest. In 90% of games, this ruling wouldn’t appear at all - but when you’ve made your way to the centre of the board only to find you’re blocked because the Warlock isn’t happy with you leaving your quests unfinished, it could be a real kick in the teeth.

In this new Edition of Talisman, the Warlock has been changed to make him a lot less strict when it comes to his quests! Specifically in 5th Edition, if you have a Warlock's Quest and you gain a Talisman by any other means, your quest ends and you are not teleported to the Warlock's Cave.

If you’ve played Talisman: Digital Edition, you’ll know very well that the Warlock just loves bringing you back to his cave every single time you complete a quest for him! In 5th Edition however, the way the Warlock works has been updated to make him only bring you back if he’s got a Talisman to give you!

Incremental Trophy Trading

In Talisman: Digital Edition, one of the more popular house rules we found players using is ‘Trophy Trading - Incremental Value’.

For those who aren’t aware, in 4th Edition, to gain a Strength or a Craft, you needed to trade in at least 7 points worth of either stat.

Now, in 5th Edition, the amount of trophy values traded in to increase your Strength needs to be equal to or greater than your current Strength. So, if your strength is 4, you need to trade in 4+ in trophies to increase 1 strength, and this is the same for Craft.

Thanks to us already having a house rule that functioned similarly in Talisman: Digital Edition, making the default rule for trophy trading was a relatively smooth process - in order to ensure that it works as intended though, our QA team have had to push their characters Craft/Strength to some absurd numbers to make sure the game can handle it. Just because we know that there are players out there who won’t be satisfied unless they can get up to 500 Strength.

Talismans to Trinkets

Apparently, the transition from 4th Edition to 5th Edition shrunk down the size of the average Talisman! In 5th Edition, Talisman cards do not count towards your carry limit (like trinkets) and you can only carry 1. They also cannot be dropped on the board intentionally.

This is another blanket rules change that was fairly simple for us to implement thanks to us stripping the Talisman engine back to its absolute basics. While it’s not as easy as just making all Talisman cards into Cursed Trinkets, we can apply similar logic to those effects onto them, ensuring that they function as they should within the rules framework we’ve set out.

Temporary Toading

One of the most iconic parts of the Talisman experience, turning into a toad has also been updated and rebalanced in Talisman: 5th Edition. Now, your toad transformation lasts just for one turn, not 3. They also cannot use fate, which is a new restriction on their abilities.

Again, this change to a fundamental aspect of the game is something that would have caused us a whole heap of issues if we hadn’t stripped the Talisman engine back. Toading is something that a lot of elements of Talisman: Digital Edition cared about, from just the base game to its expansions.

Alignment Selection

Out of all the rules changes that we had to account for, between 4th and 5th Edition, this might be one of the biggest - Players can select their alignment at the start of the game.

Now, changing alignment is something that we’ve had built into Talisman: Digital Edition in many forms, even allowing you to change the alignment of other characters with certain effects! However, selecting your alignment at the start for each and every game means that players now have a choice to make at the start of each game, adding an extra step to the setup of the game.

To make this easier, we’ve added the alignment selection to the same screen as character selection, so you don’t need to wait while everyone goes through the alignment selection process.

Taking the decision out of the players hands meant that in our digital adaptation of 4th Edition, we could just wait until fate becomes relevant to introduce it as a mechanic that the player needs to keep in mind. But now that there is an important decision to be made at the start of the game, we’ve had to look again at how we describe the reasons for choosing each alignment, so players feel like they make an informed choice.

Board Changes

The rules and characters weren’t the only thing to change between 4th and 5th Edition - so did the game board! For some spaces, the changes were minor (like the Crags no longer losing you a turn), and for others there were major changes, like how the Crown of Command works!

For anyone who doesn’t know, in previous versions of Talisman, you’d have to cast the Command Spell until all the other players were defeated - while this definitely added tension to the end of the game, it could also lead to games going on for far longer than they needed to. With the new ending in 5th Edition, you’ll end the game by slaying the dragon at the centre of the board. Thanks to our experience in Talisman: Digital Edition (and all the various endings we ended up adding over the years), we’ve got a pretty good handle on updating and changing endings.

Some of the spaces hadn’t changed in function, but had changed in design however - for example, ‘draw card’ spaces now show a +1/+2 symbol for drawing cards, which we needed to account for when figuring out how we’ll show that information to the player.

After making a comprehensive list of changes, we got to work on updating all of the spaces that functioned differently in 5th Edition. Because we were working off the work we’d done previously on spaces in Talisman: Digital Edition (both in the base game and in expansions), we were very used to adjusting how spaces work on the board, making the changes much easier than they would have been otherwise!

Adventure and Spell Cards

One of the most exciting parts of any Talisman game is when you land on a space and draw an adventure card, with no clue what might be waiting for you. 5th Edition carries on that tradition, with many cards continuing their inclusion from all the way back in 1st Edition, and some new additions too.

Just like with the board, some of these changes are minor - but some changes (like the Guide letting you sneak past the Sentinel) we’ve already found make a big difference in the playtesting we’ve been doing!

Just like with the Talisman board, we made a comprehensive list of all the changes we needed to be aware of between 4th and 5th Edition, and got to work on implementing all the changes we needed to make. In the current developer build of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, all the cards in the game now properly follow their 5th Edition instructions, we’re now testing to make sure that’s always the case!

Ensuring all Changes Play Nicely

If you’ve reached this part of this developer blog, you’ll appreciate that these changes all together add up quite quickly! Because of that, we’ve made sure to thoroughly test all these changes alongside each other, so that new rules changes and updates to one aspect of the game don’t interfere with new changes elsewhere - we don’t want the new toading rules acting weird because we’ve changed how alignment selection works!

We’re also updating the AI in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition to make sure they’re aware of (and make the correct decisions for!) these new rules and changes. Right now they’re a bit too happy to spend their fate to move to specific locations on the board, but thanks to us stripping back to its most basic state, we can build back upon it to make it behave much better than it ever did before. But talking about the Talisman AI in detail is going to wait for a future developer blog!

And that’s the end of our latest Talisman: Digital 5th Edition developer blog! We hope you’ve enjoyed this look at how we’re updating the rules and gameplay, and can’t wait to show you more of the game as development progresses.

To keep up with everything Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, make sure you follow us on all the places we are online!

And don’t forget to wishlist Talisman: Digital 5th Edition to get notified when it launches!

And you’d like to find out more about Talisman: 5th Edition, you can do so by going here!