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 Spirit Island is a 2017 board game from Eric R. Reuss. It comes from a simple observation circa 2010 or so: there is a strong tradition in modern boardgaming going all the way back to Catan of making games about a very idealized version of colonization, building up little settlements out of nothing in a pristine wilderness open for the taking. The problem is, this narrative exists only in imperialist fantasies. When pioneers go out to establish settlements it is never really in a pristine wilderness open for the taking: humankind has been living in basically every habitable space on the Earth's surface for thousands of years. Practicaly all settlement throughout recorded history has occurred at the expense of other people already living there, but most games about settlement either conveniently leave this part out or depict natives as obstacles to be overcome. Some board game designers have started trying to address this by setting this sort of gameplay in uninhabitable spaces: no natives need be displaced if you're settling underground, or underwater, or in space. Spirit Island takes another tack and asks the question of what if colonial era settlers tried to conquer a land inhabited by something bigger and more powerful than them. Hence, Spirit Island: a magical fantasy island set in an otherwise mostly normal Earth, where players take on the role of nature spirits fighting alongside their indigenous human neighbors to maintain their way of life. Your survival depends on repelling the invading colonizers just as much as the human natives' does: the spirits are unique to this particular island and their lives are tied to its ecological health. The spirits have volcanoes in their arsenal, though, so they're the ones in the driver's seat. This approach isn't exactly perfect: while it sidesteps a few problematic issues, it does still relegate indigenous peoples to a non-player role. Having two distinct native groups on the same side but with separate overlapping interests and survival objectives is both interesting and relevant to the topic of colonization experiences, but the one that actually resembles historical victims of colonization still gets the short end of the stick. But it's a good excuse to blow people up with volcanoes and that's always a good time.  Currently, there are 4 expansions to Spirit Island, with a 5th one on the way. Feather & Flame contains several additional playable spirits that were originally released as Kickstarter promos. Branch & Claw was the first "real" expansion, introducing several additional new systems as well as new cards and spirits that use them. Jagged Earth is the "big box" expansion, with as many new spirits as the base game + Branch & Claw + their promos combined in addition to more of everything from Branch & Claw plus a few altogether new things. Horizons of Spirit Island is a simplified standalone box originally released as a Target exclusive meant as a lower-cost and slightly simpler entry point--it's mostly redundant with the base game, but it does have several new spirits that are 100% compatible. Nature Incarnate is another large-ish expansion that's in production and set to ship in a month or three, with even more new spirits using some altogether new rules. I am going to be showing off the game primarily using Tabletop Simulator, starting out with a teaching game and going through progressively higher difficulty as I cover more content. Specifically I'm using MJ & iakona's mod here; there are a number of different fan-made TTS mods available but most of them have not updated since Jagged Earth. The mod has a fair amount of scripting to handle setup & bookkeeping for you, but most of the meat of the game is still very much manual. There is also an official digital adaptation by Handelabra Games for Steam as well as Android & iOS. Although it's handy because it's fully automated, the UI leaves a lot to be desired and it lacks later expansions. If you're already familiar with the game it's a great way to kill some time blitzing through games without having to worry about setting them up or running them, and it supports the developers. The presentation can be a bit opaque if you don't already know what you're looking at, though. I will be doing my best to explain the game as I go, but if you want to follow along there is a digital copy of the rulebook available here. Table of Contents Game 1: Shadows Flicker Like Flame, base difficulty Game 2: Vital Strength of the Earth vs. Brandenburg-Prussia level 0 Game 3: River Surges in Sunlight + Lightning's Swift Strike vs. Brandenburg-Prussia level 2 Game 4: Thunderspeaker + A Spread of Rampant Green vs. Sweden level 3 the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Apr 12, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 18:14
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| # ? May 7, 2024 10:47 |
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For this introductory game, I'm going to be playing a single spirit using the base game only, with a single island segment to defend. The game really shines with the interaction between multiple spirits, but trying to keep track of everything happening with multiple spirits in play would make things considerably harder to follow, so until we're into the swing of things I'm going to be showing things off with individual spirits. So here's our starting island. It's still primarily inhabited by its indigenous people, the Dahan, whose settlements are represented by rounded wooden hut pieces. The invaders' shiny white pieces have a town in the island's interior and a city on the coast, but haven't been rocking the boat much so far.  That's about to change. The invaders are ramping up their efforts, awakening the island's fearsome protector in response. Shadows Flicker Like Flame is a little unusual compared to most of the spirits in that rather than the embodiment of a natural phenomenon it's the embodiment of an explicitly unnatural phenomenon. (It's also maybe a little bit weaker than most of the spirits in the game, but we're playing at the introductory difficulty level so that's not even going to begin to be a problem.)  We keep track of what the invaders are doing off to the side on the invader board here, which tracks most of the game state information (and also miscellaneous piece storage) beyond what's physically on the island. The most prominent feature here is the fear deck, which this TTS mod helpfully expands so that you can see exactly how many cards are left at each terror level; this deck represents the invaders' resolve, and as they get spooked the fear deck will deplete and they will get closer to abandoning the colony. But the most important part of the invader board are the boxes at the bottom for the invader action cards, the first of which has flipped to reveal jungle terrain.  As a result, the invaders send their first explorers out into the jungles. The island is divided into four different biomes: Mountain, Jungle, Sands, and Wetlands (there is also a designated ocean, marking the most accessible coast for invaders to land in, but most of the time it is not relevant beyond that.) Each turn the invaders focus their efforts on particular biomes represented on the invader cards, which they will ruthlessly exploit over the course of a few turns. Now all three sizes of invader piece are present: Explorers, Towns, and Cities. Explorers are the weakest and most common, and are only directly dangerous in groups. But the presence of Explorers can allow invaders to build towns, which are tougher although still fairly manageable. Cities are the rarest and most dangerous of all: outside of the starting city they only crop up in lands that are already settled with towns, and once they're there they are quite tough to deal with. I've enabled the invader board HUD off to the right, so we can see most of the important bits of the invader board without having to look off to the side. We can see that now that the invaders are done exploring, the jungle card has moved over to the Build box, queuing up the invaders' next action. There are also trackers for the amount of Blight remaining (think of this as the island's health) and the Fear token pool, representing progress towards earning fear cards. Right now there are 0 fear tokens earned and 4 fear remaining for the next fear card draw. The red checkers on the board are our presence: the spirits do not occupy physical space as we think of it (and Shadows Flicker Like Flame has an even more tenuous connection with physical space than most) but they are connected to certain places of power where their influence is strongest. The more distant jungle has two stacked checkers (with a helpful burst graphic inserted by TTS for identification), making it an even more powerful Sacred Site and giving us even more options there. You could theoretically have more than two presence there, but in most cases there's no benefit to adding more: either you have a Sacred Site or you don't. In our present state, there's not a lot we can do to affect the island and we're horribly outmatched by the invaders. The first task each turn is to grow our spirit's power and choose our development path. But first, let's take a look at what we're working with.  Here's the spirit board for Shadows Flicker Like Flame, which covers all the crunchy mechanical bits. There's a lot to cover here. Most prominently, in the middle of the board there's a row of additional presence checkers covering up two tracks representing our basic resource capacity. As part of our growth we can move presence from our tracks to the board, which simultaneously expands our reach and uncovers additional resources. Right now we can only play 1 card per turn and generate 0 energy to pay for cards... which, given most cards cost energy to play, is a problem! By placing a presence we could uncover the next spot on either track, moving up to 1 energy/turn (shown here) or 2 card plays/turn depending on which track we took presence from. We can do that by using the growth options displayed above the spirit tracks: at the start of every turn each spirit gets to pick one bundle of goodies from those listed here. The first option would reclaim cards from our discard pile (not relevant right now, obviously) and add a new card to our hand. The second option also adds a card while placing a presence from our tracks; the range arrow labeled 1 means we could put the new presence down anywhere up to 1 land away from any of our existing presence. Lastly, we could also place a presence with longer range and get an immediate one-time burst of 3 energy. In the lower left is our special rule, Shadows of the Dahan. This lets us boost the range of our powers at a cost of energy. It's handy, but situational and kind of expensive, especially in a solo game where distances are small.  Finally, we have our Innate Power. By playing cards with matching elements we can unlock an additional bonus power for free. Innate powers help shape a spirit's playstyle and steer their elemental preferences when picking new cards. We'll go over this in more detail later, but the main takeaway is that Shadows Flicker is very good at manipulating (and later destroying) explorers.  Lastly, let's take a look at our starting cards, the powers we use to combat the invaders. Along the left hand side you'll notice various colored symbols: the cards you play provide these elements which you can match into sets to meet thresholds for innate powers. These aren't a resource that are spent, things that care about element thresholds simply look to see if you have that many in play or not. From top to bottom, the 8 elements are Sun, Moon, Fire, Air, Water, Earth, Plant, and Animal. Shadows Flicker is very heavily based on Moon powers, followed by Air and Fire with a few odd elements available to round things out. You'll notice that our starting elements are not a perfect fit for the element requirements on our innate power, which can be frustrating at times. Generally, powers target a single land that must be within a given range from one of your presence markers, and some powers have additional targeting restrictions (although some powers target spirits directly, rather than the board.) A lot of our starting powers are range 0, which makes targeting quite tricky as they only affect the few lands we have presence in. The Shadows of the Dahan special ability helps here, but it's very taxing on our energy at this stage of the game. Looking at the effects themselves you may notice that they all have the same stylized screaming face symbol from the fear tracker on the HUD, indicating that they generate Fear tokens. Not all possible powers necessarily generate Fear, but Shadows Flicker is pretty creepy. As far as the individual cards, from left to right: Concealing Shadows does virtually nothing on its own besides a single fear, but it does protect Dahan from ravaging Invaders. This is important, as Dahan that survive combat can counterattack for quite a bit of damage. This makes Concealing Shadows a deceptively huge part of our offense, although its range can make it painful to set up. Crops Wither and Fade is notable in that it's the only card we have that can directly remove towns and cities. Removing cities is potentially very important, although leaving a town behind limits its usefulness. But sometimes it's easier to downgrade a city and deal with the town than it is to deal with the much more durable city. Favors Called Due masses a whole bunch of Dahan into a single land and can conditionally generate a whole bunch of fear. The Dahan are generally passive and on its own this doesn't do much, but it can set up Concealing Shadows or other powers. Mantle of Dread lets you evict a couple invaders from a single land with your presence. In games with multiple spirits/players you can play it on someone else to target lands with their presence instead, but on a solo island it's basically just another range 0 power.  We need to pick one of the growth options from our spirit board, but first let's run down our strategic goals. At the outset there are two ways of winning the game: either wipe out all the invaders, or generate enough Fear to empty the fear deck. But you can also sort of mix-and-match, as the threshold for the invader-elimination goal gets progressively relaxed as you go through the fear deck and reach new terror levels. Until we reach one of those objectives, we have to limit the damage the invaders do before they cause enough blight to damage the island's ecosystem beyond repair. Our only 0-energy card doesn't do anything until the invaders start ravaging next turn, so we need energy from somewhere to afford anything useful. I could take the third growth for a quick energy infusion, but instead I opt to uncover the 1 energy/turn space and draw a new card. I place the new presence in the other jungle: it already starts with a blight piece (the black bubbly thing), so protecting it from further damage is definitely going to be a priority. (ED. NOTE: You may have noticed that in previous screenshots there was already a single presence in the jungle with blight--this was actually a setup error as Shadows Flicker's starting presence is supposed to go in land #5, not #4. But the two lands can reach each other anyhow, so regardless of which one I started in I would have been able to place a presence in the other one this turn.)  When you gain a new power there are two decks you can choose from. Minor Powers are cheaper but less powerful, costing no more than 1 energy apiece. Major Powers pack a much bigger punch but cost big energy, and simply picking up a major power carries an additional cost of having to permanently lose one of your other cards. So for right now, picking up a minor is a no-brainer. Gaining a power from either deck uses a draw 4, pick 1 rule (there is an option for new players that gives each of the 4 starter spirits specific draws, but I've never used it even in newbie games since drafting powers is just too fun and important.) There are some solid options here but Veil the Night's Hunt is the best fit for our innate elements, and should be useful in its own right. On its own the damage is only useful for taking out explorers since they're the only thing that can be killed with a single point of damage, but that combos nicely with Shadows Flicker's native explorer control, and being able to maneuver Dahan is also valuable: we have Favors Called Due to set up a big pile of Dahan, but it lacks the ability to fine-tune Dahan positions.  We're still only at 1 energy and 1 card play per turn. Mantle of Dread will let us evict the invaders from either of the jungles where we have presence, so that's our play. However, it's not as simple as playing Mantle and kicking out an explorer. Powers come in two different speeds, fast (red) and slow (blue). Fast powers go off before the invaders act for the turn, slow powers go off after the invaders (but still have to be played & paid for at the start of the turn.) The spirits act on a much longer time scale than humans do and are often left scrambling to keep up, so by the time Mantle of Dread activates there will be more invaders on the board. Thanks to our card draw we do have the option of preempting the invaders with Veil the Night's Hunt, which could let the Dahan in the inner corner clean out that jungle at fast power speed. But the already-blighted jungle is a higher priority, so I'm sticking with Mantle for now.  Since we have no fast powers in play, we skip straight to the invader phase. Invaders act according to the schedule laid out on the invader track: the jungle card is showing in the build phase, so every occupied jungle will build additional settlements this turn, starting with towns.  After the invaders build, they immediately explore a new terrain, adding explorers to each Wetland... and then all visible terrain cards slide over. Next turn, the jungles that just built will ravage, potentially devastating the land and its native inhabitants. The newly explored wetlands will build. A new terrain card will be drawn and invaders will explore there - and then the turn after that it will be the wetlands ravaging, the next terrain building, and so on. The invaders' march of progress is relentless. So let's do what we can to throw a wrench in it. Mantle of Dread can push both a town and an explorer out of one of our lands...  ...so we send them fleeing our spooky jungle into the safety of the coastal mountains. It's your choice where to send each individual pushed piece, but generally speaking consolidating threats tends to be the best option as long as you're not exacerbating an immediate problem. Mantle of Dread also earns 2 fear, getting us halfway to earning our first fear card.  That's our only power in play, so that's it for turn 1 and we start the next turn with another growth phase. The board's in notably worse shape, with twice as many invaders in play. That's pretty typical: most spirits struggle to keep up in the early game, so it's a matter of playing damage control while you work on growing up to speed. At least this turn we can better afford to ramp up to 2 card plays, giving us a lot more options to work with. So, thinking about our strategy. The second jungle is still going to ravage this turn, causing that town and explorer to do damage to the land and also the resident Dahan. Explorers do 1 damage, towns do 2 damage, and cities do 3 damage. All it takes is 2 damage to add blight, which will destroy some of our presence there and drive us closer to our loss conditions (not only do you have a finite amount of blight you can suffer before losing, if any spirit's presence is wiped out it's an instant game over.) If blight is added to a land with preexisting blight, it cascades and adds yet another blight in an adjacent land. So it's particularly important to keep blighted lands from being damaged further. Every 2 damage also destroys 1 Dahan, and this damage is applied simultaneously with damage to the land. We could play Concealing Shadows and protect the Dahan there... but saving 1 Dahan is a pretty piddly use of an important card. Regrettably, we're just going to have to leave them to fend for themselves. And all of our other cards cost energy, so to get enough energy to play 2 cards we're going to have to take the 3rd growth option for an infusion of +3 energy.  Where does that leave us? Now that we have 2 card plays it would be really nice to trigger our innate, which means we need 2 Moon element and 1 Fire. All of our cards have Moon, so that's easy, but the only way to get a Fire is by playing Crops Wither and Fade. We're also running low on cards and will probably be playing Concealing Shadows next turn, so we want Favors Called Due in order to set it up. That leaves us 2 left over energy (after our normal income of 1 energy + 3 extra energy from growth) which we can save for next turn.  Thanks to the elements on our cards we unlock our innate, Darkness Swallows the Unwary. It's a fast power, so we can use it before the invaders take their actions. The stacked presence on the range icon indicates that it can only be targeted from Sacred Sites, not just any of our presence; our starting site should work, but we'll put another presence in the other jungle to build a sacred site there for future use. Gather is the opposite of push, moving pieces into the target land from adjacent lands. So we can target the inland wetland and yank the explorer out of the nearby coastal wetland, consolidating the invaders further.  Then it's the invader phase. First, the invaders ravage in the jungle. One of the Dahan is wiped out, and the other is wounded (shown by getting flipped upside down.) We're in the same boat, losing one of our presence to blight as the invaders cut their way through the fragile forests. Again, damage is applied simultaneously to the land and to Dahan--the invaders deal 3 damage to the Dahan and 3 separate damage to the land, so Dahan can't soak damage to prevent blight or vice versa.  The upshot is that the surviving Dahan get to counterattack. Like invader towns, Dahan villages deal 2 damage each--enough to destroy the town in retaliation (normally, all invader and Dahan pieces have health equal to the damage they deal.) Destroying towns through any means automatically generates 1 fear per town (and 2 per city), so this banks us another fear.  After ravage, the invaders build again. Invaders only build in lands that already contain invaders, so by preemptively emptying the coastal wetlands we stopped the build altogether. But the interior wetlands already have a town, so they build a shiny new city. That's... not great news. Worse, the invaders are exploring into mountains next, so that big pile on the coast is going to be a problem sooner rather than later.  That's it for the invaders this turn, at least, so now time for our slow cards. Favors Called Due gathers the scattered Dahan into the wetlands, although the casualties from this turn's ravage means they're not able to get the bonus fear from outnumbering the invaders. Damage wears off at the end of the turn, so the wounded Dahan village will be back to full health next turn--not that it matters, since we will be able to use Concealing Shadows to keep it safe regardless.  Crops Wither and Fade has a range of 0 and can only target lands with our own presence, but there aren't any towns or cities for us to target. Our special rule lets us pay 1 energy to target the wetlands now that there are Dahan there. Honestly the better play would probably be to play it on one of our empty lands just for the fear, but for demonstration purposes why not? That knocks the city down to a town and nets 2 fear (note that the city did not actually get destroyed, so the only fear we get is what's explicitly printed on the card.) Upon earning a total of 4 fear, we get to draw a Fear Card. This card will come into play before the invaders' next action and trigger some small random bonus for us. Fear cards start out generally quite weak but as you get towards the bottom of the deck they ramp up as the colonists get more superstitious about the unnatural spirits haunting the island. Progressing through the fear deck also advances us to higher Terror Levels.  Next up, time for growth. We have 1 energy left over and will earn another energy this turn, and our two remaining cards only cost 1 energy between them, so if we pick up another minor power we should be able to boost our card plays again and play all 3 (nothing in the minor power deck costs more than 1 energy.) Sadly, none of the cards drawn have a fire element, so we actually won't be able to trigger our innate this turn. I glossed over the first power card draw, but now that we've seen a bit more of the game I should probably cover what some of our options do: Uncanny Melting can remove 1 blight from a sand or wetland, which both nips potential cascades in the bud and replenishes the pool of blight. We do have wetlands that are about to get blight but it's not really going to be a priority, and the measly 1 fear on it isn't really enough to make it worthwhile. Dark and Tangled Woods is pretty nice: it's got a decent chunk of fear, and gives us a source of Defend. Defend effects reduce the total damage from a ravage, potentially preventing blight/Dahan deaths. But Shadows Flicker generally relies on using pushes to deal with small ravages and Dahan backed by Concealing Shadows to deal with big ravages, so having a smallish Defend doesn't really fit into our game plan that well. Encompassing Ward is a rare wide area effect Defend, but it runs into the same problem as above, compounded by the fact that it only affects lands with our presence--which are currently clear, and tend to remain clear since we have multiple range 0 powers to deal with them. Coupled with the complete element mismatch and lack of fear and it's a hard pass. Delusions of Danger is somewhat redundant with our innate power, but since we don't have the elements to trigger our innate power this turn it's an appealing replacement. It can also be used just for raw fear, although 1 energy for 2 fear isn't a great deal. So Delusions it is. That does mean all of our energy will be spoken for and we won't be able to afford the range boost from Shadows of the Dahan, so if we want to use range 0 Concealing Shadows in the ravaging wetlands we will have to place presence there ourselves (this is another reason Encompassing Ward is unappealing, since Shadows Flicker will often have its presence placement dictated by its range needs and can't often afford to plunk down a presence just to add a very minor defend.)  Veil the Night's Hunt can push these Dahan into the coastal mountains to help deal with next turn's ravage. Next, Delusions of Danger sends the explorer fleeing out of the inland mountains. Concealing Shadows also pops an extra fear and protects the Dahan in the upcoming big wetland ravage; I'll put a reminder marker there to note that Concealing Shadows is in effect.  Before the invaders act, we get to reveal the fear card we earned for a one-time boost. Each fear card has 1 of 3 possible effects; we start out at Terror Level I, so we only get to use the weakest top effect. Which means Delusions of Danger was largely redundant since the fear card would have let us gather up that explorer anyhow. Instead, I opt to consolidate the explorer left in the jungle into the wetlands; the jungle explorer wasn't going to do much anytime soon, but the fewer stray invaders there are scattered about the better.  And now the big ravage. Despite the big pile of invaders, each ravage normally can only blight once no matter how much damage it does. That knocks out my presence, but Concealing Shadows lets the Dahan all live to counterattack. Three Dahan x 2 damage a pop = 6 damage, enough to knock out 2 towns (2 health each) and 2 explorers (1 health each.) That wipes out a good chunk of invaders and the fear from destroying both towns earns another fear card in the process. The invaders have already started acting, so the new fear card will get triggered next turn.  Again, only one land builds as the interior mountains are empty. Invaders explore in sands next--but this time we get to leave the interior sands empty. Invaders can only explore where there's an adjacent town, city, or ocean, so if you can knock them out of the interior you get some breathing space. It may seem obvious that sands were the next exploration since they were the only biome left, but as it happens that was just luck. The invader terrain deck is composed of three stages (labeled I, II, and III) with their own sub-deck. The first stage has only 3 randomly chosen cards, so this turn's stage II card is drawn from a separate pool. If we were really unlucky we could have run into mountains again. (The e subscript on the sands card can be ignored for now--it's a feature of stage II cards that will only come into play at difficulties beyond the introductory level.) At any rate we have no slow powers in play, so it's time to grow again. But as we have no cards left in hand we're forced to reclaim our cards from the discard. This also lets us draw a new card, but the reclaim option does not get to place any presence, so we'll have to make do with the plays and energy we have.  Our card draw has multiple 0 cost powers, which is going to be very important. Call to Isolation might be appealing if we hadn't already found Veil the Night's Hunt: it's weaker and doesn't have the vital Moon element, but it's free. Visions of Fiery Doom is both good and bad for us. It's got the right elements and giving fear + invader manipulation at range 0 plays to our strengths... which also makes it sort of redundant a lot of the time. Shadows of the Burning Forest runs into similar issues and adds some targeting restrictions, but it's another freebie. Gift of Power is intriguing: it doesn't do anything for us right away but it would let us immediately draw a new power to use next turn, and has a wide element spread that at least includes Moon. But we need Moon+Fire to activate our innate, so Shadows of the Burning Forest is a must-have here.  Even though we have enough energy to play a 3rd card, I really, really want to play Concealing Shadows for this turn's mountain ravage--but the only way to reach it is to pay energy for Shadows of the Dahan. So we're going to sit pat with just our two cheap cards this turn and skip the 3rd card play. Leaving resources on the table like this is pretty painful and often means you got sloppy somewhere, but we're playing at a low enough difficulty that it's not a critical problem.  We still have just enough elements to power our innate, letting us draw out the explorer from the coastal sands before it can build. Then we pay 1 energy to activate Shadows of the Dahan to get Concealing Shadows on the mountains.  This turn's fear card flip is semi-relevant as we are facing a coastal ravage, but unfortunately there are just too many invaders. Each point of Defend reduces the total damage dealt by invaders by 1, and defend 3 just isn't nearly enough to bring this big pile under the critical threshold of 2 damage. This is why I had no interest in Dark and Tangled Woods even with a mountain ravage coming up; even if I had taken it and stacked it with the defense from the fear card (that I had no way of knowing was coming), I'm looking at 11 damage from these invaders, so even defend 6 (let alone defend 3) would leave the land blighted and the Dahan wiped out.  The upshot of paying to use Concealing Shadows at range is that it means our presence is safely elsewhere, so although we add another blight we don't have to worry about losing any presence. With the 3rd blight we've taken, we're halfway through the blight pool and will have to be cautious about additional blight: a single cascade will almost wipe us out. The two Dahan are safe to counterattack, taking out a city for an easy 2 fear. The leftover damage picks off a measly explorer: while taking out buildings is generally higher priority, invaders also return to full health at the end of the turn so there's not much point sticking nonfatal damage on towns if you don't have more damage coming.  With both sands empty, the invaders build absolutely nothing this turn which makes next turn's ravage a freebie. Wetlands come up again next; the inland wetland can't be explored as it has no adjacent settlements or oceans, but unfortunately it already has explorers left over from the last cycle. Unfortunately, Shadows of the Burning Forest can only target a land with invaders. Our only surviving presence is in empty lands and we don't have any energy left to pay for a range boost, so slow phase is a dud. That hurts, but at least it didn't cost any energy, and the elements it gave us let us use our innate to save one of the sands from a build.  Growth time. We've reached the point on our card plays track where progress slows down, but our energy track jumps from 1 energy/turn to 3, so our next growth is obvious. There's not much point in taking extra energy on top of that, so we pick up a new minor to pad our hand. Devouring Ants isn't too shabby for damage, but its elements are useless to us and we don't need to care about jungles or sands at the moment. Steam Vents has a Fire we need, but we already have issues trying to target all our range 0 powers. Gift of Living Energy is another support power, giving us some extra energy to play with for future turns and more importantly providing Fire. Gnawing Rootbiters is a decently strong control effect with awful elements, and we really want Fire for our innate, so Gift of Living Energy looks like a better bet.  We immediately play Gift of Living Energy to give us the fire we need. We can use the offensive option on Veil the Night's Hunt to have the Dahan take care of the inland explorers. Our remaining cards are largely redundant, but Delusions of Danger can get us some easy fear (and the 2nd Moon for our innate) while saving our higher impact cards for later.  Putting our presence into the sands gives us a Sacred Site with reach into the inland wetland, letting us use our innate to gather in the coastal explorer. Veil the Night's Hunt does 1 damage per Dahan to different enemies, which will conveniently wipe out the explorers.  Meanwhile, we rack up 2 extra energy from Gift of Living Energy (since we have 2 sacred sites now) and 2 extra fear from Delusions of Danger. This puts us a third of the way through the fear deck, increasing the invaders' Terror Level. This gives us the more impressive 2nd level effects from future fear cards, and also changes our win condition: instead of having to wipe every last invader off the island, now we win as soon as all towns and cities are gone. At this point the explorers are too shaken to hang around and continue their attempts at colonization without support from larger settlements.  The newly boosted fear card can immediately take out one of the two remaining towns, putting us within a stone's throw of victory.  We get a free pass on both ravage & build this turn as neither sands nor wetlands are occupied, but the next terrain card flips as mountains. That might complicate our victory push as we don't have anything that can get rid of a town before they have a chance to build there, which means they'll be building a city. We don't have anything to do in the slow phase, so it's time to grow. We've got 3 energy banked and another 3 coming, which we can easily increase to 4 with our next presence placement. That seems like an opportune time to try for a major power.  The first thing to notice is that major powers run way more expensive than minor powers. The second thing to notice is that every single major power comes with an elemental threshold, similar to the ones on our innate power. Major powers represent a more substantial shift in a spirit's nature than minor powers, so these open up new directions to focus your elements on. We can't hit any of the thresholds at the moment, although The Jungle Hungers has some overlap with our native elements and we could hit it with the cards in our discard. Right off the bat there are three different ways to solve the impending mountain build->ravage cycle (and also the game): Tsunami would easily wipe it out after it builds. Paralyzing Fright would prevent it from building a city, leaving a town that I could deal with. The Jungle Hungers can't do anything about the city before it gets built... but Crops Wither and Fade can, and The Jungle Hungers would take care of the rest. Entwining Power is the odd man out here as a team-oriented support card, so we can safely ignore it. Overall this is a really good draw. Even with draw 4 pick 1 you can't always count on finding something that will deal with your most immediate problem, let alone having your pick of options. The Jungle Hungers is a favorite of Shadows Flicker, so let's go that route.  Picking up a major does require you to permanently forget one of your spirit's cards. You can forget from hand or discard, so generally it's to your advantage to forget from your discard so that you're not losing an immediately playable card. I jettison Gift of Living Energy, not that it particularly matters at this point.  The Jungle Hungers + Crops Wither is enough to secure the victory at this point, but I throw in Mantle of Dread for the elements in order to show off the next level of my innate. Each threshold is cumulative and sequential, so for 3 Moon/2 Fire I can gather an explorer into a land and then destroy up to 2 explorers for fear in the same land I just gathered to.  There's no additional explorers to gather regardless, so I just delete 2 explorers from the mountains and pick up a few fear.  The invaders proceed to build a city on schedule, and an explorer sneaks into the jungle.  Mantle of Dread shoves the explorer back out, and Crops Wither replaces the last city with a mere town (they also earn 4 fear between the two of them to rack up another fear card, not that it matters at this point.)  More importantly, this sets up the land to be wiped clear by The Jungle Hungers taking out every last explorer, town, and Dahan (sorry friends  ). That's the game! The mod detects that the island is free of invaders and brings up a brief after action summary. Overall I certainly could have done better--this is usually not the recommended opening route for Shadows Flicker, but I figured it might be helpful for demonstration purposes. I also could have cut the game very marginally shorter with a little help from these guys:  Last turn I could have skipped my innate and played Gnawing Rootbiters + Favors Called Due + Delusions of Danger, using Delusions to skinny down the explorer pile in the inland wetlands and Rootbiters to shovel the remaining mountain towns into the wetland where Favors Called Due could get me a big pile of Dahan. Then all I would have had to do this turn would be to reclaim and play Concealing Shadows so that all the towns would be wiped out by the big wetlands ravage + counterattack for an easy Terror Level II victory before the mountains even had a chance to build. If you care about playing for "score" there is a score displayed on the detail popup is based in part on how many cards are left in the invader deck, so if you can hit a win condition during the ravage you get a couple extra points over waiting for slow phase (since the invaders will have explored another card by then.) I could claim that I wanted to deliberately drag the game out to show off major powers, but I honestly just didn't see the move at the time. It's an important lesson in not letting yourself get too blinded by your innate elements: while it's generally a good idea to draft for elements early on to maximize your options later, as you approach the endgame you should focus more on what elements do for you right now and whether that's worth it compared to juicier off-element effects. In my defense, I'm used to playing at higher difficulties and would not normally be looking for opportunities to finish off the game this early.  Our peaceful island. The colonists did a number on the island and its Dahan population (or at least we're chalking it all up to the colonists), but both of them will recover in time. The island's reputation will keep invaders away for a good long while, and the spirits that make the island unique will be able to continue existing. Overall, playing at the introductory level is easy enough once you know what you're doing. The steepest part of the game's learning curve is dealing with slow actions: it's quite common as a new player to find yourself saying "oh good, I've got a meaty slow power to throw at that town that's about to build" only to realize that oops, there's now a city there and the power you had earmarked to deal with that land is now entirely inadequate. There are a ton of modular difficulty options and they're certainly not all going to be this easy, but for now it's a fairly straightforward puzzle. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Mar 30, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 18:17
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Super cool! I'm looking forward to hearing an experienced player's strategies for various spirits. I've only played the digital version, and it feels like the computer is doing a lot of work to manage the actions of the invaders. In the actual tabletop game, do you find it really fiddly to keep track of everything, or is it not too much?
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Mar 28, 2023 20:17
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Seems cool so far.
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Mar 28, 2023 20:46
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s__herzog posted:Super cool! I'm looking forward to hearing an experienced player's strategies for various spirits. The invaders aren't a big deal to keep track of. Some of the expansion features can be more of a pain.
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Mar 28, 2023 20:55
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Very neat. I was dogshit at this game the first times I tried so it's cool watching someone good at it.
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Mar 28, 2023 20:55
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Zurai posted:The invaders aren't a big deal to keep track of. Some of the expansion features can be more of a pain. Yeah, the core invader action loop is very straightforward and I've never found it that hard to track. Some of the higher level invader abilities can be very easy to forget, though. The big ones are generally nasty enough that you're not going to overlook them, but some of them have random fiddly bullshit stapled on. Mostly I find it more difficult to keep track of spirit powers: did you use that power yet, did you ever use your innate, did you take fear from that, oh wait that one was an illegal play because it can't target that terrain, etc. That's where I find the digital version really handy.
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Mar 28, 2023 21:01
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I love Spirit Island so much, it rules.
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Mar 28, 2023 21:32
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Yeah, it's great. I haven't played so much of it yet since I've got small tables and a relative lack of quiet time to play it in but I want to really get deeper one of these days.
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Mar 28, 2023 21:34
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Glad you picked Shadows That Flicker Like Flames for the first spirit: It was the very first spirit that I ever tried and I fell in love with it (and the game). I know it's considered weak, but it's still fun to play and the lore for it is great, and some of the variations that are present in latter expansions for it do make the spirit a lot better.
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Mar 28, 2023 21:47
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How many expansions does this game have?
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Mar 28, 2023 21:56
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NewMars posted:How many expansions does this game have? Three expansions: Branch and Claw (two spirits, some new cards, and new mechanics), Jagged Earth (a fuckton of new spirits, new mechanics, including the mechanics from Branch/Claw (but not the two spirits and all the cards)), Feather and Flame (four new spirits). One standalone game with compatible components: Horizons of Spirit Island. This is just Spirit Island, limited to three players, with all cardboard components, but the assorted cards and five new spirits are compatible with the base game. One upcoming expansion that's not out yet: Nature Incarnate. It's like Jagged Earth in that it's got a fuckton of new spirits and some new mechanics.
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Mar 28, 2023 23:23
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I love this game a lot. I hope you use Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares at some point because, despite 50+ games under my belt, I just can't figure out how to use him well!
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Mar 28, 2023 23:24
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I'm looking forward to seeing more of this! I've been intrigued by this game ever since it first came out (the concept is just wonderful), but I never quite got around to picking up a copy and haven't actually played it.
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Mar 29, 2023 03:58
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Do we get to vote on which spirit you play as? Will there be audience participation? Neat game, by the way.
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Mar 29, 2023 11:19
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This is maybe my favorite tabletop game ever, I’m so glad it’s getting an LP. I thought about doing one when the Steam version came out but ultimately I decided I didn’t really have the time to do a complete one. Smart to get Shadows out of the way before the higher difficulties, heh.
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Mar 29, 2023 13:44
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Kanthulhu posted:Do we get to vote on which spirit you play as? I think I have a fairly set notion for how I want to introduce content. When I get to Jagged Earth I'll probably put those spirits up to a vote, because there's a lot of them and they're cool as hell and by then I'll have shown off enough of the game that there'll be no real point trying to introduce the simpler ones first.
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Mar 29, 2023 14:08
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Yeah, this game is wonderful. Playing each spirit gives you an empowering feeling in such a different way.
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Mar 29, 2023 14:23
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Very cool, this game is great and can always use more love. Quick screenshot tip, F11 will hide your UI in TTS which should make those images a bit cleaner. Phelddagrif fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Mar 29, 2023 |
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Mar 29, 2023 23:21
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I'm enjoying this so much that I'm bookmarking it after forgetting to click on Let's Play for years at first out of being very busy and then out of sunk costs, but if I could make a single request anyways: please make the cards a bit bigger so they're easier to read as currently they are very small.
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Mar 29, 2023 23:25
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Oh yeah, this was one of the things I wanted to bring up:quote:
Special rules are at the lower left of the spirit board, or at least most of them are. There's a similar mistake just below this in the explanation of the Power Card format.
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Mar 29, 2023 23:55
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AweStriker posted:Oh yeah, this was one of the things I wanted to bring up:  I swear I hardly ever do that, no idea how I managed it twice.Phelddagrif posted:Very cool, this game is great and can always use more love. Thanks! I don't do a great deal of TTS, I figured I was missing something.
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Mar 30, 2023 00:31
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In times like this, I wish I didn't have to deal with shipping to Australia. Importing board games is too expensive. At least there's a Steam version, I suppose.
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Mar 30, 2023 01:32
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Huh. This is neat.
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Mar 30, 2023 02:42
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I love love love Spirit Island, certainly on the shortlist for 'favorite board game.' It's also got good, rich lore that the main dev has talked about in, like, old forum posts, mostly about the spirits and their history, and that sort of stuff can usually be found on the game's main wiki. The MJ + iakona mod is great, too! Very interested to see how this goes.
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Mar 30, 2023 03:26
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 Back again for another game! This time I'm going to be bumping up the difficulty a notch. You'll notice two new things on the invader board: the first is the Blight card, which adds another step between the island being healthy and being dead. While this sounds like the opposite of a difficulty increase, note that the blight pool is substantially smaller to begin with. Emptying the initial blight pool is no longer a game over, but it will cause the blight card to flip over, giving us a second blight pool to work with but forcing us to contend with the effects of decay as the ecosystem begins spiraling. Playing with the blight card generally means you can afford more blight before you lose, but you start facing consequences from blight much more quickly. (The cascade rules also mean that having extra blight available makes less difference than you might think, because the more blight you add the fewer "safe" spots to add blight remain.)  The second change is the presence of an Adversary card. This is the game's main source of scaleable difficulty, adding various bonuses and special abilities to spice up the invaders vaguely themed after various European colonial powers. There is some attempt at alternate history flavor text behind the adversaries to account for why the adversary selection is what it is. In actual history the colonization game was dominated by a few great powers, so in order to allow for a more diverse selection of adversaries the history of Spirit Island's world was rewritten a bit to allow for a few more powers to be credible colonizers. In our actual history, Prussia did attempt several colonial ventures but never managed to progress much beyond a few trading ports. Which were specifically slave-trading ports, so it's probably for their ambitions were cut short. In this timeline, a grand alliance between Sweden, Russia, and Prussia (there are several smaller changes that made this outcome slightly more credible, which we'll get into when we look at other adversaries) resulted in the expansive lands of Poland-Lithuania being dismembered much more quickly, giving all three powers considerably more resources and accelerating Prussia's ascent. With an expansive Prussian kingdom and secure eastern borders, Frederick William (now Frederick I of Prussia, ahead of schedule) was able to throw considerably more effort into carving out overseas colonies to use as a release valve for his newly conquered subjects. Each adversary has 6 different difficulty levels that extend the fear deck and add new abilities, but for now we're going to ignore those and just use the base abilities of Brandenburg-Prussia. It only has one, which is a rules change built into every adversary: the invaders now have an Escalation ability, which makes stage II invader cards a little bit nastier.  To face them, we have a new spirit: Vital Strength of the Earth. Like Shadows Flicker, Vital Strength is described as "low complexity" and is another recommended beginner spirit. Personally, I think the base game doesn't do a great job with this; while the low complexity spirits are mechanically straightforward, their limitations can make them counterintuitive compared to technically more complex but more well-rounded spirits. Nonetheless I'm going to go ahead and stick with them for now.  The important part for me is that Vital Strength of the Earth plays very differently from Shadows Flicker; the diversity of playstyles among the spirits is one of the game's strengths. There are two main gimmicks here. The first is that you're all about defense: your special rule gives you free passive defense in lands with Sacred Sites, and your starting cards skew defensive as well. This makes Vital Strength very forgiving, but it can also trap you into being overly passive. No amount of defense is going to convince the invaders to leave, so it's important to remember that all your defense is just a tool to buy breathing room to persuade them.  The second is that Vital Strength is all about BIG CARDS. You've got huge numbers on your energy track, and you need them, because your card plays are very slow to ramp up and your starting cards are too expensive to play bunches of anyhow. Your innate also plays to this theme, letting you (or a teammate) use a card a second time. Unfortunately, it's one of the most demanding innates in the game considering how anemic your card plays are. With so few card plays you don't have a ton of elements to go around, so it's often a bit of an afterthought. Vital Strength's growths are a bit odd; like Shadows Flicker there's a growth option for "add presence and gain a card", and a growth option for "add presence and gain energy", but they're both noticeably worse with shorter ranges and less energy. But it also has the rare option to reclaim cards and add presence (with decent range too.) Compared to most spirits Vital Strength doesn't mind reclaiming early and playing the same cards, and when you're adding presence every turn you can progress through the presence tracks at a very decent clip.  Speaking of cards, let's take a look. Two of your starting cards require a Sacred Site, reinforcing the idea that you want to clump presence together instead of spreading out. Year of Perfect Stillness will shut down invaders completely in a land for a turn. It's expensive, but can put in a ton of work. Guard the Healing Land removes a blight and adds defense on top; both are really good effects but it's pretty awkward to get much use out of both of them simultaneously, so it often winds up being overpriced defense or blight removal. Rituals of Destruction is potentially a doozy, but it's tough to set up (are you noticing a theme?) A measly 2 damage is terrible for how expensive this is, but getting 3 Dahan together when you only move them 2 at a time and don't have many card plays to spare is tough. The payoff is absolutely fantastic when you pull it off, though; this is the kind of firepower you'd expect to see on a ~5 energy major. Draw of the Fruitful Earth is a strong flexible gather, capable of either yanking explorers out of newly explored lands or piling Dahan together (or both!) Again, it can be tricky trying to get use out of both effects at the same time, but the price makes it much less painful when you need to use it for just one or the other.  With so many expensive cards, we're going to start working on the top track for some more energy. If we want to spread out our presence at all we have to take the rightmost growth option for even more energy, too, which is going to be important for targeting. We don't have a lot of use for Guard the Healing Land or Rituals of Destruction, and Draw of the Fruitful Earth isn't necessarily going to accomplish much, so it seems like A Year of Perfect Stillness is the obvious play. Note that this TTS mod includes a counter for energy with some built in bookkeeping scripting--I opted to use the physical presence tokens last game to help demonstrate expenses, but this is faster and easier (albeit decidedly unthematic.)  The first explore is on jungles, and the closer jungle already has our presence so we can easily upgrade it to a Sacred Site before it ravages to activate our built in defense. So A Year of Perfect Stillness prevents down a build on the other jungle. It's tempting to save Perfect Stillness to block big ravages: being able to shut down an arbitrarily large pile of invaders feels very powerful compared to blocking a build that adds just one town or city. But again, that's the trap of playing defensively. Shutting down a ravage does nothing to improve the board state in the long run, better to stop those buildings being built in the first place if you can.  The invaders explore wetlands next. We're already halfway to a sacred site in the blighted wetlands, so this works out nicely for us.  Now we're at turn 2 and time for growth again. We're just going to be adding to our existing presence to set up sacred sites, so it's an opportune time to pick up a power card. We're building up a nice enery surplus for now, so we can also start in on the bottom track to work towards 2 plays. Our power draw doesn't do a lot for us in terms of innate elements. Devouring Ants is a pretty efficient damage card that's a decent match for our innate, but isn't going to do much to wetlands. Having such demanding elemental thresholds gives Vital Strength a bit of leeway to say gently caress it and write them off altogether, so I take and immediately play Call to Migrate instead: having that much Dahan movement on tap is tremendously valuable for setting up defend-counterattacks and Rituals of Destruction. (Note the green stripes on the corners of three of the cards: different colors are used to earmark different cards for the recommended newbie power progressions on the beginner spirits, and green is for Vital Strength itself. Usually they tend to be better element matches but here the power progression serves to illustrate that Vital Strength doesn't need to be beholden to its innate.)  I've got no fast powers this time around, so we launch straight into the invader phase. Our Sacred Site provides defense 3, completely soaking the town + explorer attack; the lone explorer in the other jungle tries to provoke the Dahan and is immediately wiped out in retaliation. (Technically the Dahan village there should be wounded, but I have a bad habit of ignoring damage that I know isn't going to have any effect.)  The invaders build in the wetlands and explore sands next, so I'm going to have to do something about the coastal city. I use Call to Migrate to gather in the rest of the coastal Dahan; it has both a gather and then a push, so technically it enables you to gather Dahan from an adjacent land and push them to a different adjacent land (effectively letting you move them across 2 lands), but right now I want them piled in the sands.  Turn 3 means we can finally move up to 2 cards per turn. We're still stacking up our existing presence, so I'm going to grab another card while I can. Encompassing Ward is an interesting option as it would stack with our passive defense, but I choose to go for Elemental Boon instead. In a solo game it's effectively a dead card, but it's a dead card with whatever elements you want--Call to Migrate does nothing for us there, so I figure I might balance it out with a pure element play. We are certainly going to want to pivot to major powers at some point, and having a flexible element card might make the difference on hitting a threshold.  I've got my second card play now, so I drop Draw of the Fruitful Earth + Rituals of Destruction. This incidentally is the easiest way to trigger Vital Strength's innate.  They're both slow, so again we go directly to the invader actions (technically our Gift of Strength innate is a fast power, so Vital Strength amps itself up, but it doesn't actually do anything until we play one of our other powers.) The central wetland is defended by our sacred site, allowing the Dahan to counterattack and clear out the invaders, but the other wetland is blighted. We still have Guard the Healing Land in our hand, so it would have been entirely within our power to stop that blight. But again, that's the trap of playing passively and reactively. Spending 3 energy and one of our precious few card plays just to stop a blight is giving up too much to the invaders; we can't afford to do that every time, so better to try to get ahead of the invaders and save that defense for when it will make more impact. (ED. NOTE: I made a mistake here and grabbed the blight from the wrong place--the current blight pool should be down to 2. I will correct it before it becomes a problem, though.)  The sands both build, and the first stage II card flips. You will notice that it has the same symbol as the Escalation ability on the adversary card, so we trigger the adversary's escalation ability: in this case, we add a town to a land of our choice that doesn't already have one. Escalation occurs before exploration happens, so if you have a safe zone cleared this can force you to place a town in a spot that will spawn new explorers.  Joke's on them though--Vital Strength is awful at building safe zones! I opt to stick the new town in the coastal mountains.  Now for the fun part: with 3 Dahan available to power up Rituals of Destruction, I can deal 5 damage to knock out both the town and the city, plus earn 2 free fear for a total of 5. We're just now earning the first fear card--it can take Vital Strength a while to get going, but when it does, watch out.  For my next trick, Draw of the Fruitful Earth gathers 2 of those Dahan back into the center...  ...and then my innate allows me to repeat it to gather 2 of them into the other sands, as well as pulling 2 explorers in from the corner wetlands. I have a Defend 4 in hand which will take this pile of invaders down to 1 damage, enough to prevent them from doing any permanent harm while leaving them exposed to Dahan counterattacks. The classic Vital Strength combo move is to use Rituals + Draw, using Draw repeated by Gift of Strength in order to gather up 3 Dahan to set up Rituals. Having drafted a bigger Dahan move let us set up Rituals last turn, freeing up Draw of the Fruitful Earth to set up a big defense: not only can I pull in Dahan for a bigger counterattack, I can also pull in more explorers so that all that defense doesn't go to waste.  That's it for our big turn. We need to spread our presence out again, so we take extra energy instead of a new card. Draw the Healing Land is our only play this turn as Elemental Boon does nothing at the moment--technically we could use it to activate the first tier of our innate, but the only card that meets the cost requirement for the repeat is Elemental Boon. We could repeat Elemental Boon to get even more elements, but they wouldn't do anything for us since we would have already used our innate to repeat Elemental Boon in the first place.  Paying 3 energy for defend 4 hurts, but at least we were able to set up a big counterattack with it.  We flip our fear card at the start of the invader phase, and it's a nice one. Not many terror I effects will remove towns outright. The downside is that the requirements on it are fairly steep and can easily whiff for many spirits, but when you're built around sacred sites and tend to stall invaders instead of getting rid of them it's handy. Given a choice between the towns in the jungle or mountain sacred sites I pick the jungle since it has an extra explorer hanging around.  Ravage time. Both sands ineffectually ravage and are immediately wiped clean by the Dahan.  The wetlands build up for round 2, and explore reveals a card we haven't seen before: coastal lands. Invader stage II is one turn longer than stage I, so there's a fifth terrain card in addition to the four basic terrains. Notice that the coastal lands card does not have an escalation attached since it covers 3 different lands instead of 2. It's a bit of a trade-off: on the one hand, it means one extra ravage. On the other hand, it's much harder to block the escalation from adding a town and it can add towns in very inconvenient places. Overall the coastal lands card is usually a little bit tougher than regular terrain + escalation, but it's a little more predictable in that you know it's probably coming.  Time to reclaim. Being able to add a presence while reclaiming brings us up to 3 plays, letting us bring out some of our bigger guns; we're running well ahead of our energy income, but picking up a few early minors let us build up a bit of surplus. I need to do something about the big corner wetlands ravaging, so Guard the Healing Land is a must. I could bring out my Rituals combo to nuke the coast, but I'm going to keep it in my pocket for now; Year of Perfect Stillness should handle one of the coastal builds, and by playing Elemental Boon I can rack up the elements to charge Gift of Strength up to the 2nd threshold to repeat Perfect Stillness.  Guard the Healing Land removes a blight from the inner wetlands, and adds enough defense to prevent another blight this turn. If I had left it alone the ravage would have caused a cascade, so with my big 3 energy defense I've turned a +2 blight ravage into -1 blight, a much better use than if I had played it the first time this wetland ravaged. Removing blight from the island returns it to the blight pool, replenishing your buffer. At this point I realized that I had accidentally taken an "extra" blight when I added this blight originally, so I throw this one out of the game. The blight pool is now back where it should be for the state of the board.  Both wetlands are adequately defended against the ravage, and the Dahan in the middle wipe out the invaders via counterattack.  Two of the three coastal builds are shut down by Year of Perfect Stillness. The invaders explore mountains next, which could be nasty--Year of Perfect Stillness is still in effect on the coast so no new explorer is added there, but that matters less than the fact that the coastal mountains are about to ravage twice in a row (once on the coastal card, and then again on the mountains card.) I stick the escalation town in the central wetlands.  Our energy surplus is basically spent, so I need to pick up another minor to keep our average card cost down while I work on improving the energy track. Pull Beneath the Hungry Earth is pretty decent damage and it at least hits our main element, but right now I'm focused on those mountains where it would be less effective. Gift of Power is an even better elemental match, it's cheaper, and will let us fish for even more cards.  With both mountains about to build cities it's definitely time to bust out Rituals again. Call to Migrate will set it up more efficiently than Draw of the Fruitful Land, and Gift of Power will provide the elements I need for a repeat.  Last turn's ravage earned us another fear card and it's another card that works out nicely for us. Yeah, it only picks off explorers and can't empty lands, but when you've got lots of invaders spread around it will chisel away at quite a few lands at once.  The sands are defended by my presence, letting the Dahan there defeat the town 1:1. The undefended mountains pick up a blight.  Both mountains get their own cities. The invaders hit jungles again next, doubling up on explorers and triggering an escalation town that I stick in the sands.  Here's where Call to Migrate comes in really handy. There's only one Dahan that can be gathered into the coastal mountain, but by playing Migrate on the jungle I can gather that Dahan + the two from the central wetlands into the jungle and then also push those 3 from the jungle into the mountains. Even if I used my repeat on Draw of the Fruitful Land the best I wouldn't be able to move more than 2 into the mountains where I need them.  That allows me to nuke the coastal mountain clear for a total of 5 fear, getting another fear card and taking me to Terror Level II. There's quite a bit more buildup this time around, so I'm still a ways off from eliminating all the towns.  Not having to use my repeat to set up Rituals means that I'm free to repeat Gift of Power on myself for two minor draws--there's nothing in Gift of Strength that says you have to repeat a power on a land! It's a very choice spread: Sap the Strength of Multitudes is fantastically efficient defense, Call to Bloodshed is great damage when you have as much Dahan movement on tap as I currently do, and Call of the Dahan Ways is one of the few ways to add more Dahan while also potentially removing a town outright. But I think I'm all about that Drought: if you can hit the threshold it does way more damage than most majors can dream of for all of 1 energy. For a spirit that is better at soaking blight than eliminating invaders it's an amazing pickup.  D-D-D-DOUBLE POWER. Who says Vital Strength of the Earth has poor card gain? Nature's Resilience and Dark and Tangled Woods would both be enough to defend the inland mountain (I already have Defend 3 there from the sacred site), but I don't want to just play defense. Purifying Flame gives me a Sun towards the threshold on Drought and can either sneak in a little bit more damage or clean up after it.  That's our last action of the turn, so we come back around to growth for MORE CARDS. We hit the big jump on our energy track and only have cheapo cards in our hand, so now we're finally going to break into the majors deck. Infinite Vitality is largely redundant with our defense, and I'm looking for a more permanent solution than Terrifying Nightmares. Powerstorm is a blast and it's sorely tempting to take it and go on a Drought-fueled rampage, but looking at the state of the wetlands and jungles I think Accelerated Rot is just what I need. Gift of Power goes into the trash for the major power tax, I think I have enough cards by now.  Our energy income exactly pays for our 3 most recent pickups.  The fear card is another powerful but limited one, and this time it whiffs. It adds a lot of defense as long as you haven't let your Dahan get wiped out, but it does nothing for you unless you're already risking Dahan lives. Note that I've added a 3rd presence to the mountain stack, since I know it's going to get blighted shortly.  Mountains ravage, adding a blight and knocking out that extra presence. The jungles both build towns, and the first Stage III invader card flips to explore both mountains and jungles. This is why being too defensive turns into a trap, because the invaders get tougher to deal with as time goes on. Worse, we're now on a clock: invader stage III is double terrains, invader stage IV is you lose. At that point the invaders are too committed and too established to give up and the island drowns in a wave of colonists despite the spirits' best efforts.  So, let's get on with things. Purifying Flame cleans up the blight in the mountain, allowing me to safely throw Drought at it. Accelerated Rot almost wipes out the coastal jungle and racks up some bonus fear on top; between the two big cards that's 6 fear, putting us within a stone's throw of Terror III. (I goofed and forgot to add the blight from Drought, although I already took out the presence that it would have destroyed--it doesn't matter if invaders or spirits add blight, either way it kills spirit presence. The blight will be there in the next shot.)  The nearness of Terror III is crucial, because it gives us a path to victory without having to deal with too much of stage III. We're down to 1 card in hand so it's time to reclaim, returning our full toolkit to our hand. But we only need 2 cards here.  There are 4 builds incoming but only one of them is set to build a city, which Year of Perfect Stillness can stop--while also skipping a ravage that would overcome the sacred site defense.  We've got 2 fear cards queued up. Ultimately neither matters, but this one does leave the coasts a little clearer by downgrading that town.  The big ravage is skipped by our power and the small ravage doesn't do any real damage. A lot of smaller invaders are added, but we don't need to worry about them:  Because now Accelerated Rot comes out again, earning 2 fear and dealing 4 damage to take out the last remaining city in the wetlands for another 2 fear.  That's just enough to tip us into Terror III, and with no cities left the surviving invaders immediately bail. The Kingdom of Prussia abandons its unsuccessful colony: the land was too wild and the natives were too stubborn for the colonists to build a lasting foothold. When the last major settlements are consumed by a strange and unnatural rot they decide their meager gains are not worth it, some even alleging that the island itself is cursed. Back in Berlin these superstitions are chalked up to malcontents and malingerers who lacked the spine to stand up to some primitive savages--after all, most of them were mere Polish peasants, without the discipline of proper Prussians. But word spreads among Europe's sailors and adventurers, and attempts to organize another expedition fail to gain traction...  Back on the island, the victory is tinged with bittersweet notes. Even on Spirit Island this is a virtually unprecedented amount of activity for the spirits. The vast majority of spirits are far too small to effect any real changes spanning entire towns; the few spirits powerful enough to easily do anything about the colonists exist on such an immense timescale that the most active among them have not even begun to notice any unusual activity among the humans on the island. It is a tremendous effort of growth and concentration for any spirit to try to keep up with humans while also mustering the strength to make widespread physical manifestations, especially for a spirit to whom change does not come easily. Vital Strength of the Earth has grown far beyond its bounds to become a harsh force of cleansing and now it slips into an exhausted state of senescence among the greater spirits. The Dahan will long venerate their mighty protector, but no more does it speak to them, having transcended to existence on a scale altogether beyond their comprehension. This was a little bit of an unusual route for Vital Strength of the Earth; again, the most common play is to hit the juicy energy track harder and pick up an early major. But your starting cards + innate can do plenty of work if you get the right draws, so once things started to line up I decided I might as well show off that route. The trick is that you definitely want to capitalize on your immense amounts of starting defense by focusing on offense & Dahan support rather than doubling down on more defense. On a larger board with more spirits there's sometimes room to specialize more and go full defense to cover for other spirits going full offense, but in a solo game you have to be able to pull your own weight offensively. Even with some juicy counterattacks and a few decent sized nukes we went a couple cards into Stage III, and we're still a long ways off from any real challenge. On the flip side--or rather, the flip-less side--we went the whole game without having to turn over the blight card, despite the very thin margin of blight it leaves you with (no Dahan losses, either.) That's the upshot of playing a defensive spirit, so we'll have to wait for another game to actually see the blight card in action.
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Mar 30, 2023 18:19
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A very down to earth strategy. No earthquake powers on the earth spirit?
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Mar 30, 2023 19:40
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Kanthulhu posted:A very down to earth strategy. There are several earth spirits. This one is specifically a very defensively-minded spirit, so earthquakes are a little out of its wheelhouse. I'm pretty sure there's an earthquake major power, though. There are also other earth-ish spirits with a more offensive/less passive bent (including one that's rather... explosive that I hope we get to see go off).
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Mar 30, 2023 20:29
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Yeah. It's not the earth spirit, just one of many possible earth spirits. There's nothing stopping it from picking up earthquake-themed powers, but its nature is more nurturing; its innate needs Sun+Plant in addition to Earth, which aren't elements that you will find on earthquake powers.
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Mar 30, 2023 20:41
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Zurai posted:(including one that's rather... explosive that I hope we get to see go off). Eagerly waiting to see such an extrusion of information
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Mar 30, 2023 21:01
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You know what you must do now, to show the exact opposite kind of game: play Heart of the Wildfire. I wouldn't recommend Wildfire solo: it's doable, but you basically win or lose within the first few turns.
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Mar 30, 2023 23:58
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I have this game and I put it next to Imperial Struggle and Struggle of Empires for some reason.
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Mar 31, 2023 21:01
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That extra blight you had actually might be intentional from setup, depending on if the module auto-set up for you. Eager to see the eventual Ocean playthrough 
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Apr 1, 2023 20:12
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Nope, the TTS mod already includes that errata. I started at 3 on the card, then I accidentally picked up a blight from elsewhere, then later I removed it and realized I had somehow ended up with 4 on the card so I deleted one. (With the errata, you can still easily get to 4 on the card in solo by simply removing the starting blight from your board. But I never did, so I shouldn't have gone above 3.)
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Apr 1, 2023 20:19
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My favorite spirit combo is Ocean's Hungry Grasp and Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares. Bringer drives them to the coasts where Ocean simply devours them. You can't really get rid of inland cities so you're committed to running out the fear deck, but this combo has no trouble generating metric fucktons of fear anyway, so...
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Apr 2, 2023 12:41
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I've heard of this game and it seems pretty neat, I'll be watching quietly. From looking at the options, Thunderspeaker intrigues me.
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Apr 2, 2023 22:44
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Spirit Island rules. I transformed one of my coworkers from someone who never plays boardgames to a serious gamer who backs a half dozen boardgame kickstarters by hosting a 4P game once. Looking forward to when we get to the expansion spirits, there’s some really fun ones there.
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Apr 3, 2023 02:01
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Junpei posted:I've heard of this game and it seems pretty neat, I'll be watching quietly. From looking at the options, Thunderspeaker intrigues me. Thunderspeaker is my favorite. Before Jagged Earth came out and we branched out, I ran Thunderspeaker through all of the historical invaders with a few of my store's regulars, it was great fun and I never got tired of playing Thunderspeaker. I still pull them out sometimes, even though I usually randomize spirits now, they're like a comfort food.
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Apr 3, 2023 03:46
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Think my favourite spirits are either Lure of the Deep Wilderness or Volcano Looming High. The mosh pits created by Lure are incredibly satisfying to pull off and just having these absolute hell-holes that are basically inimical to human life is absolutely satisfying from a thematic level. That's what I love about the game, the level of convayance portrayed by the spirits, how they mechanically work and what their theme is, is absolutely outstanding.
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Apr 3, 2023 10:58
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Ultiville posted:Thunderspeaker is my favorite. Before Jagged Earth came out and we branched out, I ran Thunderspeaker through all of the historical invaders with a few of my store's regulars, it was great fun and I never got tired of playing Thunderspeaker. I still pull them out sometimes, even though I usually randomize spirits now, they're like a comfort food. I’m very bad at sacrificing Dahan and not feeling bad about it, so Thunderspeaker is my favorite as well 
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Apr 3, 2023 11:56
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