Alternate House Rules to Speed Up Your Game of Talisman

Points:
1. 5 or 3 trophies for stat increases.
2. Trade in trophies for stats at any time except combat, even if it’s not your turn (something to do while awaiting your turn.
3. You can turn in 3 items for a craft or strength.
4. You can trade a relic (Highland expansion) for a craft or strength.
5. You can trade Quest Reward cards for craft or strength (Sacred Pool expansion).

Equipment:
1. You can trade items with other players when on the same space.
2. You can trade items with other players, even when not on the same space.*
3. You can trade followers.*
*We never use these rules.

Movement:
1. Use Fate tokens to adjust movement rolls (one token per additional movement).
2. Option to move one space instead of rolling for movement (even a toad can move one space).
3. Don’t roll for movement, all characters have a movement score set at 2, 3 or there starting Strength or Craft.
4. Roll 2 dice for movement, choose which one to use.
5. You may move UP TO your movement roll (i.e. roll a 4, you can move 1, 2, 3 or 4 spaces).

Combat:
1. Assign another player your nemesis. Your nemesis always rolls your monster rolls.
2. Bring in another set of dice as monster dice, and roll your monster and hero dice at the same time.
3. All 6’s are critical hits. If both the hero and monster roll 6’s, it is a push.
4. All 1’s are critical fails, and automatically lose the battle. If both the hero and monster roll 1’s, it is a push.

Obtaining a Talisman:
1. Start everyone with 1, 2 or 3 Warlock Quest cards. When the last one is completed, the player receives a Talisman.
2. If you confront the Eagle King or Lord of Darkness in the Eyrie or Treasure Room, in the Highland or Dungeon expansions, win or lose, you steal a Talisman.

Entering the Middle Region:
1. Earning a Talisman automatically teleports you to the sentinel space.
2. Earning a Talisman automatically teleports you to the Warlock’s Cave.
3. Win or lose, you always pass the sentinel on your next turn.

Characters and Teams:
1. Every player receives 3 or 5 hero cards. This is their team. They choose which hero they put in first, and the rest are reserves. When a hero dies, they are replaced by the next reserve hero of their choice. The hero retains the Strength, Craft and Life bonuses of their predecessor. Equipment and followers are left on the space the original hero died (first player to get there can take them). Spells from the previous hero are discarded. In a 2 or 3 player game, distribute the heroes by alignment.
2. Team play: with 2, 4 or 6 players, divide the characters into good and evil. Players with the same alignments are on teams. They can trade equipment, gold and followers when they are in the same area. You can only fight other players who are on opposing teams. Only one Talisman is needed for the entire team. Either discard the alignment change cards, or allow players to switch teams if their alignment is changed. With 3 or 6 players, make a neutral team.

Ending Conditions:
1. Game ends when the Crown of command is reached. Period.
2. Insert any or all of the alternate endings from expansions.

Alot of nice ideas here =)

I'll try to convince my group to try some of them out our next game.
I really like the "choose to take one step instead of rolling for movement", "6 for crits, 1 for auto-fail" and "team of players that inherit the strength and craft".
We already play with 3 warlock quests and a Talisman on the third.

Talisman Highspeed Game: Each player rolls a die. Highest die roll wins!

Some of your ideas are nice, but Talisman is not a speed game. A lot of players want even more playing time! More adventure, more regions, bigger or second mainboard ...

Good grief... if we player even half of these it wouldn't even be Talisman anymore... just a freebie fest... and Talisman already has plenty of that.

 Though I think some of the ideas are interesting, I'm pretty sure you could ALWAYS trade items (and followers, I think) when on the same space. Only thing you can't trade are spells, trophies, and quest rewards. 

I find that the 5-point trophy suggestion and the teams idea to be the most promising- especially teams that can roll together during the endgame (would SURELY speed it up).

Personally, I think the speed of Talisman is just right- the endgame begins just as everyone begins to grow weary, and this revitalizes the last few minutes of the game. What it could use far more would be more excitement during the game itself- the dungeon added that region to explore when the main board grows too safe, and the highlands added an alternate region in the early-midgame. This has contributed to making the game flow more nicely, even if it doesn't reduce game time per se.

Now we just need the City expansion, and it will all begin to come together...

The Sorcerer King said:

You mean between players? There's no trading in Talisman unless it is of the Merchant/Thief-type (rip-off where only side has any say) or sword to the gut, take all your stuff as you are now a corpse going cold kind of "trade".

The trade or "swap meet" option when encountering a character is a very common house rule; only the one taking the current turn and landing on another character can request a trade.  If the other player / character declines, the turn is over.  But it isn't and has never been in the official rules.

I tried some of Bragis suggestions my last game.

The 1 for fail and 6 for critical during combat gave us some interesting battles. You could never be sure to instant win, but always had some hope of slaying even the mightiest foe. Although I might be a bit much with both 1 and 6 as special numbers, that only leave 4 for "normal" combat. Might remove the effect of the 1 next time. I have used this system in a lot of RPG and other games, and I like that David might have a chance to defeat Goliath. We did a special version for the "end bosses" and removed the 1 effect and changed the 6 to turn int0 2 dices (stacking) instead of instant win, Thus keeping the mechanic to see where you emerges from the Lord of darkness.

The rule to choose one step instead of rolling a dice for movement was highly appreciated in our group. It made it easier to reach your locations. We added that the one-step counts as rolling a "1" thus moving the Reaper each time. So He saw alot of action and slew alot of players. Suggestion for next time is that we keep the one-step and the reaper as is, but it will always be the NEXT player who moves the Reaper. So instead of moving last in the turn of the player rolling a 1, it moves at the beginning of the next player. This will work as a price for the player who choose to make it "easy" and just move one step, but instead of being able to control the Reaper as a bonus, he will risk a visit instead.

Keeping craft and strength for you next characters in your character-pool made it possible for restarted characters to have a chance of winning. Very nice.

Overall it was a fun game, and it only lasted 8 hours on five players (no breaks) so the speedup was a welcome addition =D

We tried open ended D6 for a while, but as you said, 2 “special” numbers was a bit much.

By, open ended, this is what we personally meant…

If a 6 was rolled, you kept the 6 roll, took another dice, and added them, essentially making it D6+6.  If the second dice was a 6, you now keep both 6s, and you get a 3rd dice, making it D6+12, and so on.  That STR 1 / CRA 1 enemy… isn’t an auto-win fight anymore.

If a 1 was rolled, you got –6 to your Attack Score, but rolled another dice, and added it as above, essentially giving you between a –5 to +0 modifier to your Attack Score since it was D6-6.  However, if you rolled another 1, you got a second –6, and took a 3rd dice making it D6-12…

Then we spent a LOOOONG time rolling the dice all night.  That house rule lasted about 3-5 games, and we went back to normal.  The randomness was fun… heroic win against a STR 10 Enemy, surprising loss against a CRA 1 Enemy, but just not worth the extra time of all those extra rolls, at least for us.
 

Another idea we've been trying out lately, instead of 6's being critical, swap out d6's for d10's.  This does away with the special number, but still offers a little hope when blind-sided by a heavy.

BTW: we have usually play with about 2 or 3 of these rules to speed it up; never all of them.  I wrote these up because the amount of time it takes to play vs. the amount of luck involved in the game is the biggest objection I've heard to playing.  I usually play with kids aged 10-14, so I have to wrap it up in about 3 hrs or I'll lose them.

Another idea I had (but never tried) was 2d6 with an extra die for rolling doubles.

We sometimes play that on natural rolls of 6 and 1 in combat, it's an automatic win/loss.  Can lead to unexpected results!  (Although to be fair, we've several times seen a toad kill a bandit even without this rule)

I don't reduce the number required to increase Strength/Craft (still 7), but I changed it to XP instead of trophies. When you kill something you get XP equal to it's Strength or Craft and you can trade 7xp for a stat bump.

It gets rid of combining STR and STR to get STR; and it gets rid of adding up to 9 and losing 2pts.

We've also played it where it cost an amount of XP equal to the current stat to raise it by 1. This resulted in slightly more rounded characters, but wasn't necessarily more fun. It does speed up the early game though.

Calinor said:

Why not just wait until you get to 14 and cash in for +2 instead losing 2 points? Hell, in the Dungeon I often see people get to 17 and wait until they reach 21 before cashing in.

I'm not saying I wouldn't wait, I generally would. It's a choice though, and not a rewarding one.

Using all those house rules you are changing the game of Talisman into something else! Not good….

Ell.