How can we speed up Killer Bunnies?

Question

What are some common house rules that you might use for a Killer Bunnies game?

Because the game has so many rules/cards to begin with, the only one that we've come up with is not allowing Super Bunnies to be blanched. Any others we should adopt to help simplify/speed up the game?

We've tried halving the cost of carrots, but that made "Take a carrot" cards nearly unnecessary. We've also tried allowing people to have a free Black Pawn in order to limit the effectiveness of weapons but that kept too many bunnies on the board. The free Black Pawn helped make the game move faster, but it meant that you nearly never had to play around not having a Bunny.

Answer 1

An old group of mine found it very effective to give each player a "holy hand grenade" token at the start of the game. This can be used to destroy any card, weapon, bunny, etc.

Feel free to adjust the number of tokens, if one simply isn't enough. Just remember, "three shalt be the number thou shalt count!"

Answer 2

I've played the "normal" version of Killer Bunnies Quest (i.e. Blue and Yellow decks) and also the Remix version. I found the normal version can be a bit slow mainly due to a lack of Bunnies - there are 25 Bunnies out of about 160 cards so if you don't have a Bunny you can be waiting a long time to pick one up.

For the normal version I'm planning on trying the following rules:

Everyone Starts With A Bunny

Anyone who wasn't dealt a Bunny at the start can go through the draw deck until they find a Bunny and discard one of the cards they were dealt.

This is suggested in the rules for the first time you play, but I see no reason not to do it every time.

You Can Buy Dead Bunnies

When Bunnies die put them in a separate pile. Dead Bunny cards can be bought for 10 dolla. The Bunny card is placed in your hand and has to put through the run as normal.

This rule is in the Remix version (and I think it's in one of the later expansion decks too), it seems to speed things up considerably.

Free Money

Give everyone some tokens (I'm going to use Monopoly money) at the start that represent dolla, these tokens act exactly the same as normal money. I'm going to try giving everyone 10 dolla, that's enough to buy a Bunny or a Carrot and it's usually enough to feed a Bunny.

A slight variation on this would be for everyone to get some free money at the start of their go instead, I'd suggest 1 or 2 dolla.

Answer 3

When we play with all the expansions, last of which is chocolate, we deal out a carrot to each player at the start. We also make roaming red runs (ebola, orp, mystery urn, etc) turn based and not round, makes it faster. usually dealing out carrots at the beginning speeds it up a bunch and not allowing players to steal a carrot until a player has more than the original dealt ones. Also if you feel the game is laying too long, implement a rule at that time to force all choose a carrot cards to be market only, not stolen. Our games usually last 2-3 hours that way.

Answer 4

We have started setting a timer and every time it goes off the person/people with the fewest carrot cards each get to draw one.

Answer 5

An easy way to speed up the game is to play cards directly from your hand instead of waiting for it to pop up in the run list. This speeds up the game allowing players to play bunnies and weapons more often. When I play with this rule games last about 1-2 hours at most.

Answer 6

I generally play with the regular rules, but sometimes we have a spare hour (not nearly enough to play a full game). For these games, we just reduce the number of carrots possible (since the game is over when the last carrot is selected). The more carrots, the longer the game. I liked the other suggestion to give everyone a carrot at the beginning... that essentially does the same thing.

There's a slight difference I like... where you don't draw a card until the END of your turn (instead of before laying down a card on the table). That way people can read their new card during other people's turns. No one wants to just watch people read their new cards... this speeds things up quite a bit.

There are some cards that make the game longer. There's a card that closes Kabala's market. Man... all of my longest games were games were someone played that card which means no one can buy a carrot. There's only about 2 cards in the whole deck that can re-open it. I'd take that out (kinda makes me think I should take it out of my deck too). Also, some cards can cause players to lose all of their carrots. You might want to eliminate these out of the deck as well.

Admittedly, the shorter games aren't quite as rewarding... but they'll cut down on the game time.

Answer 7

We thin the deck down ( maybe do this differently every time) and make sure there are a lot of "choose a carrot" cards in the thinned deck. This way the carrots are going fast.

Answer 8

I'm going to revive this with a cheap solution we've come up with. We've found with all the expansions, there aren't enough bunnies or choose a carrot cards to keep the game moving - and some of the weapons and red run cards are way too powerful for the limited amount of bunnies each player has, essentially wiping the slate each time they come into play.

We ended up buying 3 additional starter sets (used, on ebay for less than $8 each - incomplete sets work too). We took all the bunnies and choose a carrot cards out and added them to our existing set, tossed the rest of the 3 starter sets cards. This stacked the game in favor of getting bunnies and carrot cards - but not enough to off-balance the game.

Originally, with all expansions, the odds of getting either a bunny or choose a carrot were 1:5.5, with the additional cards, those odds went to 1:3.8.

All other rules remained the same. It's made the game much more enjoyable, the mechanics of working around occasionally not having a bunny are still there, but the bunnies come frequently enough that it doesn't drag on - and the additional choose carrot cards let us use all the carrots but still have a reasonably-timed game.