Talisman 4th, have any good house rules or variants?

Although many critique Talisman's simple rule sets, I think it can be a strength in that it leaves it open for a lot of experimenting and interesting house rules. Does anybody have any house rules that might help my games be more interesting? Any variations that you play more than the base game rules? I'm interested to see if there's a way to make combat a little bit more exciting instead of just rolling a die and adding strength or craft. Just keep in mind I only have the base game and no expansions yet. Thanks in advance.

My house rule is to put it back on the shelf and play Runebound.

Here's a post I wrote a few years back with my houserules.

fortressat.com/forum/10-ameritrash/118291-let-s-talk-talisman

Hard stop at two hours. Winner is whoever is the closest to winning at that point.

I dunno, yeah, it's very simple and you'd think that you could muck around with it and all...but really, you kind of don't want to mess with it. It does what it does, that's it. If you want it to do more than that, then it's probably better to play a different game. For example, you really don't want to do anything with the combat because it's simple, direct and quick. If you were one of FFG's hotshot game designers, you might think "oh, I'mma make my mark on this game by introducing threat dials, multi-phase card combat and special dice". But you would be on the wrong track.

Relic does SOME things to make it more interesting, but it still keeps simple and doesn't stray far from the basic mechanics.

The biggest change is to let people level up at 5 craft/strength instead of 7. It speeds the game way up and doesn't lose anything.

Yeah, that's a good one to use, especially with that two hour cap. At five, you can level up on some higher-end middle-tier adventure cards and you don't have that 30 minute stretch where all you're getting is the cheapies that keep you from progressing.

Another thing you can do- and this way madness lies- is to tool around with the decks so that you have a higher rate of encounters that lead toward the end game. Less frittering around with events, strangers, and so forth. Less "bags of gold". I've always meant to go in and sort out the combined decks to tune them up a bit, but at this stage it's not likely to ever happen.

I average between 2-3 hours with four players, and that's even with expansion boards. Part of that is because I play pretty aggressively, and push in as fast as I can. That tends to make other people play aggressively as well, since it's a race after all.

I've thought about tuning the deck now and then, but I only do it by removing expansions. For example, I taught it earlier this year and just used base game, Reaper, and Frostmarch. But my friends in KC would play with all the stuff I own, and we were able to finish pretty easily there too.

The main thing that makes Talisman run long is that players tend to play too conservatively. Fight hard and play to win. If you get yourself killed early on it isn't really much of a setback if the other players are dancing around trying to get really big and beefy, because that's really the slow path to victory.