Hawkmoon

One of the great things I love about Zombies!!! are all the expansions. But you can run into some serious grief if you don’t do a bit of card maintenance at the end of every game and keep the cards for the various expansions separate. It seems like common sense but it’s something that a lot of us forget to do.

If you are running a tutorial game or are playing with newer players it can cause a lot of confusion if you have the cards all mixed together but aren’t playing with the tiles for that expansion.

A lot has been said about how the river expansions mess with the farming mechanic, giving lucky players access to mega farms and trapping unlucky players in little patches of empty land.

We came up with a simple house rule stating that you can not put out farmers until the river is finished. It goes a long way toward balancing out the mega farms issue.

It has been mentioned once before but from my experience it really is a great way to play the game if you draw the tiles out of a sack, preferably a cloth one.
There are various problems that you can avoid by drawing the tiles form a bag. The stack falling over, tiles being visible etc.

And Especially with younger players it adds a little more tension to the action of drawing tiles.

If you are the creative sort try making the sack yourself! 😉

One complaint I hear a lot about Talisman is that it can really drag on sometimes. To help with this I always advise them to check the alternate rules in the back of the rule book.

Going from needing to collect 7 points of Strength or Craft to 5 in order to raise your stats goes a long way toward increasing the speed of the game.

The other rules in the back are sort of a hodge-podge of ideas on how to shorten the game and less a concrete system to utilize but even with that said I would suggest trying some of them out next time you play.

While I can’t take complete credit for this because I got the basic idea from a forum over at BGG, one house rule we use when playing Talisman is to roll two dice for movement and choose whichever number you wish.

If you roll doubles you can move any number of spaces up to the number you rolled on the die. For example, if you rolled double 4s you may move up to a maximum of four spaces.

This simple change to the rules goes a long way to speed up the game and keep you from going around and around the outer realm with little gain.