Do any of you folks remember the movie Krull ?

If you’ve seen it, chances are you’ve not forgotten at least one or two key details from this lowbrow fantasy masterpiece: the flaming horses, the faux-stormtrooper bad guys with laser-firing spears, the Cyclops dude, the hazy, vaguely photographed rubber suit monster that serves as the film’s boss level. And Liam Neeson is in it! And who can forget the Glaive, a sort of shuriken-come-boomerang wielded by the hero of the film, played by some guy no one remembers. Of course, anyone who had a Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook quickly figured out that a glaive is actually a polearm, not a thrown weapon.

I love Krull. But I also know that Krull is crudely framed, cheaply produced, and largely stupid in pretty much every respect: bad acting, rudimentary script, dated special (?) effects, clunky direction, sloppy art direction, bad score, it goes on and on. Yet when I saw it in the theater, I was eight years old and it made a bigger impression on me then many greater, more respected films have even later in life. Sure, I love all those movies by Lynch, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Hitchock, and so on but I love this crappy 1983 trying-to-mimic Star wars camp-a-thon just as much, even if on a different level. Is it nostalgia? Hell no. I watched it just last week and the Glaive hasn’t lost one sparkle of its shine.

Ah, Krull.

So what the hell does this have to do with this week’s “Games from the Crypt” installment? Plenty. This week sees the release of the much-anticipated 4th edition of the Games Workshop classic Talisman-- first released in 1983 just like Krull, and it is very much the Krull of board gaming for me. It isn’t a great game. In fact, it’s pretty dumb overall and any sort of “discerning” gamer looking for the modernity and supposed elegance of efficiency exercises like those that the Eurogame craze of 1996-2006 popularized will be sorely disappointed but this isn’t a game for those fun-murdering analysis-paralysis chokepoints anyway.

Look at the cute box

But you don’t go to see a movie like Krull and expect it to compare to Citizen Kane. It’s long, almost completely luck-driven, and it features a roll-and-move mechanic that most “discerning” gamers dismiss as childish or antiquated. To sum it up- Talisman is box office poison for gamers more interested in assuming an air of sophistication than having fun. I won’t even bother to regale you with a dissection of the game’s mechanics beyond this: you take a fantasy character with a couple of special abilities, you move around a multi-tracked board, fight monsters, get treasures, and try to get one of the titular Talismans that grants you access to the central Crown of Command, where you sit and basically rain death down on your fellow players until you’re the last one standing. Brilliant.

Yet the game has a tremendous following that hasn’t waned in its nearly 25 years of existence despite Games Workshop’s abandonment of its popular board game line. A first edition (which almost no one has ever played it seems) led into a revised and hugely expanded second edition and then a third iteration retooled slightly to match up with Warhammer Fantasy Battle in the early 1990s. Even with a 14 year gap in retail circulation the game kept going, commanding huge prices due to eBay inflation and kept alive by a burgeoning Internet community dedicated to the game.

There’s a baffling number of homebrew expansions, encounter cards, spells, and even extra boards out there if you so desire. Most of these are compatible with the fan-favorite second edition, which is the chassis on which this new 4th edition, published by Games Workshop subsidy Black Industries, is built. Of course, the big downside is that most of us who played Talismanin the 80s and 90s probably played it with several of the expansions so this new edition is very much a back-to-basics affair. I already miss getting to be the Space Marine or wandering around the City.

But that’s beside the point. If this new edition sells well, I’m sure Black Industries will expand on its success. What we have, however, is definitely the best looking edition of Talisman to date; the art looks like top-notch collectible card game art and in addition to the now industry-standard linen finish board you get some custom dice (the 1’s are Talismans), a bunch of sculpted money, some embarrassingly huge toad tokens that will delight veterans of the game, and tons of glossy cards all kept in a black flocked insert. That’s a touch of class. It all comes in this black-and-gold box that, if you’re old enough to relate, looks like something you would have seen at the hobby shop your parents let you peek into after taking you to see Krull back in 1983.

2nd Edition -- more menacing box

The best news though, beyond the fact that this is the best-produced version of Talisman to date (although I do miss the classic artwork of the second edition) is that it’s just good old Talisman- if you played it and didn’t like it before, you’re not going to ever like it. They didn’t add an auction or some other “modernizing” mechanic but there are a couple of suggestions for the weenies who want to shorten the game or make it easier. Some have said that Black Industries missed an opportunity to update the game or to make it somehow better but I believe the right thing was to release the classic game that many have loved faithfully all these years without bowdlerization. Remember what happened with Star Wars?