‘Escape Arkham Asylum and become the most notorious Batman super-villain of all time!
Take on the role of Gotham City’s greatest criminals as you fight to reach the center of Arkham Asylum in Batman Talisman. Roll your way to victory as The Joker, Harley Quinn, The Riddler, Bane, Poison Ivy, and more! Your path to becoming ruler of the criminal underworld consists of many twists and turns. Battle Gotham city’s finest heroes as you search for the Arkham Asylum Key Card that will provide access to the Security Control Room where you can shut down the system and free all of the Super-villains. The first super-villain to make it to the center of the board and best Batman himself wins the game and their freedom!’
Gameplay:
The objective of the game is to reach the Security control room at the top of the tower and subdue Batman so that you can turn off the security systems and become the leader of Gotham city’s underworld and win the game.
Each turn consists of two parts, a movement and an encounter. You roll a die and move your character. Characters can move clockwise or anti clockwise. If the movement roll is a 1, then you must move Batman aswell. Once you have moved, you take the encounter action which will either be to encounter the space or to encounter a character. Encountering a character means that you enter combat and follow the appropriate rules. Combat will either allow you to gain objects from another player or money or if you lose, will cause you to subtract health. There are many types of encounters and there is not space to write about them all here.
You make your way round the board, building up your character and moving through the regions until you reach the Security room tower and try to subdue Batman. The first player to do this wins
Components:
1 custom illustrated game board - the game board depicts the villains’ hand drawn maps of Arkham Asylum. It is divided into three Regions: first floor, second floor and tower. The artwork on the board is cool and I love the way it is made to look like there are handwritten messages and scrawls. I also like the way the outer region is dark and gloomy gradually getting lighter as you move up to the tower
1 rulebook - fairly easy to follow, we did find a couple of rules we were unsure of but after a few reads through most of our questions had been answered
12 character cards and 1 Batman card - each player has a character card and a mini. The character card has the starting stats on it and any special powers. Batman is a non playable character and is moved when a player rolls a one on the dice (the Batman signal)
102 encounter cards - there are encounter cards for each of the three levels. On entering certain rooms depicting the card symbol, you pull a card and this effects what happens or who or what you encounter.
24 feat cards - if you have enough cunning as indicated in the rule book or on your character board, you gain feat which are special abilities
28 purchase cards - you can purchase objects from amongst these at different points other than when you encounter something.
4 security key cards - you can collect these, and will need to, by encountering them or by completing a job for Carmine Falcone on the second floor
4 alignment tokens - every character starts with a specific alignment but this may change during the game. These tokens are cardboard chits which lay over the player board to indicate a change. Different alignments will be able to do different things when encountering a room or character.
6 six sided dice - dice where the one is replaced with a Batman symbol - should be standard on all dice lol
12 sculptured character figures and 1 custom sculpted Batman figure - we were sold on the game from the minis. They are the kind of minis that you want to paint and they make game play so much more enjoyable as you imagine you are one of the super villains
6 stat boards - these are boards with dials that are added to the top of your player board. You can keep track of your health, strength and cunning on these. Values cannot exceed the maximum amount on the dials
30 coins - plastic coins - they work just fine!
30 encounter tokens - these are used to keep track of the encounters as they suggest placing them off the board. We didn’t use these and placed the cards on the encounter space. It didn’t negatively affect the game play.
36 fate tokens - cardboard tokens made to look like a two face coin used to reroll die rolls
Overall thoughts: First of all, the minis are amazing in this game and for Batman fans they will love them. These alone sell the game for me. The only downside of the game is that it can be very long; there are rules you can employ with higher player counts to make the game shorter but we were not aware on our first game how long it would take. We could have looked at the side of the box, I suppose, but sometimes that’s not all that reliable. Anyway, this can be a long one. Once you get to grips with it, it is much swifter but due to the size of the board, reading what each space does sometimes takes a while as you have to keep reminding yourself what you can do. On subsequent plays, we had got the gist of certain rules and this certainly made things a lot easier. We found we had to work out a few rules regarding encounters so it’s worthwhile reading the rulebook a few times to get your head round it. Once it’s clear, it’s actually easy to remember. The game is fun and certainly feels like you are in Arkham Asylum. I like the hidden encounters and objects and the combat elements of the game. It can get a little repetitive at the start as you are trying to make your character better but it does then get going. Getting deranged can be a little bit deflating at times because you lose all your objects and can only move one space each turn. I guess that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Overall, enjoyable game and definitely one for Batman fans. The IP means you probably will be more into it if you are familiar with the Batman IP but it’s good fun and the mechanisms employed are accessible for all.
thanks to the Op for sending out this copy for review.
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