Hi everyone,
I've seen a couple of threads like this one on other sites, but I was wondering if I could share some of my ideas on how to manage having multiple expansions and encourage the characters to explore all they each have to offer, and hear what you guys have come up with.
So I am playing with 6 (or rather, 5 and a half) expansions: the highlands, the city, the woodlands, the reaper, the harbinger, and the nether realms (which we have loved way more than we thought possible by the way).
How we have houseruled it is as follows:
The city and highlands are not set up at the start of the game. The woodlands are.
There are two ways for the highlands to become available: 1) an effect requires a character to be placed on a space in the highlands. 2) someone rolls a 5 or a 6 on the crags. Once the highlands is available, it is permanently in the game.
The city expansion becomes available when a player lands on or attempts to move through the city space carrying either 5 gold or 7 points worth of trophies. He can continue his movement into a newly opened city expansion. Once the city expansion is made available, it is permanently in the game.
Both the highlands and woodlands are subject to restricted movement, meaning that if a character chooses to move counterclockwise in either region, that character cannot reverse and continue to progress clockwise until he or she has first left that region (rules as explained in the woodlands and dungeon expansions for restricted movement).
[the above rules were done to slightly discourage everyone from spending the entire early game in the highlands, as would typically occur, and to discourage people from stepping into the city just to avoid the harbinger; basically we decided to make the city more of a later game region, and to discourage people from taking advantage of the waterfall and all the canyons and ravines at the end of the highlands to by just hovering there.]
The harbinger expansion house rules: when a character lands on the harbinger, the harbinger can only be moved to a space containing another character not in the inner region (instead of any just any space not in the inner region); if there are no other characters not in the inner region, the harbinger just stays put. Also, if we are feeling particularly masochistic, if the harbinger is on the board, and there are no characters in his region, if a character rolls a 1 on his movement, the harbinger moves to that character's space after he has finished his movement and drawn cards.
[this was to encourage more use of the harbinger expansion. Basically we decided we should either play with the harbinger expansion and really get tangled up in it, or just elect to leave it out of the game if we are playing with beginners.]
Finally, since I have not yet bought the sacred pools expansion with the warlock quest rewards, we have one more houserule: If there are no more talismans available as a warlock quest reward, when you hand in the warlock quest you roll a die on the following chart:
1) Become a toad for 3 turns
2) Draw a potion card
3) Gain 2 fate
4) Gain 2 lives
5) Gain a craft
6) Gain a strength
[This might seem a little overpowered, but we wanted to help move things along a little faster in the late game, and because we are only playing 12 quest reward cards and you can only roll on this chart when there are no talismans to be drawn, we have found it hasn't generally changed the outcome of a game, just sped it up a little]
Would love to hear people's thoughts. Also, I've already spent so much money on this stupid game (I love it too **** much though). I don't feel like I'm missing much by not having the other expansions, but am open to suggestions otherwise.
Thanks!