TALISMAN is undoubtedly one of the seminal titles in the board gaming hobby, and its enduring popularity through four editions over more than 25 years has cemented its position as a favorite fantasy adventure game for many gamers, including myself. With such a great success under his belt, you might be wondering what designer Robert Harris had in mind for an encore. Well, the answer for the past couple of decades has been a couple of expansions but no new design. Sure, he’s authored young adult fiction with Jane Yolen, written for the BBC, and worked as a published writer for all this time but he has been something of a one-hit-wonder. But what a hit it was.

A couple of weeks ago I started hearing rumblings at FortressAT.com and through some of my uber-game collector friends that Bob Harris had a new game coming out- not only was it an all-new design, but it was also sort of a “sequel” to TALISMAN that was intended to be released by Games Workshop sometime in the 1980s but for whatever reason it never made it to press. Just like when I hear that a favorite director or author had a new film or book coming out, I got pretty excited.

At least until I saw the box art for MYTHGARDIA, which is hopelessly dated, homey, and simple and not at all the baroque, epic fantasy artwork I was expecting from a game purported to be the spiritual heir and successor to one of the best fantasy adventure games of all time. I’m not known for being very tolerant of amateur art—in this case simple line drawings—and almost completely because of its visual presentation I immediately balked at the fact that the game was over $80 including shipping from the UK. It turns out that MYTHGARDIA was being printed as a completely do-it-yourself project by Mr. Harris and his wife and in an extremely limited edition of 100 copies. You even get a LaserJet-printed, hand-signed certificate of authenticity with it to prove you have one of the first edition copies.

Fortunately, one of those “gotta catch ‘em all” collector-friends of mine ordered copy #35 from Mr. Harris so I’ve had a rare opportunity to play MYTHGARDIA without risking darn close to a hundred bucks on a blind purchase of game that very few people in the world have ever seen or heard about.. Sometimes, having friends obsessed with buying every board game ever published really pays off. But sometimes, it’s one of the most frustrating things in the world when you play a really great game that’s also extremely expensive or hard-to-get. I’m both happy and sad to report that MYTHGARDIA falls squarely into this category, and I’m sure that my friend will add it to the already burgeoning pile of games that he likes to parade around in front of me just to make me jealous. I sometimes wonder how much of his game budget is spent solely to inspire covetous thoughts in the minds of fellow gamers.

It turns out that MYTHGARDIA could have been a classic fantasy adventure game. If it had been released in the mid-1980s, it likely would be regarded with at least some degree of the reverence and fondness that many gamers have for TALISMAN. It is a smart, simple, and fun system that manages to squeeze more detail and planning out of its rules than its predecessor while maintaining some of the wild, random drama and excitement that has alternately irked and delighted generations of gamers. The game would not have really fit into Games Workshop’s darker concept of fantasy, however, as the game is much lighter and whimsical in spirit- I can’t help but wonder if it sat on their shelves unpublished because they just couldn’t figure out how to put a Chaos Warrior in it.

There is a dopey, clichéd, and almost endearingly silly backstory to the game involving a sorcerer named J’cabe and each of the player characters has a little fluff story to flesh out a general sense of time and place. But more significantly, the world of MYTHGARDIA is a kind of amalgamation of Persian, African, Northern European, British, and Classical folklore- all divided up by realms for your convenience. Throughout the game, players travel among and between these mythic lands to discover clues as to the whereabouts of three magic jewels that will spell the end of J’cabe’s evil ambitions to rule Mythgardia. It’s stock fantasy material, no doubt, but it has that sense of naive, 1980s charm that’s missing from the fantasy milieu from the past couple of years.

One of the really neat things about MYTHGARDIA is that it is one of the only games I know of that drops the player into the game effectively in situ- unlike a lot of fantasy adventure games where you start out armed with a towel and fighting rats until you level up enough to hold a sword and fight bigger vermin, the player characters all come into play with a handful of items and a couple of potential friends that provide short-term goals from the onset of play. An ally or companion card gives a location that the player must travel to in order to play the card. The map is a simple point-to-point affair using a roll-and-move mechanic to get from place to place.

Combat and encounter resolution is similar to the TALISMAN model of moving to a space and drawing a card. However, rather than the absolute result from a strength or craft check, MYTHGARDIA provides a lot more detail and potential for encounters. A theoretical “legend” card might detail a certain adventure with a couple of items or allies specifically named on the card as keywords. There are also different types of encounters that may call for particular skills. For every card the player has that matches the legend, they get a +1 on a single D6 roll and can also add some luck points from a starting pool of 20. So if you’re digging in a silver mine, you’d get a +3 bonus for having a shovel, a torch, and for having a dwarf in your retinue. Each encounter type references a different results table with specific outcomes, and the higher the die roll the better the outcome.

It’s a very, very minimal system that bears some resemblance to TALES OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS in that players are awarded bonuses for having the right item, skill, or companion at the right time. Unlike TALES OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS, however, there is no paragraph system so the result is somewhat more streamlined if less specifically narrative. In 1985, this could have been a groundbreaking mechanic. In 2009, it’s still brilliant and it makes me wish that more games had both this level of detail and mechanical simplicity.