Hi there

I was thinking about adding a "house rule" section to Talisman Island in the near future, as there are some great suggestions around the forums for quick play, long play, fun play etc.

It would all be displayed under the banner of "Talisman X", which was an old idea I had for "experimental" rules for Talisman.

Anyway, I'd love to hear from people and hope to make it available soon, or at least as soon as I have some content to share!

If you are interested, please email me (link on the site), with the house rules, your preferred name for credit etc.

I realise that a lot of house rules will be similar, but the first to let me know a particular rule gets the credit!

I hope it will give us some new ways to play!

I disliked the Dragon expansion, as is, and looked around for some house rules, and while discussing it, came up with I think, and my friend too, the best new way to play it.

Get an extra Highlands board. Attach it to any space you prefer, but from the middle region may be best. In this new Highlands, you will draw a Dragon token for any cards drawn. Place that token on the space and that space will now draw that kind of dragon token.

This is the only place to draw Dragon cards. However there are cards that will send dragons out to other spaces, like the temple and castle and such. This is fine or you can take those cards out.

We did play with Dragon rage, if you pulled a dragon rage token, you would get rage from the last Dragon who had his token pulled. And that's how we kept track of the King.

We also put all 3 Dragons as the end space encounter, and you could win Talisman beating all 3 at once or going to CoC.

In my set, I am gonna remove Dragon rage, and some of the cards that make the Dragons come out. I really like this way to play Dragons and may make a it a permanent way to play in my set, and play the above way at my friends house.

However, once a 4th board is released, we may run out of table space!

I am emailing this to you as well, as you requested.

We house rule that you can't use fate to re roll against the reaper.

Ouch, that's mean! I always like to save one for the Reaper.

I just remembered a big one we use: Rather than rolling the dice, you may always move one space. For all intents and purposes you are considered to have rolled a "1" on the die so all effects must be resolved as though a 1 was rolled.

Sometimes we use the house rule:

During battles that are impossible to score a tie or win you can treat all die rolls of 6 as open-ended. This allows you to roll the die on a 6 adding this result to the 6 as well.

Recently we had a Toad beat a Strength 10 Demon. Sigh. We usually use this house rule with Kids, newbies and Wives and girlfriends. Especially with Wives and Girlfriends actually.

Fate can be used to increase any dice roll by 1 instead of re-rolling. Cannot exceed 6.

Can move 1 square for your move instead of rolling, however, the next player gets to move death and the werewolf, we normally play that they roll 2 dice and choose which dice applies to each character.

The Sentinel can be passed even if losing combat, however you miss your next turn if you choose to do this. (Running for your life essentially)

The boat can be used to ferry back from the temple to the tavern for 1 gold. (Ferry Costs)

Players can trade in trophies at a ratio equal to their current strength or craft (or +1). more than one trade in at once still apply the increase.

If a player rolls a 1 at the crown of command they miss a turn

After a set time limit : All adventure cards on the outer region are discarded and all "Draw Card" squares are disabled. Players can freely move between the temple/tavern and across the sentinel bridge.

I figured I would put the rule I e-mailed to Talisman Island to: But it looks like the firelands expansion may be changing the 10 result somehow. I guess a firelands token is placed on a 10?! I need to see the rules..... hehe

I just thought I would update this topic to say that I have posted a number of house rules to the site, but am not yet happy with the layout of the page. I will ponder the best way as I go, so it will likely be a work in progress.

Keep 'em coming!

http://www.talismanisland.com/talisman_x.htm

Regarding the Dungeon...

When you defeat the Lord of Darkness, draw two treasures and choose the one you wish. Shuffle the other back in the treasure deck.

When you defeat the Lord of Darkness, roll an eight sided die to see where you are teleported to instead of how much you defeat him by.

When you land on the monster pit space, keep drawing dungeon cards until the required number of enemies are drawn. No treasures to be found there!

Played my 1st game tonite with my Dragons variant. My friend does his differently. he places all 3 Dragon Lords at the end and you have to beat all 3 at 1 time (36 Str and Craft ?). He also leaves all cards in the decks and still the Main board gets attacked by dragons, particularly the Temple, village, and castle. You also can draw Dragon Rage.

In my version I only have the 3 colored tokens to pull, there is no dragon rage, and no 3 dragon lords. Cards have been pulled out that deal with Dragon Rage (or most have), and pulled out the cards that attack those places. But I still ended up with dragons in the main board , cards that moved 5 Dragon cards to the top of the Adventure deck. But I felt this wasn't overly powerful and think I am leaving them in. My version is definitely tamer. As the end space of the extra Highlands board also has the Dragon King ending, instead of the Eagle King or the Dragon Lords.

This ending may give another player the win (roll a 3-4) or kill you if you don't have a Talisman (roll a 1-2).

I thought this brought a great balance. The Dragon board was tamer and easier to navigate, but the chance of winning smaller and chancier.

The game tonite was for my youngest son's sleep over, so played with three 13 year olds. And 2 of them were in the Dragon expansion on the run to the King. The one who made it to the King rolled a 4, and the King died by another's hand.

I liked how it played, in this version people were not afraid to explore it, as in my friend's version hardly anyone would go in.

Of coarse completists will dislike it, as cards and tokens are not being played with, but it makes for a more fun and less dangerous game play, without players hating or not wanting to play the expansion at all!

Of coarse I still had alternate endings stacked at the CoC if anyone wanted to try and win that way as well, no one did. I also want to note that cards that require the known King to have an effect, we rolled a d6 to determine that randomly. In my friend's variant, that last token pulled referred to the King.

I've just been viewing the Nether Realm rules and alternate endings online.

I was a bit surprised, and disappointed, that the Nether deck can only be used with the expansion's alternate endings.

This got me a bit concerned that not all expansions could be used at the same time without house rules (as some alternate endings are incompatible with the Dragon expansion)

But the instructions for the Gauntlet eneing looked interesting, and thought I could use those instructions as a house rule.

Putting cards on spaces on the Dragon Inner Region and encountering them before encountering the spaces or Dragon King.

If using the Dragon Tower, drawing a Nether Card as well as the required Dragon cards, and discarding them at the end of the turn.

Yeah I posted on the Nether Realm thread we plan on using the Dragon Tower to draw Nether cards, and put a random alternate ending in the next game my friend hosts.

Based on a suggestion from a friend who played an earlier version, when drawing cards, either another player draws them or the player draws them and passes them to another.

The other player will then arrange them in encounter order if needed, then read out the text on the adventure cards.

Cool idea for the site!

Some of the house rules I like to use include:

-The Reaper and the Werewolf will kill a stranger/enemy/follower of your choice if you move it to a space with no character.

-Each vault space in the Dungeon starts with 3 gold on it.

-At the City Gate space, you can choose to discard any number of wanted posters instead of taking one.

-Instead of "you can cast as many spells on your turn as you started your turn with", I prefer "you cannot cast a spell in the same turn that you gained it". Simpler, slightly more hindering to spell-cyclers, but doesn't change how many spells you can cast a turn.

-Aaron Tubb

-The Reaper and the Werewolf will kill a stranger/enemy/follower of your choice if you move it to a space with no character.

I really like this house rule, going to have to give that a go soon.

Instead of choosing our character at random we like to dice off to see how gets to choose first from the character deck. Then we take it in turns to pick whoever we want, the only condition is that you cannot pick a character you have already won with. (Until everyone have won with that character, then they are up for grabs again.)

We really noticed a huge boost in our enjoyment of the game when we did this, as there are so many characters now everyone gets something fun and you can always choose a new approach to the game if it interests you. Such as, strength based one week, then craft based the next and the merchant after that.

After a player with a Scribe follower and Spellbook gained the "take three successive turns" spell, we decided to house rule the Scribe as follows: "If you have 2 or more spells, you may give the spell to your Scribe after you cast it and discard 1 of your other Spells in its place. The Scribe may cast the spell whenever you wish (treat the spell as though you had cast it), after which it is discarded." Still pretty powerful, but no longer game breaking. I've seen that some people just remove the card, but I hate removing cards.

Dealing with the Dragon Expansion: Everyone knows that the problem with the Dragon Expansion is that it's just annoying to draw dragon scales every turn. One way to deal with this is to simply decrease the number of times you have to draw dragon scales, but increase the number drawn. I saw one person suggested drawing a scale every time you draw an enemy. I would prefer to make drawings even more rare, but increase the number of scales drawn to compensate. Something like this perhaps:

1. Every time a player draws a Cultist, he draws 5 dragon scales, and every time a player draws a Dragon, he draws 10 dragon scales.
2. If a player draws 3 dragon rage tokes, he suffers the dragon rage.

3. If a player draws 3 of those "draw two more" thingys, he draws two more dragon scales.

And the numbers could be tweaked to suit your fancy. I haven't actually tried this, since my friends prefer just to shuffle all the dragon cards into the adventure deck and ignore the dragon scales completely, which is fine (except you have to remove some cards, which I hate).

My main house rule is that expansions are to be used like spices, i.e., not all get used each game. Expansion selection is managed through randomly drawn endings. In the case an ending indicating a corner board expansion is drawn then the small box expansion that immediately preceded it in the publication cycle is also used. Character pool is limited to base game plus expansions used.

I'm also using several fan published endings to generate ending cards for The Dungeon, The Reaper, and the base game. In the event a base game ending (see preceding sentence) is chosen, the players choose one of the small box expansions to also be used. This keeps the adventure deck flavor from being diluted and disallows some of the combinations that garner complaints.

Previously Vandal said: My main house rule is that expansions are to be used like spices..

I had an insane teacher when it came to cooking, so I'm way overboard on all spices!

Needless to say, we use all expansions but the only one that needs 'house rules' is the Dragons.

We have a new idea to limit scales running around the board.

When the new King is crowned, after 3 scales, all dragons' scales are off to the discard; EACH DRAGON HAS TO START FROM ZERO AGAIN. When the new King is crowned, *that* scale goes to the player's space. So this will limit the scales a little bit, which is the main complaint for most Dragons Non-fans.

I agree Oberon. I use everything, but use a variant of Dragon. However, I also don't use a portion of Bloodmoon. Too much Halloween flavor for every game. But I do use some of it, and every time. I do pull out a small number of Dragon cards as well, but not many.

As a Wiccan, I agree with the Halloween flavor! Just gotta work on the shuffling some more, since I mostly don't like when too many from any one set are grouped together. I myself would not like 3 Blood Moon cards in a row (or Firelands, Sacred Pool, etc)

I make stacks of piles when adding new expansions to my game, and shuffle really well. I am not opposed to the Halloween theme. But only like it during the Fall season.

Each player gets to draw three characters randomly and then pick one of these at the start of the game.

Whenever you are turned into a slimy toad, you remain thus for two turns instead of three. This means it is much easier to recover your stuff before someone else loots you. We also decided that the Toad King must hop two steps away after toadifying a player, instead of his normal three.

The cost to increase strength or craft is the same amount of points of trophies as the aspired level, to a minimum of 7 points. So, to gain your ninth strength counter, you must pay nine strength points of trophies. To gain anything below your eighth counter will still cost 7 points. If we want a quicker game we remove the minimum cost, but that has only happened once. Growth tokens on the Ancient Oak do not count as either strength or craft but we might change this if it seems too big of an advantage.

I finally found the time to move the Talisman X feature over to the new site format!

http://www.talismanisland.com/?page_id=5175

I have just placed the house rules in a random order, and will top-post any new items. It should make for an interesting read on a rainy day at least!

If you have any to share, please let me know through the site.

We play with the following:

Upon death, the character is moved to the temple. At the start of his turn he rolls a die adding the number of turns he has stayed at the temple (first roll is at +0). If the roll+bonus is 6 or more the character ressurects at 1 life and may immediately take a turn. if the roll+bonus is lower than 6 he stays at the temple and rolls again next turn. He retains all followers objects and gained strength craft life fate. Until ressurected he is safe at the temple from enemies, characters, events and spells.

This may seem like sacrilege to some players, but first, we're not a very bloodthirsty bunch, and deciding to destroy hours of character building with one fell swoop brings us more discomfort than malicious glee. Second, and more importantly, this drastically speeds up the game because there are no resets only timeouts. The lower penalty means that players can be more willing to take risks, particularly to enter the inner region much earlier.

For similar reasons when becoming a toad you retain objects and followers, but cannot use their abilities.

Finally, when turning in trophies for strength or craft, players may turn in for 1 S/C for every seven combined strength or craft OR any two trophies with combined strength/craft of 5 or more.

This means trophies are usually worth half a point making them a decent draw later in the game and giving a decently fast route to increase stats early on in the game beside stumbling across magical objects and streams

Oh and of course you cant gain life whena character is in the crown, really surprised me to learn that was a house rule, i mean with a healer and runesword maybe a caster it can be hours before you actually kill the charcter - how does that make sense?^^