Hold Back The Night

With the help of some willing accomplices, last weekend The Other Half and I had our first game of Talisman with the new Blood Moon expansion added.

I love it, it's brilliant.  Crucially, though, it's only brilliant if you put some effort in.

There are two primary additions to the game here.  The first is the werewolf, who to be honest is a bit of a retread of the Grim Reaper from his similarly eponymous expansion.  Indeed, in some ways this is a step backwards; at least when Death was teleporting between players or occasionally helping them out, you could rationalise that.  A werewolf who shows up and heals you? Not so much.  There's also a nice idea here that certain people can be bitten and turned into lycanthropes, with various effects throughout the game, but the only real improvement from the Grim Reaper to the werewolf is that he'll pounce on any character he passes, so long as it's night.

Yes, the night.  Blood Moon's best idea by miles is exceptionally simple: play starts during the day, we switch to and from night each time an event card is played.  The actual logic of this is ridiculous, of course - twenty-minute nights followed by twenty-second days were not uncommon - but that hardly matters.  Monsters are slightly easier to kill when the sun is up, and slightly tougher to beat after sundown.  This adds an extra tactical consideration regarding play, as everyone tries to hoover up as many beasties as possible in the sunshine.  OK, we're not exactly talking deeply involved tactical thinking, here, but then this is Talisman.  The aim is always to just hit things until they stop moving, and hopefully drop a, well, talisman.

Anyway, it's not the tactics we should be focusing on, but the atmospherics.  I'd always wondered whether I'd find a decent use for the dimmer switches my flat came with (romantic dinners being a bit tricky when you lack a dining table), and at last that question has been answered: full illumination during the day, severely dimmed lights during the night.  I find the best level is a sliver below the point at which my girlfriend starts complaining she can't read the cards, but it's a personal thing.

Those with an interest in incidental music will profit enormously here, too.  Stealing shamelessly from a bloke named Richard who ran an excellent Cthulhu campaign I was lucky enough to take part in back in the mid '00s, I played an awful lot of the sublime Twin Peaks soundtrack, interspersed with Phillip Glass' wonderfully unsettling soundtrack for The Hours, courtesy of occasional commenter lyndagb.  The combination of the lighting, the music, and the increased difficulty of staying alive in the game worked brilliantly, if I say so myself.  I was less sure about what to play during the day; I settled for some up-tempo playlists I had lying around, but I'm certainly open to suggestions.

Give it a try.  It doesn't slow the game down too much (though how I long for a remote control for either my lights or my sound system), and it works really well.  If nothing else, the illusion of change and progress can be pretty important for a game of Talisman, as anyone who's played it with more than two other people knows full well.

Actually, since we're here and all, this might be a good time to put up my suggestions for speeding up Talisman.  After all, I love the game a great deal, but not to the degree where I can spend six hours playing it (Arkham Horror, on the other hand...)

The Other Half and I play with the standard rules when it's just the two of us, and that works out OK.  We can top three hours with a single game, but then we're using every expansion the game has, and we're pros.  Obviously, any ideas from those below you want to apply to your own two-player games, go right ahead.  Note also that the reduction in trophy exchanges is suggested by the rules themselves, so I'm including them because they work, not because I thought of them.

Three players

There is no limit to the Fate points one can expend to re-roll the same die as long as failing the roll would result in the death of the character.

When a character dies, the replacement character retains one third of their predecessor's strength tokens, rounding up, and their craft tokens likewise.  Thus characters with only one or two strength (or craft) tokens do not actually lose any of those tokens after death.

When placing a character on the board for the first time, they are given one extra strength or craft, whichever is initially lower.  If a character has equal initial strength and craft, the player may choose which one to increase in this way.  This additional strength or craft can be lost like other such tokens.

Four players

As above, with the following alterations:

When a character is placed on the board for the first time, they gain one extra strength and one extra craft, as oppose to the approach described above.

Trophies can now be exchanged when they total six points of strength (or six points of craft), rather than seven.

Five players

There is no limit to the Fate points one can expend to re-roll the same die as long as failing the roll would result in the death of the character.

When a character dies, the replacement character retains one half of their predecessor's strength tokens, rounding up, and their craft tokens likewise.  Thus characters with only one or two strength (or craft) tokens do not actually lose any of those tokens after death.

When placing a character on the board for the first time, they are given one extra strength or craft, whichever is initially lower.  If a character has equal initial strength and craft, the player may choose which one to increase in this way.  This additional strength or craft can be lost like other such tokens.  Once this is complete, the character gains one additional strength and craft.

Trophies can now be exchanged when they total six points of strength (or six points of craft), rather than seven.

Six players

There is no limit to the Fate points one can expend to re-roll the same die as long as failing the roll would result in the death of the character.

When a character dies, the replacement character retains two thirds of their predecessor's strength tokens, rounding up, and their craft tokens likewise.  Thus characters with one or two strength (or craft) tokens do not actually lose any of those tokens after death.

When placing a character on the board for the first time, they are given two extra strength or craft. This additional strength or craft can be lost like other such tokens.

Trophies can now be exchanged when they total five points of strength (or five points of craft), rather than seven.