by L.N. Hunter originally published 04 December 2024
While the corner expansions (City, Dungeon, Highlands, Woodland) make for nice additions to the Talisman base game, a criticism is that people end up playing by themselves—players in one corner board have close to zero interaction with players in others, and it’s a long tedious process to trek from one corner to another. See this thread on Reddit for some other opinions on the matter.
The Lost Realms expansion makes getting between The City and The Dungeon easier. Sitting in the space between those two boards, it provides both a shortcut and an opportunity to plunder some high value treasure. The Crypt homebrew expansion from Magia i Miecz is similar, this time fitting between The Dungeon and The Woodland.
You enter from spaces roughly halfway through both of those expansions into The Forgotten Tomb. From there, you can hop across to the other expansion (or back the way you came). However, despite being a single space, it’s not a quick and easy route to take: on entry, you get walloped with three Crypt Cards, all of which you have to deal with, one per turn, before you can move on.
But that’s not all. You can head up or down from that space to get to the Lichyard or Royal Chamber, where you can attempt to defeat the boss, gaining goodies and craft or strength points, and then teleport out of the expansion.
A nice little pack, it consists of the board, 38 Crypt Cards, 2 each of Treasure and Destiny cards (prizes for defeating the bosses), and an instruction sheet. A complete set of PDFs is available from Magia i Miecz (in Polish) and on Talisman Island (English and Italian) for you to print yourself, but the nice people from Poland will send you a physical copy for a quite reasonable price, all nicely printed and boxed, though some cards’ printing were a tad misaligned on my set. (It did take quite a while to get to me, but worth the wait.)
Incidentally, and little to do with this expansion, one way to get a bit more out of the corner regions is the Wanderlust ending (Woodland expansion), which at least forces players to visit all corner regions. http://www.talismanwiki.com/Wanderlust gives a summary.
Magia i Miecz are the folks who made this, and they have a Facebook group here. This is the post from Talisman Island that first alerted me to the English translation, which includes contact info to get a copy.
/LN Hunter