Talisman - Tips & Strategies

We have had the experience that becoming a lycanthrope (which is possible with the latest expansion, Blood Moon) is almost exclusively a good thing and does not affect you at all during the Day.
Since this is neither realistic nor as fun for the other players, the following rules for players who have become lycanthropes are suggested (three of these rules are presented in Blood Moon and two are additions):

During the Day:
– Subtract 1 from your attack score during battle and psychic combat (due to the stress you have experienced by being a lycanthrope during the Night and from the transition to your ordinary existence during the Day).

During the Night:
– Add 2 to your attack score during battle and psychic combat.
– Whenever you land on a space with another character (except in the Inner Region), you must attack him instead of encountering the space.
– Whenever you defeat another character in battle or psychic combat, you must take a life or a follower from the defeated character. You cannot choose to take an object, gold, trinket etc. Should you choose to take a follower, the follower is immediately placed on the discard pile; you do NOT take him/her for yourself (he/she is killed in the frenzy of the lycanthrope attack).
– Whenever you defeat another character in battle or psychic combat, the defeated character must roll 1 die on the Werewolf’s chart instead of you claiming your normal reward.

When playing Talisman, bad rolls will happen. Hence the use of the fate tokens to alter the roll of the dice. However, the rulebook says that you can only use a fate token once per roll, and you can only use it to reroll one die if you roll multiple dice.

A variant rule to this is to allow players to use multiple fate tokens on a roll of the dice if they so wish. The benefit to this is that players will be able to speed up the game slightly by avoiding potentially crippling situations, and in general makes for a more enjoyable playing experience. If a player exhausts all of their fate tokens rerolling without succeeding in their roll, they can honestly say that it wasn’t fated to be.

If you’re like me than you have all the talisman expansions. If you have all the expansions than you defiantly have some storage issues. If however if you have not solved these issues, than you are not like me. I found a product sold at Office Max called Really Useful Boxes, and they come in a variety of sizes that work perfectly with Talisman.
Here is a list of what you will need for talisman

6x 0.07 liter (craft/strength/gold/fate/life/dice holders)
4x 0.3 liter (Dragon expansion/Highland & Dungeon/ Adventure Cards / Various (Purchase deck, quest deck, quest rewards, dungeon treasures, high relics, alignment cards)
1x 1.6 liter (miniatures)

I than put all the Really Useful Boxes into my Dragon expansion box, and put the characters, alternate endings, dragon token bag, and the board into my main Talisman box. This cuts down all the time it takes to find the counters in the box and distribute them and makes the game flow much better!

I love that skit from UHF, I really do. But that’s beside the point.

If you start off with a character that is strong in strength but weak in craft, you should try to find ways to increase their craft values. The reverse is also true for characters strong in craft but weak in strength. While it is tempting to make your character exceptionally good at one thing at the cost of another, the random encounters of the game mean that you will have to deal with both at one point or another. Having a well-rounded character means that you stand less of a chance being hurt at a critical moment, and you will be able to progress smoother at the end of the game.

Name: Pacifist

Strength: 4

Craft: 4

Start: Town

Alignment: Neutral

Abilities:

1) Pacifist cannot use / carry weapons (he can only carry an axe but for raft making).

2) Pacifist cannot attack other players. He can cast spells on any other player only when attacked by one.

3) Whenever atacked, he MUST try to avoid fighting – throw a die: 5 or 6 – no fighting.

Comment:
S+C=8 but he is really hard to play! Recommended either for experienced players or… for peace-loving ones.

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.

Character building is a huge part of Talisman but is it really worth spending all that time getting your hero up to snuff? Or is it better to roll your luck with the dice? This goes one of two ways with my gaming group. In most of the games we’ve played the gamers who ended up using characters with lower craft ratings decided to go bonsai into the inner regions after building up enough strength and ended up winning the game even after being “booted” out of the inner regions a couple of times!

Players who had strong character craft to start off with and built up their craft felt invincible but spells are hard to come by. They were feared but that only made other players stray far from them to avoid getting “scroned” by them.

Press your luck when you’re in the middle of your character build and you are more likely to succeed. You might get thrown back to the outer regions but you are more likely to win depending on how well you managed your inventory!

This is similar to one of Dylan Reid’s tips, but it solves the misuse of spells problem slightly differently.

If your character can replenish spells as they are used, then you may only use as many spells on your turn as you hold at the beginning of the turn.

This allows a bit more flexibility as to which spells are used and allows for the use of defensive spells between turns.

As some of you may notice the Priest character out of the original Talisman 4e is pretty lacking compared to some others. A simple house rule we made is that the Priest may attack (not defend) with their craft value in place of their strength. This gives the priest some more attacking power, but doesn’t give them to much power.

Basically when the Reaper lands on a space with Stranger, Enemy, Follower or even Location cards, those cards are immediately moved to the Discard pile. Other cards that would be non-living items, like Objects, stay on the space.

This helped keep open a reasonable number of spaces on the board, in a self-correcting way; as the number of cards on the board grew, the Reaper would become more likely to land on an occupied space, thereby clearing it up.