I managed to play another game of Talisman last weekend, occasionally with four players, but beginning with three and ending with three. Not the same three!

The game used only the base set and the Dragon expansion. We used one of the Dragon Realm Inner Regions, but it ended up being irrelevant to the game’s end.

Unlike the Firelands, the Dragon expansion doesn’t get particularly diluted with more expansions (except potentially having more spaces to put dragon shards on). I drew the Troll as my hero, and went on the standard path for the troll: finding monsters to beat up!

Glen was the one player who played the entire game with me. It was a strange game for him: while he’d encounter dragon shards, he’d almost always gain items or followers, or find it was a monster he couldn’t defeat. He rolled really well for monsters attacking us, but horribly for his own attack rolls. At the end of the game, he had collected exactly one dragon shard – and that in the last few turns.

My troll ran into the Chinese Dragon and lost his runesword to him (sigh), but apart from that concentrated on taking down the Red Dragon King’s minions, which he found quite easy. A few of the Yellow King’s minions also fell to him, and once the Maiden joined him, one or two of the Green King’s as well.

The biggest problem with the Dragon expansion is that it is very much a “win more” expansion. The more tokens you collect by winning battles against Dragon encounters, the easier it is to win those encounters. So, once I started getting ahead as the Troll, I kept getting further ahead.

Two places eventually came out that would allow me to bypass the Inner Region and go straight to the Dragon King. It took me about ten turns to land on one of them – the Troll being somewhat deficient in Fate – and when I did, it was an automatic win against the Red Dragon King – Varthrax. So much Strength, so many red scales.

When you come down to it, the Troll is an excellent character for this expansion, as he’s got a great starting point and being able to know that red scales will give strength-based encounters give him a lot better options than the game normally gives him. The surprise was how poorly Glen did. (Rich joined in later, and didn’t have as much of an opportunity).

I like the Dragon expansion, but due to the Strong gets Stronger play which it really accentuates, I’m unsure as to its balance.