I use everything, with some randomization to determine what gets used in any given game specifically.

1. Determine Inner Region: Roll a die. On a 1-2 result, do not use the Dragon board overlay. On a 3-4 result, place the Dragon Tower side face-up over the main board as the Inner Region. On a 5-6 result, place the Dragon Realm side face-up over the main board as the Inner Region.

2. Determine Ending: Roll a die to determine if the ending will be Revealed or Hidden. On a 1-3 roll the Ending is Hidden. On a 4-6 roll the ending is Revealed. After rolling, remove the unused Hidden or Revealed Ending cards from the Ending deck and shuffle the deck. Draw one Ending card and place it on the Crown of Command space. Face-down if Hidden, face-up if Revealed.
Note: If the ending is the Dragon King, ignore the rules on the card and instead follow the rules for which Dragon is King using the Dragon expansion ending rules.

3. Determine Omen deck: Lay out the four stacks of Omen cards and roll a die to select which stack will be used. Use 1-4 from left to right, re-rolling 5 and 6. Collect all eight Omen cards belonging to the selected Omen set. Then use them to make a face-up stack, starting with the 7th Omen at the bottom, then the 6th Omen, 5th Omen, etc., with the Prophecy card on the top. The stack is then placed next to the Harbinger sheet.

4. Cataclysm: There are Seven Omen cards, plus the beginning Prophecy. When the Omens advance, roll a D6. Add the number of the new Omen to the roll. On a 6+, the Cataclysm has arrived! Discard all face-up cards on the main board. Replace the main board with the Cataclysm board, placing Characters, the Grim Reaper, the Werewolf, and the Harbinger on the same spaces they were previously in. Place Remnant cards on spaces with a Remnant symbol as the Cataclysm setup rules dictate.

To keep play moving smoothly, I randomly draw the dragon tokens for each player instead of passing the bag around. It just seems to work better if one player "GM's" the game. If you have all experienced Talisman players that are all actively paying attention and people want to draw their own tokens, sure, go for it. That's rarely the case for me though. Same goes for cards, I typically have all the cards in one bank area next to me and draw and hand over cards from the appropriate stacks. Experienced players will grab cards if they want, ones that aren't so comfortable with what's going on don't have to deal with remembering what stack to grab from, I just hand it to them.

Honestly the game plays as smoothly with every expansion as it does just the base game this way. I'm the only one that has to keep track of the complexities, and since I'm the game owner for my group and have the most experience with it (especially after creating and publishing the all in one rulebook ), that's no problem.

New player here. Been playing pretty much every night with my daughter since we bought the game 6 weeks ago. We have completed a couple of games with in 3 hours (although only playing with 1 corner expansion plus a 1-3 small expansions as our table space is limited) but usually we take pictures on my phone of our play areas and the board so that we can set up the same game the following evening. Really obvious I know but sometimes the genius is in the simplicity and the obvious...

On 14.1.2017 at 1:10 PM, Lorinor said:

Beware wall of text.

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@ Cookierobber:

"Never play with more than 4 people. Playing with that many people massively increases the playtime,
to the extent that games are almost never finished."

Depends on what kind of game you want to play. When we play with 6-10 players,
we usually have about 7-8 hours time and manage to finish the game during that time span.

And even if you don't finish it, there's always next time.
So now you'll probably complain how to remember everything.

Easily. I made a little sheet in Excel that I just have to fill out so everyone
knows what goes where when we continue playing.

"Try to avoid the harbinger..."

Even with only 4 players this can very easily increase play time a lot, because you can't go
where you want to go if you try to avoid him at all costs.

"Start of the game is fairly deadly and slow paced..."

Don't know how the people in your group play, but we never start slow and deadly.

We want fast progress here.

Must be pretty interesting to play at your table.

"If you can survive the first hour or so, in my experience you won't usually
die for the rest of the game..."

Never been screwed by the Basilisk, Swamp Siren, Mob etc. I wager.
They is no point in time where you are save in this game.
I know this is hard to accept for some, but it is the harsh truth.

"Everyone needs to be very familiar to the game and rules."

No, they don't. As long as you have a "game master" that is attentive,
nice and forgiving, not everyone needs to know the rules by heart.

"Talisman isn't an easy game to fit into a day..."

If you don't have anything else to do, it's entirely possible.
Like I said before, you decide your play style which in turn
can lead to longer or shorter games.

Apart from the randomness of the draw and/or players screwing you over,
that is.

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@ magicrealm:

1. That's too brutal. If I were to use that rule at my table,
everyone would refuse to play at all.

2. Makes the game longer. Why do this?

3. Makes the game longer waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy longer. Why do this?

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@ Filippo:

"Start the game with a warlock quest":

Depending on your random draw , this can screw people at the start.
I would be very careful with this.

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Neat idea with that Adventure Die.
Might try that one out in the future.

1. That is Game Workshop Talisman ! These fate points are made for americans....

2. The Question here is, how to play Tallisman with all expansions, not how to make a one- move shortened Game. If i want a short Talisman, i would play as it is. But i never do this.

3. I ask myself if players understand sense of gaming at all. It is like in modern PC Games, WoW etc. They all rush through it. Now the quickest rush is NOT TO PLAY IT !

I just played Talisman and we have a few houserules we use to speed up the game.

Generaly for us, a game takes 6 hours for 3 people. To speed up early game (...or keep it relatively balanced). We increment the amount of trophies needed depending on how much Strength/Craft you have.

If you start with 2 Strength you only need 2 in trophy value to go to 3. Then you need 3, to upgrade one more time, etc. This puts the progress for all players pretty equal and allows for less powerful players to catch up to the otherwise snowballing players ahead.

When setting up the game, I use points system to balance the playtime.

Every player above 3 gives 1 point.

I then ask for how long they are willing to play, every hour below 6, adds 1 point.

So today, we were 6 people wanting to play for 2 hours...

That's 6 points...

I allocate points accordingly:

2 points - 1/2 of the trophy requirement of your current Strength/Craft, rounded up.

1 Point - Each player adds 1 Str/Craft to the lowest of their score (Or equally distribute the points)

So in our game today with 6 points... to shorten time, we halved the requirement and each player got +2 in Strength and +2 in Craft at the start of the game.

It works well and everyone had fun. We played for about 2.5 hours (They asked for 2) but they didn't seem to mind as the game got balanced and a fair stat boost for the amount of players playing. The game didn't outstay its welcome