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I ask people not to play shattered days, finder, or spread of rampant green when there's a new player. Those are the only real hard limits. I tend to know the style of anyone I introduce spirit island to so I give suggestions of what they might like or don't push it.
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Jan 11, 2023 09:55
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Got my premium tokens in from the backerkit for nature incarnate today. These things are nice!
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Jan 14, 2023 08:18
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Triskelli posted:I've played Spirit Island only a couple of times and feel like I'm going to be swallowed up each time. I've yet to graduate to specific invaders or beyond the prescribed newbie decks. How do I get gud? at its most basic spirit island is about efficiently solving problems. a lot of players get caught up in overextending and trying to use Defends on lands that will blight, playing reactively to whatever the Invaders are about to do damage in. But for most spirits in the game (notably not the big defensive earth spirits), what you want to do is target where invaders are going to build and prevent them from creating a town on those spots. Because of this, slow powers that affect explorers some of the best powers you can have. If you play them in one of the first few turns of the game and then move one or more explorers out of places where they will build in the following turn, you've solved several problems ahead of schedule. "grow to play more cards" is also a generally good idea, although many spirits have equally strong strategies based around gettting a lot of energy quickly and grabbing a ton of majors powers. In general, you want to grab majors once you're noticing problem lands aren't able to be handled by either by one of your powers and a card or just by a card itself. Try to grab majors that play to your elements, but don't feel tethered to them. Sometimes you just want Indomitable Claim even though you'll never threshold it. Finally, cards that benefit other spirits are usually far stronger than other cards. A turn where you and a buddy both use a boon or a gift on each other is almost always better for your long term growth than a turn where neither of you helps the other. edit: also most spirits want to try to hit at least one level of their innate every turn. Some of the starting beginner spirits in the base game aren't so good at that and unfortunately train players against this - but do try. it's like playing a free extra card.
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Jan 18, 2023 20:56
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The realistic side of the board is cool and slightly harder but I have a harder time reading it. I think that's the most common complaint
Impermanent fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Feb 17, 2023 |
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Feb 17, 2023 10:48
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i long for a big floppy water playmat to put the boards on for this reason
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Feb 18, 2023 07:03
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It's touch and go for a little while but Silent Mist has a really fun mid / endgame as a fear spirit
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Apr 4, 2023 19:01
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you pretty much have to play super greedy with mist and get to 3 plays and 2 power per turn ASAP. Underplaying the first turn to allow you to push harder into the plays track. It's not great but it works most of the time. Thankfully the new expansion coming later this year has an aspect for Mist that is supposed to buff it back into a power level more in line with other spirits.
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Apr 5, 2023 07:09
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you do want to go back and get B&C stuff though because I believe the majority of the Events deck is in there.
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Apr 5, 2023 21:48
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Tekopo posted:Lure of the Deep Wilderness Incredible write up, thanks a bunch for this. Lure Is definitely one of my fav spirits and is one that I push players to on a second or third play because of how well it synthesizes the themes and gameplay of spirit island. It also benefits from being open-ended - you can go top or bottom track fairly well with mean kermit, either going hard into your innates and plays or using your natural tendency to lump up invaders into something you can nuke from orbit with a big ol' major power. One thing that I want to talk about too with this spirit is how amazing Softly Beckon Ever Inward is. It's an absolute fucker of a card and is maybe the single most impactful thing any spirit can play in the opening turns of the game. Because of how the Gather ability works, this can solve three or four problems simultaneously - pulling an 2 explorers from two lands about to build, and two towns from two lands about to ravage. You can wind up solving every problem on your board at once and still benefitting a neighbor - it's hard to overstate how useful that is on the first three turns of the game. (Maybe the land you just pulled everything into turns up as an explorer next phase - that's ok! Because you're the frog, you can nuke that from orbit anyway, and ignore the spare explorers when defending!) The animal and Dahan gathers are nice too for getting your mosh pit started, but the invader manipulation is really what makes it shine. If you think about cards as problem solvng units - that is that each card should ideally solve a single land's issues, the value of Softly Beckon becomes really apparent. Most cards are capable of solving the problem of a building explorer or a ravaging town in one land. The rider effects of those powers or their ability to let you use an innate gives you an option for a second solution, so maybe with some spirits you're looking at 1.5 problems per card. But Softly at minimum solves two problems, and usually does more. The energy cost is a little high, but Lure's ability to get extra energy in the growth phase means you can always push into it if you need it.
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Apr 6, 2023 21:47
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Awesome! I'm always pumped to hear about mist wins. It tacks that Tidal Boon helped a lot - in multiplayer scenarios I think that mist really benefits from just a touch of support early game. Keep in mind that it can return the favor with the card that let's you gather other spirits' presence. The clause in that card about moving presence when it would be removed can let you cheese certain recurring blight effects or event cards.
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Apr 11, 2023 09:28
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1. Shroud of Silent Mist 2. Shattered Days 3. Finder 4. Keeper of forbidden groves 5. Ocean Although all of this is subject to change when nature incarnate drops
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Jun 1, 2023 02:26
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Oh shoot I forgot my other favorite spirit, which is vengeance. They're maybe slightly undertuned but they make you approach the game completely differently from anything else and that rules.
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Jun 1, 2023 18:16
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Photux posted:Just got an update that Nature Incarnate will start shipping as soon as June 19! Very exciting; I haven't played much recently because I know my group is going to play nothing but Spirit Island for months after it comes out. Breath of Darkness is the spirit I'm most excited for; the abduction mechanic sounds really fun. My only problem with the expansion: I don't think I'll be able to fit everything into one box anymore! wow that is so exciting!
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Jun 13, 2023 21:13
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some of the spirits view the dahan as expendable, others don't. I think that this will shift when the much anticipated Dahan Expansion finally is revealed.
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Jun 14, 2023 04:52
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oh god dangit I just noticed that my pledge includes the tokens so it won't be in the early-early shipment heading out next week. Please post in the thread when y'all get yours though because I'm really pumped about this expansion!
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Jun 14, 2023 19:16
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People in the Spirit Island Discord have just now started posting that they are receiving shipping notifications! Earliest seen so far is Friday - strongly likely that we'll have full spoilers on the contents of the NI by the end of the week!
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Jun 21, 2023 23:12
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 spoilers are live on the discord
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Jun 22, 2023 20:48
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ovenboy posted:What kind of spoilers are there? I didn't expect to see that type of discussion regarding a board game. it's like how people use the word spoilers to refer to full card lists from upcoming mtg sets. it just means all the details of the new stuff, down to photos of the cards etc. I've played a game with wandering voice keens delirium and ember eyed behemoth now and wow they're both very fun. wandering voice hits a lot of really good notes that shroud does for me but in a very different way. I really want to see the complete bullshit that the incarna spirits can get up to when paired with Finder, too.
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Jun 23, 2023 20:17
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I've played a few of the aspects on medium difficulty (5-7 or so converted on the ten point scale, usually adversary level 2-4) in true solo while I'm just feeling out how the new stuff works. Here's my thoughts: Transforming Wildfire: Extremely interesting aspect that doubles down on your offensive capabilities in exchange for a tighter tightrope walk with blight. I played this without the "likewise" rules modifier for true solo (you may do likewise text affects you on cards that you target yourself with, that could originally target another spirit.) Very fun, Transforming Wildfire loves to have +1 damage tokens lying around. It's very cute that you have to moderate both your blight creation and healing to keep yourself able to target problematic lands. It seems like a direct buff to Wildfire that also makes it a little more interesting to play, which is a huge win in my book. Spreading Hosility Keeper One thing that's interesting about this pack of aspects is that some of them are essentially direct nerfs to spirits that are a little too strong relative to everything else. Spreading Hostility is one of these. This one halves Keeper's Growth placement and also halves its energy gain. This is still not enough to bring the big boy down, though. Losing presence hurts really bad with this spirit, but misplacing it isn't nearly so problematic thanks to the new growth option. I think it's a solid pick for anyone who wants to play as this spirit but doesn't want to trivially outperform the rest of the table. I'm really impressed by how this is clearly a weaker version of the spirit that still feels fun to play. I don't feel like I've lost out on the Keeper Experience using this aspect. Dark Fire Shadows Flicker My new favorite way to play Shadows Flicker. Treating moon and fire as one gives you a ton of flexibility in what powers you pick, while also making it a lot easier to hit your innate often. You're in a lot more control of how builds work with a highly achievable innate, and getting Unquenchable Flames at the beginning of the game lets you go longer without reclaiming while giving you a helping hand against the harder to control factions like England. At the end of the day, you're still playing Shadows Flicker, and I don't find it the most compelling spirit to play - but I'd really like to see what a majors-focused build for this aspect could do. Stranded Shroud Probably the quietest aspect of all of them, but a really significant one for Shroud nevertheless. A barely-perceptible nerf to your movement capabilities in the late game in exchange for greatly increased movement in the early game and a free isolate every turn is a very good deal. I love shroud but I almost never played it with beginners because it tends to run into problems it needs other spirits to solve in the early game. This is not the case with Stranded, because the isolate does so much to make fear farming more sustainable. It's significantly easier to keep three lands going this aspect, and stretching up to 6 for the 2 energy per turn looks extremely possible on larger maps with more controlling spirits. Impermanent fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Jun 29, 2023 |
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Jun 29, 2023 20:46
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The only way we'll get a bunch of new power cards at this point is we do a huge rebalancing /revamping 2nd edition, gloomhaven style. Which I'd welcome but a lot of people don't like.
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Jul 2, 2023 01:29
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The abduction mechanic of breath of darkness down your spine is very strong but tippy. If you can't clean cruft you can't use it to fix problems. If you can you can zoop up whole cities with single damage pings. Otoh wandering voice keens delirium is extremely strong at wading through otherwise heavily sieged zones and sweeping all of your problems onto a corner to later nuke down into oblivion. So I guess we need more info or a clarification on what mechanic you're referring to here.
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Jul 7, 2023 20:48
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Ragnar34 posted:My question is, can Mist do its thing inside the darkness? It's a surprisingly comfy combo! Mist doesn't care about individual pieces of presence as much as other spirits and benefits from the range. Meanwhile it gets a free fear spot while also getting to eventually leave with some of the damaged towns to just plop down a fear farm somewhere else
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Jul 9, 2023 23:02
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Just had an incredible two-handed solo game with Gaze and Many Minds against Habsburg 5. Managed to draft Drought, which is just a bananas card to get as Gaze. Reasons why this is incredible as Gaze: 1. two of your most important elements. 2. Lots of unconditional destruction but with a single damage rider that can trigger the Badlands you've been tossing around. 3. Add 1 Blight doesn't matter at all to you if you take a single moon element somehow, which lets Gaze ignore blight adds from powers and instead just lose a presence somewhere. 4. Past like the third turn of the game you will always hit the threhold to destroy a city. 5. You can repeat this for two energy, making turning it into an incredibly cost-effective single land nuke that reads: destroy 6 towns, 2 damage to each town/city, destroy 2 cities. Add 2 blight (but not really, you'll just destroy presence that you can put back on the board with your reclaim growth option.) It almost singlehandedly won the game.
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Jul 13, 2023 23:25
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one thing about solo is that you can just get crunked by a bad couple of draws in a row. So some losses are going to happen. Are you giving yourself the extra starting blight? You should always start with 3 per player on the blight card, not two. This is errata from more recent printings, and it makes the biggest difference in single player games. Some other things: 1. Are you overplaying your hand? Some spirits, particularly ones that start weaker, don't want to play all possible plays in a given turn. Pacing out your card plays early, even foregoing innates when they're not that impactful, can help you get to your optimal zone at a more crucial time. 2. Are you optimizing for fear and events? Sometimes you just can't solve a problem land before it blights or builds in a problematic way. But you can give yourself a little bit of an edge by trying to maneuver beasts or dahan or presence into it in case one of the helpful events for those pieces fires off. This is more of a hail mary if you don't have a fear card or two ready to deploy, but consider it strongly, esp if you're playing fear or beast oriented spirits. 3. Card drafting is a little different for solo because sometimes you simply have to take off-element or non-synergistic cards because they solve a problem you can't handle. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and draft a card because you're going to play it right now and forget it later. In general I lean harder into drafting on solo games because you need the answers. 4. Fear and Control are more powerful overall in solo than they are in team games. One or two good fear cards can let you blitz through the fear deck, and control can completely close off part of the island, greatly reducing the amount of problems that pop up. Isolates and other more subtle control effects are even stronger because no one is going to come in from your teammate's board.
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Jul 14, 2023 20:31
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Ragnar34 posted:Red Revenge is a playtester and he knows what he's doing, even though he keeps saying Ocean is mediocre for some reason. Red rules but succumbs to the fate of all high level board game players of developing increasingly idiosyncratic and intense game opinions over time. There's a few like that over in the Discord as well. They're all great.
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Jul 14, 2023 20:41
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the holy poopacy posted:Ocean really struggles against Habsburgs and to some extent Russia, and doesn't scale great at very high player counts. I don't fully agree with RedRevenge's reasoning but they're correct that Ocean is considerably weaker since JE came out. these are true to some extent but those are really conditional things that make spirit worse in certain matchups, rather than being like base Shadows Flicker and having a severe "doing-things" deficiency. Anyway, the new aspect for Ocean introduced in NI seems to give it a lot more of a punch against invaders that prefer to go farther afield from the shore, although I'm not sure how much it helps their perceived problems for scaling to higher player counts.
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Jul 14, 2023 20:51
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Wallet posted:As far as I know the Errata is 2 per player +1, not 3 per player. It's in the Nature Incarnate rulebook, as well as newer printings of the base game. Perry Mason Jar posted:Correct. And I'll add that it's only for the starting blight - when the island card flips it's [x] per player and no additional Oops, that's right. thank you both for the clarifications.
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Jul 14, 2023 21:42
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I think that the best setup for Wounded Waters Bleeding is matchup dependent, but I really like Roiling Waters Renew. Throwing extra damage on top of Call to a Fastness of Renewal is really strong.
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Jul 19, 2023 17:02
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have become enough of an obsessive that I am considering trying to make custom presence tokens for each spirit, as modeled in this thread: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2602282/custom-presence-tokens:strip_icc()/pic5985589.jpg)
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Jul 20, 2023 17:02
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purple just fits every fear spirit, maybe just due to the little fear stat bar being the same. The true connoisseur understands that Vengeance Like a Burning Plague is an orange spirit despite all of its red. Relentless Gaze of the Sun should small bright button LED lights
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Jul 20, 2023 18:49
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SettingSun posted:I want to encase smb3 angry sun sprites in resin to use as presence for Gaze. ok, I'm glad I'm not the only one who visualizes the smb3 sun every single time I think of Gaze. For some reason the Thwomp sound from super mario 64 also plays in my head. I don't know why. The sun in smb3 doesn't even make that sound. maybe it's the similar expression.
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Jul 20, 2023 18:58
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you'd think that after like 20 solo games of the Stranded aspect with Shroud i'd start remembering to use my isolates. but no. i need to make a big ISOLATE chip and flip it once i've used it or something. Got to play Locus Serpent and Mentor Memory in 3p games recently and wow those are fun. Especially with players who are a little newer to the game you can wind up doing a lot of fun support to help them clear boards without engaging in any obvious "let me get in there and fix that for you" quarterbacking behavior. It's really cool that Locus can almost definitely solve one land per turn with the "play other player's actions at the locus" mechanic, but still has to scrounge around for ways to deal with anything else. And if you go for an early majors build, you may wind up paying for energy every turn, because you'll need to use energy for the extra power repeats as well as whatever you drafted.
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Jul 30, 2023 23:52
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Annointed posted:I was able to win with the branch and claw expansion on tabletop. apparently drawing an entire crowed with Draw of Consuming Void giving 4 fear and 15 damage to get an extra 5 fear per town, 2 fear a city gives a massive fear bomb and got me a legitimate victory. I think I like BoDaN but it seriously feels very rng dependent to get the majors needed to help get the Fear Victory. this is the big critcism of BODAN and it is strongly mitigated by the two new aspects avaialble for it in NI
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Aug 14, 2023 22:33
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BODDYS is great but what's even better is a BODDYS + BODAN game. Suplex the fear deck.
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Aug 17, 2023 02:10
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Serpent Slumbering is a top-tier support spirit with the added benefit that at the end of the game you get to go kablooie
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Aug 22, 2023 06:49
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I am really enjoying relentless gaze, which is surprising for me because I tend not to gravitate towards big damage spirits. I just love the protoss colossus sound effect that plays in my head each time I blow something up with it.
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Aug 22, 2023 17:17
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everything released currently just barely fits into the old broken token organizer. unfortunately i cannot recommend it due to the owner's whole deal. There's quite a lot of nice ones on Etsy, though!
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Sep 25, 2023 23:09
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In a tram with Finder and Towering Roots volcano might be one of the less strong spirits, but only because of how over top powerful Finder is. It's a good pairing tho. Who was the 4th spirit? (Volcano is still very strong. And that is a good team for them!)
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Nov 28, 2023 07:01
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Vengeance as a Burning Plague is a really interesting spirit because very little about it works like any other spirit, and the things that it wants to do in order to grow in power properly are things you normally avoid. The biggest thing about Vengeance is that its whole kit synergizes with getting punched in the gut. You get your disease tokens from getting presence destroyed, you can easily place presence in places where it will get destroyed, you get to treat blighted lands as badlands tokens - everything about the spirit is much more powerful on lands where it has been owned. Vengeance basically wants to play kinda like an underdog action hero - you want to get smacked around really hard in the first part of the fight and then come back stronger than ever as you tilt the advantage away from the invaders. Newer players in particular have a hard time with Vengeance because its easy to get locked into a firefighting "blight is bad" mindset, since so many other spirits are negatively affected by blight on the island. But Vengeance wants to actively court it, kind of like Wildfire. One popular way to play the spirit is to go for card plays as quckly as possible to take advantage of its really good innates. The fastest way to do this is to do something like: growth 3, top track, play fetid breath, try to take a good power with beast or fire, -> g2, top track and bottom track, play plaguebearers and sudden fevers -> g2, bottom trackx2, play fiery vengeance and your other card. Sometimes events will gently caress that up though, ymmv! One quirk of the spirit, due to how it plays, is that although it can make the game harder for everyone early on, it is a great buddy to anyone whose lands start blighting too much. You have the power as this spirit to fairly easily fight fires on problem lands on your teammates' boards.
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Nov 28, 2023 20:44
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 02:24 |
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yea RedRevenge is great but the tier list is a product of a very specific way of playing the game and likely will not translate very well to your table's meta. Most of the bleeding edge-tier spirit island players who play on supermax difficulty settings do so on the TTS mod with other people from that community, and the 'house style' of those games involves relatively little collaborative play - so spirits that are more intricate in how they might need help or can help tend to wind up underperforming.
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Nov 28, 2023 21:21
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