|
Fat Samurai posted:I’m very bad at sacrificing Dahan and not feeling bad about it, so Thunderspeaker is my favorite as well This is a very big part of it for me too, I especially love when Thunderspeaker gains access to a way to add dahan, either via teamup or the deck, and you just end up with this island full of angry folks punching invaders. Extremely fun. That said, Tekopo posted: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. This is also extremely correct. I like the Steam client a lot more than TTS for electronic play, but I really miss all the Jagged Earth spirits. There are tons of them and so many of them are just awesomely thematic.
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2023 19:01
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 7, 2024 12:55 |
|
|
 I've shown off 2 of the 4 recommended beginner spirits, so now I'll show off the other 2. Having two spirits in play means a larger island as well as larger fear and blight pools. It's harder to keep track of everything this way, but the game itself tends to get easier: for one thing, it cuts down on variance and makes an unlucky draw on one board less catastrophic. For another, a lot of spirits tend to have synergy that makes paired spirits stronger than the sum of their parts.  And as it happens, the two remaining beginner spirits happen to be one of the highest synergy spirit pairs in the game (certainly in the base game box, and arguably even compared to expansion spirits.) River Surges in Sunlight is the most support-oriented of the starter spirits, although it's also fairly well rounded in general.  Its partner here, Lightning's Swift Strike, is one of the most support-hungry spirits in the game. Both spirits have a lot of facets that play off of each other really, really well, but the crux of the relationship is that Lightning is very good at turning any support you can give it into invader murder, and River is extremely good at feeding it.  In order to help the invaders keep up, I'm bumping the adversary up a couple levels. Prussia is a very straightforward adversary in general, and outside of the escalation there's no special rules that change gameplay beyond setup. Instead, they get to accelerate the invader deck, sneaking in an early Stage III card. Honestly, it's not enough. With this duo I could go straight up to the maximum difficulty and it wouldn't be close. I want to keep things simple for now until I get back into the habit of running two spirits manually though, and this preserves some sense of progression.  Let's get a closer look at River Surges in Sunlight. Its presence tracks are actually longer than Shadows Flicker or Vital Strength (which, since it has the same total number of presence tokens, means it starts with fewer on the island) but to compensate it actually gets the option to place two presence at once. Its tracks also have a feature we haven't seen: one of the spaces on the card plays track is "Reclaim one." Once that space is uncovered, River Surges gets to reclaim one card from its discard every turn (starting that turn.) Its tracks aren't too shabby otherwise, either.  Its special rule is simple even by the standards of the beginner spirits: a single presence in wetlands counts as a Sacred Site. It's not flashy, but its innate makes good use of it. In a lot of ways it's a slower, harder-hitting version of Shadows Flicker's innate--instead of scooping up explorers before they build, River normally waits for them to build and then pushes the town out. The top level threshold turns it from a control power into a nuke, so generally River wants to use its pushes to shove towns together into a big pile to obliterate with its innate later.  As for its cards Wash Away is more of the same, giving River fairly absurd amounts of town pushes. River's Bounty is the obligatory Dahan power; it's not terribly great at moving Dahan and River lacks any built in defense to capitalize on it, but it effectively costs -1 energy and it can create new Dahan. (Although it's tempting to view this as pushing two Dahan villages together to make a baby, thematically this more represents creating food surpluses to free up a greater proportion of the Dahan to actively participate in warfare.) Flash Floods is a very handy fast damage power. Most of the time it does 1 damage for 2 energy, which isn't terribly efficient but in a pinch being able to delete an explorer before it builds can be worth it. But on coasts it deals an extra damage, and 2 fast damage for 2 energy is both efficient and hugely worth it. Boon of Vigor is the real headline here. If you're playing solo or feeling greedy it's +1 energy, which isn't an amazing use of a card play. But like many support powers it gets better when you share it with a friend...  ...especially if that friend is Lightning's Swift Strike. Like River Surges in Sunlight, Lightning has a double presence placement option. It also has extremely lopsided presence tracks and can conceivably hit 6 card plays on turn 2. Actually getting the cards or energy to do anything with them is another story altogether, though. You do get a burst energy growth option, but it comes at the expense of having a presence + card option--the only way you gain cards naturally is through your reclaim. You have insane amounts of card plays, but don't have the energy or card gain to consistently use them; you can sort of fix the card gain issue via repeated reclaims, at the cost of giving up on placing presence.  Your innate turns those card plays into large amounts of invader destruction. It's refreshingly direct, but the thresholds are very demanding. Like River Surges, Lightning's special rule helps supe up its innate even further. For every air element you have in play, Lightning gets to use one of its slow powers during the fast power phase instead, turning an already hard-hitting slow innate into a breathtakingly fast one. Getting this kind of destruction in the fast power phase is hard to come by naturally.  Lightning's cards also lean slow, but they all have Air, effectively making them free fast phase. On the other hand, they're also quite expensive overall, exacerbating your energy issues. Shattered Homesteads is a solid workhorse power. A little expensive, but the range is extremely valuable as Lightning is built to reclaim frequently and may not be able to get its presence everywhere it needs. Raging Storm is generally considered terrible. It's theoretically a lot of damage, but in a form that's tough to capitalize on. It doesn't play nicely with Lightning's instakill powers and needs additional damage to destroy anything more threatening than explorers, but damage powers tend to be pricy and Raging Storm is prohibitive by itself. It is, however, literally the only way Lightning's Swift Strike can do anything about explorers by default. It's also the only card with all 3 of your innate elements, and the power decks aren't a lot of help there either, so hitting the higher level thresholds of your innate often means playing more than 5 cards. Lightning's Boon is a support power that gives any spirit a version of Lightning's play-slow-powers-fast special rule. Technically you can play it on yourself, which can occasionally be relevant--if you pick up a bunch of slow minors with Fire but not Air then you'll need some extra help to make them all fast. But most of the time it's kind of dead weight in solo games or when your partner has mostly fast powers. Harbingers of the Lightning is your only 0-cost starting card, so it's a good thing it's pretty decent since you wind up playing it a lot. It's got your primary elements and gives you a lot of Dahan movement and a steady trickle of fear. Since you're terrible at controlling explorers you can use the Dahan to clean up explorers that ravage after you blow up the towns they built, which helps keep the board clean but doesn't preempt builds (or subsequent explores from towns that just got built.)  Because Lightning's Swift Strike is so hungry for presence and energy, a lot of experienced players prefer to sit turn 1 out to build up energy and get more presence out. But since I've got River in play I can afford to be more aggressive with a big opening, taking the single presence + energy option to afford splashing 3 cards right at the start. River's opening is perfectly conventional, with two decent invader pushes between Wash Away and the Massive Flooding innate.  The initial explore comes up wetlands. The board segment that Lightning starts on here is a little unusual--it's the only board segment that doubles up on a coastal terrain, and it's got a weird shape to boot, stretching all the way up the side into what would normally be inland territories. That gives Lightning better coverage from its starting sands than it would get on some boards.  Lightning's Boon makes River's pushes both fast, allowing River to immediately sweep all the explorers into the mountains.  Meanwhile Lightning opens explosively, using its innate to immediately nuke the town in its starting land. Raging Storm snipes a lone explorer, which would be incredibly efficient but with the starting town gone it could potentially prevent exploration into the interior. Boon of Vigor immediately recoups most of Lightning's spent energy for the turn, and Harbingers consolidates some Dahan into the coastal city for +1 fear.  We're down to 1 build between the two boards, but thanks to the extra starting town from Prussia level 1 it's a city. The explore card is jungles too, meaning that Lightning's effort to isolate the interior doesn't actually do anything. All of our slow powers went off during the fast phase, so that's it for that turn.  At this point River could speed down the bottom track to ramp up its innate, but I opt to go for a more balanced approach and bank energy. Lightning isn't likely to be bringing out any majors, so I might as well keep that option open for somebody. Having played most of my hand turn 1, Lightning has a pretty slow turn 2, although at least it's a decently high impact card. Lightning's turns often have a boom-and-bust tempo to them due to its energy and hand size issues.  The double presence from Lightning gives it some badly-needed reach, allowing it to take out the town in River's backfield. River returns the favor by using Flash Floods to destroy an explorer, preserving Lightning's clear zone.  The only ravage is in the built up coastal wetlands, which immediately blight. Most of the jungles build, and sands explore--minus the inland sands on Lightning's board, thanks to River's timely intervention.  River uses its innate to push one of the new explorers into the mountain with his buddies. River's Bounty consolidates some Dahan and adds a new one for +1 energy.  Both spirits are out of cards and need to reclaim, which means cards for both. In River's draw Call to Tend is the only on-element card, but I already have a lot of Dahan movement and no real way to capitalize on it. Quicken the Earth's Struggles is a fantastically hard-hitting card with the rather strict range requirement of range 0 from a sacred site... and River gets easy sacred sites and has an easy time gathering Dahan at range 0.  Lightning has a similar choice, with Call to Migrate having optimal elements but being rather expensive for a lot of Dahan migration that's a bit superfluous right now. Rain of Blood is sort of on-theme and is very spammable; while most spirits might prefer higher-impact cards to spend their limited plays on, Lightning gets to play this almost every turn for very appreciable fear income.  Turn 3 winds up looking a lot like turn 1, although Lightning swaps in Shatter Homesteads over Storm and gets to add Rain of Blood for free.  Again Lightning's Boon speeds up both of River's pushes, letting it clear out the jungle towns ahead of the ravage. Wash Away pushes out the explorer too, although I opt to push them in different directions: the town gets shoved into the already-blighted wetland, while the explorer gets sorted into the explorer pile in the mountains.  Harbingers pushes a fourth Dahan into the coastal jungle, where Shattered Homesteads takes out a town. Lightning's innate kicks in and takes out the town in the closer board's coastal mountains, and then Rain of Blood racks up an easy 3 fear to flip the first fear card.  Conveniently there's a land with a city about to build, too.  The coastal jungle in front is down to a single explorer which gets safely mopped up by the Dahan, but the further coastal jungle ravages for 4 damage, taking out two Dahan and dropping a blight. The surviving two Dahan counterattack and avenge their fallen, clearing the land of invaders.  Only one sand builds, but unfortunately it's enough to create a launching point for Prussia 2's early stage III card. Both inland mountains fail to explore, although obviously the one on River's board has plenty of explorers already.  Rather than suffer another slow turn Lightning reclaims again. I would dearly love Elemental Boon since both spirits have strong innates that could be powered up and they even have a little bit of overlap in their elements, but right now I need some explorer control ASAP so Veil the Night's Hunt is what I'm after.  River moves up to 3 plays and flushes out the rest of its hand. Lightning goes big and dumps everything but Rain of Blood, burning through the surplus from last turn's Boon of Vigor.  First, River goes to work setting up defenses. Quicken the Earth's Struggle gives a whopping 10 defense in the coastal sands, and River's Bounty pulls in some Dahan to set up a counterattack. River's innate adds yet another explorer to the explorer pile.  Lightning promptly annihilates the pile with Raging Storm, and uses Harbingers to move the Dahan out of the empty blighted jungle. One heads inland to deal with the explorer in the mountains, the other goes into the wetlands to trigger the +1 fear rider on Harbingers.  Veil the Night's Hunt lets that Dahan kill the explorer, and Flash Floods cleans out the inland jungle for a second time. Shattered Homesteads blows up the town in the sands ahead of the ravage. (In retrospect I'm not sure why I didn't push one of the Dahan there to finish off the explorer in the counterattack.)  All of that does push us to a new fear card, although it doesn't have much immediate impact and I think I forget about it later.  The coastal sands ravage is futile in the face of River's massive defense, and the Dahan counterattack wipes out the invaders in response.  Only 3 towns are built--pretty nice, considering there are 8 mountain or jungle lands on the island. Unfortunately we're into stage II now and the escalation does add 2 additional towns, which I opt to stick into the just-cleared sands. And sure enough, I forgot about the fear card and added an explorer to the inland blighted wetland even though it has 2 Dahan there.  I already used most of my powers in the fast phase, but I chose to hold Lightning's innate in reserve for slow phase so that I could take a town out after the invaders' build. That finishes out one turn.  Lightning takes a 3rd consecutive reclaim, which is not particularly unusual. The card selection leaves a lot to be desired, with no 0-cost cards and no fire elements anywhere. Delusions of Danger would be attractive if I didn't already have Veil the Night's Hunt for explorer control, but it's a bit redundant right now and playing both gets a bit expensive. Still, it's about as good as it gets here.  River also needs to reclaim, and with this much energy we're overdue to pick up a major power. There are some solid options here; Mists of Oblivion is a pretty good nuke that synergizes well with the damage we already have, Terrifying Nightmares would let River double down on invader control while adding some much-needed fear, and Accelerated Rot is a solid beatstick as we've seen. The Land Thrashes is the odd one out here; it's got some fantastic rubberbanding when you're getting slammed by blight, but we're just not taking enough damage for it to be worthwhile. I decide to stick with my innate elements and pick up Accelerated Rot, replacing Nature's Bounty.  Even playing River's two biggest cards only cuts my stockpile in half. Meanwhile, Lightning has another sparse turn having blown its wad last turn. With only 2 energy I've got no way to trigger Lightning's innate--I need a 3rd fire and I haven't picked up any new cards with fire, so my cheapest 3 fire cards are 0, 1, and 2 energy. That makes Shatter Homesteads my only source of destruction this turn, limiting me to the 2 free cards.  Flash Floods on the coastal jungle is boosted to 2 damage to knock out a town, and Shatter Homesteads takes out the last jungle town while Rain of Blood pushes us over to a new fear card at Terror Level II.  The last couple of fear cards were passive effects, but this one gives us one choice to make per spirit. Or it would, except that there are precisely two inland lands with invaders, both of which are cleaned out due to the Terror II effect.  The double terrain ravage fails to do any real damage, and the Dahan clean out a couple explorers on River's coast. The wetlands on Lightning's board both build, and sands explore with escalation. Sticking the escalation town in River's coastal mountain keeps the inland sand free from explorers, but the newly built town on Lightning's board spoils our efforts to keep the inland clear.  In retaliation River smites the wetland settlement with Accelerated Rot. It's not the world's best offense, but the range does come in handy. Harbingers of the Lightning scoots some Dahan our of the safe interior towards the major wetlands build-up, although there's no opportunity to cash in on the fear rider.  Lightning notches yet another reclaim for its streak, and picks up Shadows of the Burning Forest to finally have a 0-cost fire minor. I opt to hold it in reserve; if this lasts another turn, I would like to have enough cards left in hand to maybe think about placing presence for Lightning instead of reclaiming. That's definitely if, though.  First, the setup. Lightning's Boon on River allows Wash Away to consolidate another town + explorer into the coastal wetland, while Accelerated Accelerated Rot erases the jungle colony. Meanwhile, Harbingers of the Lightning shepherds two more Dahan into the wetlands...  But rather than set up for a counterattack, I use the "1 damage to every town/city" option on Quicken the Earth's Struggles, comboing it with Raging Storm to wipe out every single explorer and town.  Veil the Night's Hunt deals 1 damage to 1 target per Dahan, cherry tapping the remaining two cities. Lightning's Thundering Destruction innate blows up one of the remaining two towns. I haven't reached Terror III yet, but the invaders are down to a single town maintaining the colony.  And the next fear card immediately causes them to bail. I almost had a board wipe but a single explorer was left after the fear card.  Although early European explorers to the island described it as a tropical paradise, probably having had the good fortune to arrive in one of the brief seasonal lulls in the island's rainfall, the earliest Prussian settlers were greeted with torrential rains and terrifying lightning storms completely outside their comprehension or ability to cope. Even the few footholds they managed to carve in the island's interior were wiped out or evacuated in response to the island's unpredictable flooding. Nonetheless, despite the island's notoriously bad weather the principal settlement of Neu Berlin grew into a thriving port, its estuary harbor a welcome sanctuary from the tropical storms that lashed across the greater part of the island. Refugees from failed settlements further inland ballooned its numbers, and Neu Berlin might have easily come into its own as a vital part of Prussia's fledgling colonial empire. But disaster struck for the Prussians: a once-in-a-generation storm ravaged the city with terrifying winds and lightning, along with even heavier than normal rains that loosened the already-swampy foundations of the river delta and unleashed a wave of mud that toppled buildings and swallowed them whole. Awestruck settlers wrote that it was as though "the angry hand of God itself scooped up the earth and dropped it on our heads." Many of the city's homes were destroyed overnight, and in the wake of the storm tensions rose between the settlers and the Dahan people that previously inhabited the island. The Dahan were more accustomed to the island's hostile weather patterns and migrated their settlements regularly to avoid calamity, but the colonists saw these migrations as evidence of a sinister foreknowledge and blamed their misfortune on the Dahan. It is unknown who struck the first blow afterwards, but in the aftermath the bedraggled colonists were driven away from their ruined homes. When the survivors reached the remaining settlements on the opposite coast, a consensus was quickly reached to abandon the colony. The Dahan, on the other hand, have their own stories. The elders speak of a time when they were young, when the angry rivers were instead playful and abundant and the skies were not dark and sinister. Their grandchildren are used to hearing them complain that the fruit was sweeter, the fish were fatter, and the girls were prettier, and so most of them just smile and nod when their elders tell the stories of life before the storms came... most of them. Those that have learned to hear the spirits themselves nod, but they do not smile. I definitely sandbagged a little bit on River--most openings gun the plays track much more heavily to get to that big top level innate very quickly. There can be valid reasons to go deeper into the energy track; you can still max out your innate soon enough, and get to mix in more majors to make up for it--but it's very hard to go wrong just spamming River's full starting hand to max out your innate. I apologize if these victories are starting to get a bit boring; going 2 spirits at time I should get through the more basic stuff in a few more games, and then things will get a bit more interesting.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2023 21:48
|
|
|
You just repelled Prussia from the Catatumbo river, didn't you?
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2023 23:42
|
|
|
Interesting you didn’t take Reachin Grasp with lightning over Rain of Blood. I generally love it as a many-cards partner to River because it can help with lands further from wetlands and is great with River’s Bounty, and it’s especially juicy since River just got Quicken. I’m also higher on Raging Storm than you are because while it’s obviously not a great rate early on it teams up well with various cards, including the otherwise rarely used 1 damage to all buildings mode on Quicken.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2023 05:58
|
|
|
Omobono posted:You just repelled Prussia from the Catatumbo river, didn't you? I had not actually heard of this phenomenon, that's pretty cool. Now I wonder if that was actually an inspiration for anything.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2023 06:01
|
|
|
Very impressed with the river spirit. Seems like it would pair well with any other team mate tbh
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2023 11:13
|
|
|
I'm enjoying these ending vignettes. They're a nice touch.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2023 13:12
|
|
|
DGM_2 posted:I'm enjoying these ending vignettes. They're a nice touch. IIRC there's a suggestion in one of the expansion that a final stage take place after the 'ending', where players discuss how the Spirits have changed as a result of taking new Major Powers in order to drive off the invaders, and come up with new names for them.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2023 13:19
|
|
|
Hmm... Rain of Blood wasn't a major power, but given how often Lightning's Swift Strike spammed it I'd go with something like "The Sky Weeps Blood and Lightning" for a new name.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2023 13:46
|
|
|
Ultiville posted:Interesting you didn’t take Reachin Grasp with lightning over Rain of Blood. I generally love it as a many-cards partner to River because it can help with lands further from wetlands and is great with River’s Bounty, and it’s especially juicy since River just got Quicken. I’m also higher on Raging Storm than you are because while it’s obviously not a great rate early on it teams up well with various cards, including the otherwise rarely used 1 damage to all buildings mode on Quicken. It's a tough call, Lightning loves good 0-cost minors and those are both good 0-cost minors. If I was going for a more conventional River build then Reaching Grasp probably would have won out: if you make a beeline for 4 plays on River, you will probably wind up doing almost as many back-to-back reclaims as Lightning, which means you don't put out a lot of presence and can run into targeting issues. For that matter, if things had shaken out differently and Lightning wasn't able to get as good a position I might have needed it on Lightning, but the only land on the top 2/3 of the island that wasn't adjacent to one of the Lightning sacred sites (necessary for the innate destroy) was the jungle that got zerg rushed by Dahan right away. If you think I was rough on Raging Storm, I've seen some players say they will literally never play it. I think it's in the same boat as a lot of Vital Strength's 3-energy starting cards, in that it does something theoretically strong, but difficult to use efficiently. I find it's very teamwork-dependent, in that Lightning struggles both to get enough energy to play it and get enough damage out to combo into anything useful. Sometimes paying 3 energy to snipe an explorer can be the difference between being able to clear a safe zone vs. having a permanent inland invader presence, though. Kanthulhu posted:Very impressed with the river spirit. Seems like it would pair well with any other team mate tbh It's extremely well-rounded, especially when you're looking at it alongside the other recommended beginner spirits, which are generally not. The closest thing it has to a "weakness" is that it isn't great at dealing with cities, which is... ok, yeah, the hardest type of enemy in the game is hard, what else is new? Sure, spirits with decent defensive/stall powers can block early city ravages that River has no option but to take on the chin, and really aggro spirits can blow cities up very early if they have to. But often the best play is to let early ravages go when you can't deal with them efficiently, in order to build up faster and deal with smaller problems more efficiently and proactively... so River usually winds up forced into what is generally good strategy anyhow. The Lone Badger posted:IIRC there's a suggestion in one of the expansion that a final stage take place after the 'ending', where players discuss how the Spirits have changed as a result of taking new Major Powers in order to drive off the invaders, and come up with new names for them. I contemplated doing this more explicitly but decided not to make a habit of it because there's not always going to be much of a thematic thread and at some point I would wind up stuck with River Had Really Stupid Draws or Lightning Does Random poo poo Because It Was Useful At The Time. I figured the little narrative vignette would be a good way to incorporate a little bit of the lore and flavor without tying myself to trying to describe a theme every time. DGM_2 posted:Hmm... Rain of Blood wasn't a major power, but given how often Lightning's Swift Strike spammed it I'd go with something like "The Sky Weeps Blood and Lightning" for a new name. There's a general theme in Lightning's minor drafts of being dark and spooky: Rain of Blood, Delusions of Danger, and Shadows of the Burning Forest are all 2+ fear, and Veil the Night's Hunt is darkness-themed, so call it Dark Skies Weep Blood and Lightning and I think you're probably about set.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2023 15:16
|
|
|
the holy poopacy posted:It's a tough call, Lightning loves good 0-cost minors and those are both good 0-cost minors. If I was going for a more conventional River build then Reaching Grasp probably would have won out: if you make a beeline for 4 plays on River, you will probably wind up doing almost as many back-to-back reclaims as Lightning, which means you don't put out a lot of presence and can run into targeting issues. For that matter, if things had shaken out differently and Lightning wasn't able to get as good a position I might have needed it on Lightning, but the only land on the top 2/3 of the island that wasn't adjacent to one of the Lightning sacred sites (necessary for the innate destroy) was the jungle that got zerg rushed by Dahan right away. Makes sense on the Grasp, just figured I'd sing its praises a bit since it didn't get a callout in your post. I love Lightning in any case, I find Lightning's Boon can be an incredible support card for a lot of spirits that either have big slow powers in their starting loadout or that tend to be frequent Major Power users. A really fun spirit IMO (but then, almost all of them are). As for Raging Storm, I feel like the people who say they will literally never play it are really underselling how good it is against Russia if nothing else...
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2023 22:38
|
|
|
I enjoy your ending vignettes and hope you continue them! Also, out of curiosity, how gameplay-accurate is the art on the support power cards? Since they tend to show a specific spirit receiving the boon, is the shown spirit usually a good target for said boon?
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2023 07:40
|
|
|
This LP got me to try out the game, and I can already agree with some other people here: Thunderspeaker sure is a lot of fun. Especially on the Dahan Insurrection scenario.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2023 01:58
|
|
|
Apologies for the delays--I had gotten most of the way through the next update and then realized I had misplayed a critical rule in a bigger way than "oops, forgot to do something that will be fixed when it becomes relevant." It might be tomorrow before the next post goes up.
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2023 14:47
|
|
|
 This time I'll be showing off the second adversary included in the base box, the Kingdom of Sweden. Sweden was a legitimate great power during the early colonial period and had a sprinkling of outposts in the Carribean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, and even briefly held a foothold in North America along the Delaware. Ultimately, though, the Scandinavian population was too small to support a colonial empire and a series of decisive defeats at the hands of Peter the Great resulted in Sweden losing the eastern Baltic, curtailing its ambitions and relegating it to a regional power at best. The Spirit Island timeline for Sweden deviates during the reign of Gustavus Adolphus, one of the most powerful Swedish monarchs in history. In this timeline he narrowly dodged his early death during the Thirty Years' War, going on to secure an alliance with Russia against Poland and also fathering a son to pass the crown to in lieu of his daughter Christina (who was a fascinating person, but a reluctant and ineffective monarch.) The continuing Vasa dynasty defeated and conquered their rival Denmark, leaving control of the Baltic largely a settled issue. This left Peter the Great with a completely different calculus when he came into power; by this point Sweden was not only a longstanding ally of Russia but also a virtually unassailable force in the Baltic. Consequently Peter the Great was persuaded to abandon his ambitions for a Baltic port, accepting Baltic access through a friendly power in exchange for aid developing Murmansk to have a year-round Atlantic port instead. This pact of friendship freed both Sweden and Russia to turn their expansionist agenda elsewhere. Despite Sweden's change of fortunes in the alternate timeline, mechanically the invader rules for Sweden are still largely informed by the demographic limitations of Scandinavia. Compared to other adversaries, Sweden doesn't flood the island with as many colonists; instead, it makes a relatively smaller number of settlements that punch above their weight. Where Prussia supplies pressure via accelerating the invader deck, Sweden is all about aggressively pushing blight. There's a little bit more rules overhead as Sweden actually changes gameplay in addition to setup, but because it's all ravage-focused it's still pretty easy to keep track of. Sweden's population woes do show up in one other aspect: Sweden's escalation allows it to recruit Dahan to join the colony, needing people more than they need land. Prussia and most other adversaries hit each board segment exactly 1 time with their escalation, but this one can hit 0-2 times depending on how your Dahan are arrayed. Even if it only hits once per board, getting extra towns dropped on you at the same time that you lose allies hurts worse than most escalation effects. The upshot is that you can potentially dodge the escalation if you're careful with your Dahan positioning; if they stick to large groups away from existing settlements then you won't have to worry about them. The timing is also favorable, because it's delayed until after the explore step is done--the escalation will never drop a town that will immediately send out explorers into previously-unreachable territory.  In order to cheese the escalation effect, I'm bringing out the most Dahan-oriented spirit in the game: meet Thunderspeaker. Thunderspeaker's backstory demonstrates some of the game's lore about the changeable nature of spirits, as a spirit of thunder whose fate and nature has become interwined with the Dahan. It's still a spirit and not a person or even a person-like entity, but it understands and interacts with the Dahan much more than most.  We're out of the low complexity beginner spirits now and it shows, because there's a lot more going on here. More special rules, more innate powers, more stuff on spirit tracks. At least Thunderspeaker's growths are familiar and straightforward. Thunderspeaker's are all pretty powerful but they're relatively specialized, so you get to pick one thing and do a lot of it: the growth that gives you cards gives you more cards than most spirits, the growth that gives you energy gives you more energy than most spirits, the growth that gives presence has more targeting flexibility than most double presence growths. In return Thunderspeaker's spirit tracks are a little subpar, but some of that is made up for by having elements on its tracks. These just add to the elements you have in play from your cards, so if you play two cards with Air and have an Air element uncovered on your track then you have 3 Air in play for the purpose of meeting element thresholds. You also get a Reclaim One space, just like River.  Thunderspeaker's main rule gives it an insane amount of mobility. Naturally you have a lot of Dahan movement at your disposal, with lets you move your own presence very freely. Your second rule is actually a drawback, but it's a minor one, giving you extra penalties for letting Dahan die to ravages. But that's already something that you don't really want to have happen, and which you're generally quite good at avoiding, so it doesn't actually come up that much... and when it does it probably doesn't do much, since Thunderspeaker's mobility means you can easily afford to lose some presence without crippling your coverage.  Not only does Thunderspeaker have two innates, they're a little more complicated than what we've seen before, with non-overlapping thresholds. Every threshold is independent and the order doesn't matter for which thresholds you can hit, only the order in which they are activated. The 4 Air thresholds change the speed of the power, but they aren't a prerequisite for the thresholds below them. Gather the Warriors is even more complicated because it counts elements independently of its thresholds. As we've seen before, gather-push powers provide a lot of movement on tap, but it does require a minimum of 1 Animal power (or other element source) to get it going and then you have to get plenty of Sun and/or Air to make the most of it. Lead the Furious Assault is a fairly straightforward destruction power like Lightning's Swift Strike, but it scales with Dahan in addition to elements. Amassing 4 Dahan is not a heavy lift for Thunderspeaker, so being able to destroy 2 towns with a very easy threshold is generally ahead of the curve. Thunderspeaker only starts with one Sun+Fire card, though, so getting the bigger threshold can be difficult.  Thunderspeaker's starting cards all have Air, so between that and the early Air on Thunderspeaker's energy track the fast power threshold is pretty easy to reach. But there are only 3 Sun, 2 Fire, and 2 Animal between the 4 cards, so your other innate thresholds can be tricky to juggle sometimes. The big one obviously is Manifestations of Power and Glory, which is pretty much just broken. On paper it's balanced; if you only have 1-2 presence in a land then the damage is in line with other Dahan powers for its cost, and accumulating 3+ presence in a land is very costly and constraining for most spirits. But Thunderspeaker is not most spirits. Sudden Ambush is a bit expensive in both energy and setup if you just wanted to snipe a lone explorer and it's missing your Sun element, but the flexibility to take out piles of explorers when you have Dahan available is very useful. Words of Warning is also a little bit subpar: Defend 3 for 1 energy is pretty bad (especially with the Dahan requirement, but that's trivial for Thunderspeaker and you often don't want to bother with small defends if you can't counterattack anyhow.) It's an important source of Animal element to activate Gather The Warriors, though. Voice of Thunder is fantastic, though, and very spammable. Push 4 Dahan is huge, and if that's not good enough it's a perfectly serviceable fear card if the Dahan are already where you need them to be. Thunderspeaker's Dahan demands are heavy enough that you'll probably be mostly using it for the big push but it's nice to have a fallback use.  Our other spirit this time is A Spread of Rampant Green, one of the strongest support spirits in the game as well as just a general all-around powerhouse.  If Thunderspeaker's growths are a bit juicy, Rampant Green's growths are absolutely insane. It's a little more complicated than normal, being split into two parts: every growth always has a presence placement (terrain-limited), and then it also gets to pick one normal growth. In effect, your three growths are: 1. Place presence in J/W, reclaim cards, gain a card 2. Place presence in J/W, place a presence, gain an extra card play for the turn 3. Place presence in J/W, gain a card, gain 3 energy These are all just stupidly good--you could chop off the last part of any of these options and it would still be on par with the average growth option! Your tracks are even worse than Thunderspeaker's, which does keep things in check somewhat, but overall you still accumulate a lot of resources.  Green's special rules are also quite strong. If you have a sacred site you can just outright cancel a build or ravage, at the cost of a presence. For most spirits that would be an expensive but valuable swap, but Rampant Green gets to spam a lot of presence and its second rule means that it's not even a permanent loss--where most spirits are stuck with their remaining presence after they finish emptying their spirit tracks, Rampant Green gets to place destroyed presence back on the board. (It should be noted that for all spirits placing presence, you're allowed to take a presence that's already on the board instead of a presence from your tracks, so even if your tracks are empty you can at least use presence placement to relocate existing presence. Obviously, being able to place destroyed presence is much better.)  Because all that somehow isn't enough, Green also gets two very well-rounded innates, getting both offense and defense built in. The ranges aren't great, with range 0 and a sacred site requirement respectively, and they're not terribly powerful--in particular, the Creepers Tear Into Mortar doesn't actually do anything by itself until you hit the 2nd threshold since you can't target explorers and need 2 damage to put down a town. But you get a lot of flexibility being able to just get a decent amount of offense or defense from elements alone, especially since the abundance of Plant element means you only really need to worry about your secondary elements.  And after all that, Green still has some whoppers in its cards. Do note though that none of them have booth Moon + Water, so early on you will have to pick and choose which innate you want to focus on. The big one is Gift of Proliferation. 1 energy for 1 presence. It's fantastic even by the standards of support cards, and support cards tend to be slightly overtuned on purpose to make them feel more appealing compared to board impact cards. Then you have Overgrow In A Night, which is basically just Gift of Proliferation again but worse, and is still a card that makes most spirits jealous. Note that your special rule is specific to presence placed as part of growth, so once your presence tracks are empty you can't use Overgrow to regenerate lost presence, it just turns into a very expensive fear power. But by the point your tracks are empty you will probably want to start looking into major powers, so this probably gets pitched anyhow. Fields Choked With Growth is a very nice, efficient push power. 0 energy slow town push is fine, and it's got the flexibility to turn into Dahan movement when you need it. You have built in defense via your innate so sometimes it's better to set up a counterattack to get rid of a ravaging town than it is to kick the can down the road by pushing it elsewhere. Stem the Flow of Fresh Water basically just exists to combo with your Creepers Tear innate, although it has no moon element on it. But it does mean that Stem the Flow + any moon will let you kill a town, which isn't too shabby.  The invaders' initial explore is sands. I'm not sure I can combo 2 cards profitably right now, so I'm going to pick card + energy to start with for Green. It's an interesting draw, but with Thunderspeaker in the mix those Dahan powers look really tempting. Veil the Night's Hunt might have been the right play since it has Moon element and Rampant Green doesn't mind having to spread damage around since it can rack up damage easily, but there's a sands next to Green's corner that has 2 Dahan and is about to build a town just begging for me to drop Call to Bloodshed on it.  Thunderspeaker takes the big energy to get two card plays. Sniping an explorer with Sudden Ambush is always a strong opener and Voice of Thunder can set up big things for next turn.  I place a presence on the mountain Dahan and gather it in to take out the explorer in the blighted sands.  Everything else builds, and the next explore flips jungles, which means that thanks to Sweden's extra starting cities and damage bonuses I'm scheduled for two 9-damage ravages in 2 turns.  Call to Bloodshed takes out a desert town as planned, and Thunderspeaker uses both Voice of Thunder and the Gather the Warriors innate to amass an army of 4 Dahan to confront the jungle city.  Next turn I plan to make good use of the pile with Manifestations of Power and Glory, and Words of Warning will take care of the other ravaging beach town while also activating both innates. Rampant Green goes big with the double presence + card play growth, playing both presence accelerators and Stem the Flow to queue up a lot of damage.  Fast phase is mostly prep. The double presence growth and Overgrow in a Night are Rampant Green's only ways to get presence into something that's not jungle or wetlands, and combining them lets me pop up a sacred site in a single turn to cancel out the big ravage. Words of Warning is juuuust enough defense to cover a 1 town + 1 explorer ravage with Sweden's damage boost.  Green cancels out the big ravage and the Dahan soak the little one and counterattack to wipe out the invaders. All four jungles build; I'd really like to cancel out the coastal build by spending a presence, but I need to keep my sacred site intact for targeting Stem the Flow of Fresh Water. The last stage I invader card is Mountains.  Slow phase brings a lot of offensive powers out. Manifestations blows up the big jungle pileup on Thunderspeaker's board, and the Furious Assault innate takes out the town in the other jungle. Green uses Creepers Tear Into Mortars; with 2 moon + 3 plant I get to repeat it for 2 damage on the sand city, and Stem the Flow finishes it off (and damages the town uselessly, since I have no more damage before it heals.) All this carnage gets me a fear card. I use Gather of Warriors to consolidate Dahan positions on Green's board; next invader flip is going to have an escalation effect and I don't want to have Dahan scattered around to get picked off.  Green is down to 1 card, so I take another card + energy growth to pick up another card to play. Lots of defensive plant cards, which is not what Rampant Green needs, but Elemental Boon is usually a slam pick and I can definitely put it to use here.  Thunderspeaker has to reclaim and gets a double card pick. Sap the Strength of Multitudes and Quicken the Earth's Struggles are both great (mostly) off-element cards for Thunderspeaker since you can convert defense into counterattacks very efficiently, but I'm all about that Drought. Second draw is not quite as juicy, although Rampant Green would have loved some of these element draws. Call to Migrate is on-theme and mostly on-element but is largely overkill. Reaching Grasp has useful elements and will come in very handy for Rampant Green--using Green's special rule often leaves it with mediocre presence coverage and it has range issues on its innates, so being able to largely ignore range is a big help.  Rampant Green plays the rest of its cards. Thunderspeaker leads off the next hand with Manifestations again, backed up by Voice of Thunder. It's missing the all-important Animal element, but I have Elemental Boon to pitch in an animal as well as an air to boost Thunderspeaker to the 4 Air threshold for fast phase innates. For the 3rd element I just pick moon to open up Creepers Tear; it's unlikely to actually do anything, but I have nothing else to do with it.  Having Thunderspeaker's innates fast lets me my 4 Air to gather all the remaining Dahan on the south board for safety from escalation effects. Since I'm unlikely to have any other chance to use Furious Assault I just delete the town in the sands; it doesn't really do anything, but it will at least make it easier the next time sands comes around.  The fear card earned last turn helpfully clears out the remaining explorer. Unfortunately, keeping the Dahan clustered away from invaders means I don't have a lot of options for fear cards like this; the only other land that has Dahan + invaders is a lone explorer in the jungle that's about to get counterattacked into oblivion.  The jungle ravages are canceled out by Green spending presence. All four mountains build, and the first stage II card turns out to be coastal lands, so I didn't have to stress about avoiding escalation anyhow. That's an awful lot of buildings headed my way though.  I take care of one of them by using Voice of Thunder to push the whole Dahan pile from the jungle into the coastal mountain and immediately nuke it with Manifestations. I had wanted to use Choke to push the coastal mountain town into the wetlands to set up a big Drought, but with an extra explorer there pushing the town isn't enough anymore, so I use it to clear out the adjacent mountain instead.  Next turn, Green finally reclaims and takes a card. Enticing Splendor is ok, but it doesn't have the all-important secondary elements for my innates. Savage Mawbeasts can do some work, Rampant Green likes being able to destroy explorers efficiently and it can combo with Creepers to kill bigger buildings. But Lure of the Unknown gives efficient explorer control while having better elements. Land of Haunts and Embers is pretty bad; you can use it to stop a build or ravage, but only at the cost of the blight you would get from the ravage anyhow, so you're usually just getting 2 fear and consolidating invaders into what may be a bigger problem later anyhow.  I still need to do something about that coastal mountain ravaging with a town + 2 explorers. With Sweden's boost that's 5 damage, so if I bump Green up to the 2nd level on its defense innate I can defend it down to a safe 1 damage. That takes both water cards. Thunderspeaker wants Drought to nuke one of those coastal buildups, but I also want Sudden Ambush to take a build off my plate, so I'll need Elemental Boon from Green in order to make it work. That also lets me toss in an extra Air to get my fast innates, which will be important for handling the inland mountain ravage. Reaching Grasp gets me cheap elements and also lets Green stretch its powers a bit.  Sudden Ambush takes care of the coastal sands before they build, while Thunderspeaker's innate combo pulls in a couple Dahan to tear down the mountain town. Green's defense takes care of the last mountain ravage.  The coasts build, and sands explore next. At least I don't have to worry about the coastal explorer as it will get taken care of by coastal ravage before it has a chance to build.  Drought nukes the coastal city + town, queuing up a fear card. With the boost from Reaching Grasp, Rampant Green can use Choke the Fields to send some Dahan into the other coastal wetland to set up a counterattack. I could have used the push option to shove the town into the other wetland (or elsewhere), but I'm looking to deal with it more permanently.  Next turn. Thunderspeaker is down to a single card, but another presence placement gets me to the Reclaim One spot, allowing me to grab Manifestations from my discard pile which should give me plenty of impact even with only 2 cards. Meanwhile Green dumps the rest of its cards using the presence + card play growth, powering Creepers Tear into Mortar up to its highest level and giving me some juicy powers to use to boot.  Fast phase is mostly about prep. I play Words of Warning to defend the northern coast, while Overgrow in a Night finishes setting up the south coast. Lure of the Unknown yanks an explorer out of the sands to preempt a build. Gift of Proliferation lets Thunderspeaker add yet another presence to the big pile, which will come in useful momentarily. With only two cards I don't hit the 4 Air trigger to make Thunderspeaker's innates fast, so that's it for fast powers.  The fear card helpfully lets me delete another explorer in sands, as well as upgrading the last pull into a removal.  Green stops the big ravages in the south cold while Thunderspeaker's defense + counterattacks wipe the north coast clear. Only one sands is left to build, and the next explore card flips as mountains.  Green uses Call to Bloodshed to gather as many Dahan as possible from the adjoining sands. I have to leave one behind, but the sands escalation card is already out so I don't have to worry about it getting caught. With 3 Dahan x 3 presence, Manifestations deals 9 damage to clear out the city + town + all 3 explorers. Meanwhile, Green repeats Creepers three times to take out a city in its home jungle.  Gather the Warriors allows Thunderspeaker to move all three Dahan into the neighborhing mountains, and then pushes two more into the jungle to take out a town with Furious Assault.  Both spirits need to reclaim, and Green takes another minor. I'm not really short of energy and Defend 2 doesn't mean much in the face of Sweden's damage boost. I think I probably have enough explorer management now, so I grab Uncanny Melting so that I can potentially clean up one of the blighted wetlands.  Thunderspeaker takes its double card. Gift of Constancy is very tempting, but I doubt the game is going to last until the end of the current reclaim cycle so more reclaims probably don't do much. There's some solid defense and offense available here, but I can't pass up the elements on Purifying Flame. Call to Isolation is pretty great for Thunderspeaker; one extra Dahan move doesn't seem like much, but it's great for fine-tuning positions and the push can be very powerful when you can line up as many Dahan as you want. But there are a bunch of explorers about to build, so Steam Vents is a great pickup even if I have no real hope of hitting the threshold.  I think I can just about swing a win here. Thunderspeaker brings out Drought again, going heavy on explorer control. Elemental Boon still isn't enough to hit the threshold on Drought but it will get to 2 Sun + 4 Air for Thunderspeaker's innates. Rampant Green tries to juggle its innates, needing the threshold for the bigger defend as well as much damage as possible.  There are a lot of moving parts laid out here, but we're in the home stretch. In the south, Furious Assault destroys the remaining town in the corner and then Sudden Ambush pulls a Dahan into the adjacent mountain wipe out both explorers. Lure of the Unknown grabs an explorer out of the other mountain to dodge a build. In the north, Overgrow in a Night gets Green up to a sacred site, letting Green target its defend at the adjacent sands. Thunderspeaker uses its presence in the mountains to destroy the explorer with Steam Vents before using Gather the Warriors to move both Dahan and presence into the sands for the counterattack.  The last mountain is cleared out by the fear card, as well as the inner jungle.  The rest of the invader phase is a dud. The only ravaging sands is thwarted by defense and promptly cleared out in retaliation and not a single mountain gets to build. Explore also technically whiffs on one of the inland wetlands, although there's already an explorer there anyhow.  Unfortunately I have made a terrible miscalculation. Green uses Creepers twice to knock the jungle city down to 1 HP, allowing Thunderspeaker to wipe it out even without the threshold on Drought, sacrificing Green's presence in the process. But that leaves me 1 HP short of finishing off the remaining town up north, as Stem the Flow of Fresh Water isn't enough on its own. In retrospect I should have taken advantage of Isolation to just remove the wetland town, but I got greedy and thought I could destroy it for fear (that I don't even need at this point.)  Of course, next turn I can just use any combination of cards in Thunderspeaker's hand to trigger both innates fast so that I can move in and tear the town down before the invaders can do anything.  As the naval backbone of the Northern Alliance, Sweden's burgeoning overseas ambitions demanded colonial ports. Isla Espíritu had been explored by the Spanish but never colonized despite its strategic location, and the Vasa crown saw it as an ideal base. Unfortunately, despite the effectiveness of Sweden's modern farming techniques the settlers on the renamed Nya Gotland found them ill suited for the dense tropical island. Local fauna provided impossible to eradicate, and time and time again crop fields became overrun with vegetation, stymying attempts at turning the island to cash crops. Tensions ran hot as the fledgling colony's populated swelled, boosted by insistent immigration policies. With time Sweden might have tamed the island with sheer numbers, but another conflict was brewing. While the indigenous Dahan people were initially content to keep to themselves, as their new neighbors multiplied they started to organize into increasingly militant bands. Their oral tradition speaks of a leader that emerged in this period, the Booming Speaker. It is unclear if any such chieftan actually existed; their stories refer to the Booming Speaker as a godlike figure, and most historians believe these references to be apocryphal. Regardless of the truth of the stories, however, the results were undeniable. The Dahan organized themselves into a remarkably fierce fighting force, and although the Swedes landed several companies of Europe's finest soldiers they proved no match for the Dahan on their home terrain. The jungle itself was a formidable ally, and under the protection of the canopy the Dahan were able to strike with impunity again and again, driving the colonists back. The southern ports held on for several years, but most of the settlers abandoned the colony after a series of devastating droughts struck their already-struggling farms. That does it. I could certainly have stood to play a bit more aggressively, Green can throw around majors pretty easily. The main benefit of going for lots of card plays is being able to consistently trigger your innates, but the small defends on Green's innate aren't all that useful against Sweden. It's hard to argue with the results, though. There's no particular synergy between Thunderspeaker and Rampant Green the way there is with Lightning + River, but they're both such shitwreckers in their own right that it's hard to go wrong. In many ways they're arguably a better introduction than the official low complexity spirits; most of them are so one-dimensional that it's easy to figure out what you do but it's hard to figure out how you use your limited toolset to solve problems that it's not specialized for, where a more well-rounded spirit has more options but also has an easier time figuring out how to do what it wants. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Apr 12, 2023 |
|
#
?
Apr 12, 2023 22:55
|
|
|
Thunderspeaker: what if a spirit was an anime protagonist and the Dahan her nakama? Two utterly mediocre cards (sudden ambush is way overcosted, words of warning is not that bad but still on the weak side), then all the Dahan movement with the option of fear and lastly the power of anime friendship (translator's note: anime friendship means ultraviolence). Then if the game goes long enough she hits the major deck and may the gods have mercy on the invaders. With some majors Thunderspeaker turns her Dahans into Risk armies, with others she becomes One Punch Spirit.
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2023 00:18
|
|
|
Hmmm… I suppose it does make sense to go through all the base game spirits first, but that would put the Horizons spirits in an odd spot coverage-wise, since they’re all Low-complexity spirits introduced after a large number of Medium-and-ups that use expansion mechanics. Jagged Earth is big. I’m wondering what your plans are for them.
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2023 00:44
|
|
|
Here we get the heavy hitter - IMO Spread of Rampant Green is the strongest spirit in the game, or at least, the one that's least replaceable in the most powerful teams. It's hard to overstate just how good Gift of Proliferation in particular is - it's absurdly powerful just on its face, but it also completely and fundamentally changes how some spirits work. You can get the principle by looking at Vital Strength of Earth, the first spirit we saw in this LP - it's got quite powerful growth that's hampered by being limited to one presence placement per turn, and the passive defense power is also inherently limited by the speed of presence growth. Rampant Green casually breaks both with a 1 energy starting card. The effect is (rightfully) really rare out of the power decks, so if Rampant Green isn't around it's a rare treat and feels incredible to get access to that as something like Vital Strength of Earth, but you can get it on demand just by teaming up with Rampant Green. And there are spirits we'll (presumably) see later that work with it far better (imo) than Vital Strength of Earth does... Meanwhile Thunderspeaker is always a delight, and I love bringing it against Sweden. You have this cool tension where you are good at preventing Sweden's recruitment power from working, but also get even more annoyed than most spirits if it does, so it feels like a real grudge match.
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2023 00:56
|
|
|
The Dahan turning into an enraged mob and burning cities down is a great feeling.
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2023 15:37
|
|
|
Alright, I've played through all of the relatively normal spirits. Now it's time for things to get weird. There are only two spirits left in the box and they're higher complexity than what we've seen before, which is more characteristic of the expansion spirits (outside of Horizons.) Starting with another adversary. England is one of the few great powers that comes out worse in this alternate history: in this timeline the suspicious death of Robert Dudley's wife was not sufficient to stop his attempts to court Elizabeth I, they were married, and Elizabeth had a son to inherit the crown. King James of Scotland was never offered the English throne and there was no union of the crowns, so Scotland remained as a sort of friendly rival. Even without Scotland's resources, England is still a colonial heavyweight. A densely populated island still has a lot of emigration pressure, so England absolutely floods the island with settlements. England makes invader control a lot harder, as simply emptying lands of invaders is no longer enough to stop them from building: even adjacent buildings are enough to enable builds. On top of that, England adds a whole entire phase to the invader action queue, so after ravaging invader cards go to a second build phase (!) England also adds a unique loss condition. Prussia focuses on the deck-out loss, Sweden focuses on the blight loss, but England has its own special loss state: if the total number of towns+cities in a single land ever reaches 7, that's enough for the settlement to reach critical mass and become an unshakeable self-sustaining colony, game over. The escalation power plays to this, specifically adding buildings where it hurts the most. On top of that, it's capable of adding a city instead of a town depending on the normal build rules, making it nastier than most escalations. The silver lining is that it's actually an invader action and can be stopped (e.g. Year of Perfect Stillness), but it's still generally nastier than something like Prussia's. (Also note that at this level, the fear deck is fully 50% larger than the base difficulty. Most adversaries increase the size of the fear deck as they scale up in difficulty: more invaders means more fear for dealing with them, and England in particular creates a very target-rich environment so even higher difficulties would be over very quickly without the extra padding in the fear deck.)  So again, I'm going to set out to cheese the adversary rules as hard as I can. Ocean's Hungry Grasp has a lore-relevant backstory, being personally responsible for keeping this island culture isolated. It's also one of the two "High" complexity spirits in the base box, so it significantly changes the basic assumptions of play.  The spirit panel is even busier than Thunderspeaker's, the growth options being so big they no longer fit on a single line! There is a tidal theme going on here; every time you reclaim cards you pull presence in, every time you place single presence you push presence out. Note that these steps are not optional, so reclaiming repeatedly will wind up bunching your presence together and limiting your reach. You also get a little bit of extra energy on reclaim or double presence placement, which is nice, because your energy track is best described as "oof."  Taking a look at the special rules helps makes sense of the growth options and terrible energy track. As the growth options imply, your presence actually lives in the ocean, which can make targeting rather tricky but can occasionally be useful for dodging blight. In return you literally can't add presence further inland than the coasts. You (and other spirits when Ocean is in play) can also push invaders into the ocean if Ocean's Hungry Grasp is nearby, which instakills them and also feeds Ocean much-needed energy. The energy conversion actually scales with player count, which makes Ocean's role change a bit depending on table size. In small games Ocean racks up drowning energy very quickly and has large energy stockpiles to try to compensate for its limited reach; in large games Ocean has more of a support role as you have more players to take advantage of instakill-pushing invaders into the sea and more players to help police the inland areas, but very few spirits can drown as efficiently as Ocean can so your energy income suffers.  Ocean's innates are quite strong, having destructive capabilities right up there with Lightning's Swift Strike but with more lenient thresholds as well as just having extra fear generation. The two innates have competing secondary elements but neither of them is terribly demanding; you get up to 5 card plays compared to a maximum threshold of 4 primary / 3 secondary elements and have plenty of elements on your tracks so you get pretty decent flexibility in your element picks.  Your cards are also generally quite good. Call of the Deeps is cheap explorer management and your only built in source of Air for the fear innate. The kicker is often a trap; you usually want invaders to build on the coasts so that you can eat the towns for energy, so you're usually better off playing it on the coast and yanking explorers out of inland territories to stop them from building. Against England it usually doesn't matter, though. Grasping Tide is a solid amount of defense and fear. Depending on your element draws you may not be able to do much about cities early on, so it's very handy for blocking the cities that are left over after you eat all of the easy towns. Swallow the Land-Dwellers is insanely good destruction on a 0 cost card, although the targeting restrictions are quite limited and you do have to watch out for Dahan. Tidal Boon is goddamn amazing, since it still lets you eat a town and has a very powerful Dahan move instead of friendly fire, and also gives another spirit 2 energy (making it a net -1 energy card!) The targeting can get tricky though, since for maximum effect you need a teammate with presence on the coast where there's a town (and Dahan if you want to take advantage of the move.)  Partnering up with Ocean's Hungry Grasp is this friendly fellow. He's a nice guy, he wouldn't hurt a fly.  In fact, he literally can't. BoDaN, as he's often known in Spirit Island communities, is straight up incapable of damage or destruction, converting all damage to invaders directly into fear. "Dream-killing" towns generates a little more fear than a regular kill does, and also drives them away. Dream-killing cities generates a lot of extra fear: they're too large to relocate, so they're just stuck getting haunted. Note that adding Blight does not count as destruction, so blight-adding powers such as e.g. Drought can be pretty costly. On the other hand, if you hit the threshold on a sufficiently built-up land you generate 11 (!) fear, which may very well be worth it.  Bringer starts with unusually strong spirit tracks, opening at 2 energy + 2 card plays. The energy track isn't too shabby, providing an ok mix of energy and elements, but the plays track is so awful it might as well not exist. The other base game spirits generally have a little wiggle room on how you develop them (even if some routes are more optimal) but you really only have one option here. Bringer's growths are fairly standard if maybe a hair on the mediocre side, but he does have a unique 4th option, reclaim one card and add a presence (but only on top of existing presence.) Bringer has a fairly strong slant towards major powers, so having the option to bring out a big card again while still growing your presence can be handy in a pinch. Although in the long run your 7th & 8th presence placements typically don't do anything for you anyhow, so sometimes it's better to just take a full reclaim instead. You also get a flexible "ANY" element on both tracks. You get to choose which element you want these to be each turn; once chosen you can't swap it out, but you don't have to actually choose until you need it.  Bringer's innates are odd. Night Terrors is just a fear generator, more lenient than Pound Ships to Splinters although it peaks at a lower fear. Spirits May Yet Dream is unusual though, being a purely support innate with some unique effects. Being able to peak at a fear card can let you plan around fear effects you know are coming, and you can also hand out an extra element which can come in handy for hitting thresholds on majors (as long as they have Moon themselves.)  Your cards are... largely not great, but then, your gameplan is 100% major powers so at least you'll never feel guilty tossing these. Dread Apparitions is scaling defense with a built-in +1 fear, which is theoretically good, but in practice most of the time it's going to be rough. You need fast phase fear sources to do any good, and even with Night Terrors in the mix this + a fear minor just isn't going to generate enough defense to justify the price tag. Occasionally you pick up a fast major and can do incredible things with this, but that's the exception rather than the rule. Call on Midnight's Dream exists largely to grease the wheels of your major engine. You play it and can trade it for a major power, which you can generate bonus energy to play immediately. If it's not immediately useful you can also just pitch something else and save Call on Midnight's Dream for another pull. In a pinch you can combo it with Dread Apparitions for up to defend 5-6 depending on how many elements you get for Night Terror, but again, not really worth it. Dreams of the Dahan is actually a really great, really efficient power in contrast to most of your starting cards. Unfortunately when you're virtually always stuck at 2 plays you're probably looking for impact over efficiency. Predatory Nightmares is generally fairly awful. The standard for minors is 1 energy for 2 damage from a sacred site with moderate targeting restrictions and a minor kicker; paying an extra energy for a little more flexibility and a kicker you'll rarely be able to use is pretty bad.  The first explore card is mountains, so I use Ocean's third growth to pick up a card and get some presence to hit the coastal mountain on its board. Call of the Dahan Ways is fun and plays nicely with Ocean's elements, but Gift of Constancy is a fantastic pickup that happens to work really nicely here. Ocean's innate thresholds are lenient enough that a single Earth is often good enough, BoDaN can use a little extra energy and goes through cards so slowly that retaining 1 of their 2 cards is a huge help, and Ocean can also put it to good use since Ocean has a hard time keeping its handsize on pace with its card plays (especially if you go into majors.) Steam Vents is bad despite the elements: Ocean wants to eat things at range 0, not destroy them on dry land.  Bringer also wants to get some presence in its coastal mountain, so I opt for the energy growth with higher range presence and bank even more energy by sticking to its cost 0 cards. Ocean has no choice but to play its 2 cost 0s since it starts with no energy and I didn't take the double presence opening.  Call of the Deeps yanking an explorer out of the interior doesn't really do much due to England's special build rule, but it does enable Pound Ships to Splinters, so between that and Night Terrors I rack up 3 fear right off the bat. I also get to peek at the first fear card, which doesn't look very promising.  Bringer consolidates some Dahan to fish for a juicy major with Call on Midnight's Dreams.  Some interesting options here. The Jungle Hungers is quite decent and has a threshold that's reasonably friendly to Bringer's elements. Accelerated Rot is a fine beatstick as we've seen, although Bringer's inability to stack damage makes the 4 damage a little awkward at times. Indomitable Claim is funny (if Ocean found it, it's one of the few ways to legally get Ocean's presence in an inland territory, although most of Ocean's juicy powers can only target coasts anyhow), but Bringer doesn't really care about accelerating its tracks that much and has a hard time capitalizing on counterattacks... which Wrap in Wings of Sunlight neatly solves, since it's an infinite-range defend that brings its own counterattack with it. So Wings of Sunlight it is, but I can't make any use of it this turn so I opt to keep Dreams and forget Predatory Nightmares instead.  The mountains all build (even the cleared out ones) and wetlands come out next. Ocean starts the feeding frenzy with Swallow the Land-Dwellers on the far mountain and its innate Ocean Breaks the Shore on the coastal wetlands next door so as to avoid friendly fire on the Dahan.  Next turn I have Ocean double-place presence to get onto the other board and reach 3 card plays. I've already got Bringer queued up with defensive cards this turn, so I opt to pick up a minor to build out my hand size. Gnawing Rootbiters is fun with Ocean in play, but I go for Shadows of the Burning Forest instead for elements + fear.  Ocean dumps the rest of its hand, thanks to the energy from drowning invaders. Bringer plays Wings of Sunlight and Dread Apparitions which should leave it set for defense + counterattacks this turn.  Grasping Tide takes care of the remaining coastal buildings on Ocean's board. Dread Apparitions has the elements for the first level of Night Terrors, generating 2 fear between the two of them which turns into just enough defense to handle Bringer's coastal ravage, while Wings of Sunlight lets me take 3 excess Dahan from the coastal pile and airdrop them on the big mountain where Defend 5 is just enough to handle the ravage. That also gets me a fear card, which I've already scouted as being essentially useless.  Bringer's Dahan friends largely clear out the attacking invaders. Ocean has to punt on the inland mountain, taking the first blight. The wetlands all build, and sands explore next.  Ocean Breaks the Shore eats a town in the coastal wetlands, and Tidal Boon tosses some energy to Bringer in exchange for feeding Ocean another town from the coast Bringer occupies.  Next turn Ocean reclaims and draws a minor. Lure of the Unknown is an amazing pick; the ocean is always going to be empty of invaders so it's a 0 cost fast town delete for coasts, and if the coasts are already cleared then it can pull a town out of the inland. It's a nice enabler for the Pound Ships innate too.  Bringer goes for another major and gets a very on-theme pull. Terrifying Nightmares is fun with Ocean in play, and Paralyzing Fright is a fantastic power any time, but Winds of Rust and Atrophy offers me a unique opportunity as "remove" instructions are not subject to Bringer's limitatoins: thanks to Wings of Sunlight cleaning out the mountains on counterattack, the empty mountains are about to hit England's extra build phase and happen to be adjacent to exactly 2 towns. If I play Winds of Rust on one of the wetlands I can block the ravage and get rid of the town, which will stop the mountains from building. Blocking England's builds takes a lot of work but the extra breathing room it gives is invaluable, so I'm going to forego the big fear cards for that. I go ahead and forget Shadows of the Burning Forest without ever playing it, as I kind of want to keep hold of my starting cards for now.  I pair it with Dread Apparitions (reclaimed last turn from Gift of Constancy) so Bringer can block the other wetland ravage. Ocean plays a near-repeat of last turn, although I swap out Swallow for Tidal Boon.  I peek at the upcoming fear card. Not bad, this will help me leverage the extra space from Winds of Rust to hobble England's builds. Blocking England builds is not easy, so every bit helps.  I set up my various defenses. Ignore the "2" on the defense token up top; Grasping Tide is a defend 4, I think my brain got a wire crossed with the 2 fear. I know what it is anyhow.  Isolation takes out the remaining mountain town in the far blighted mountain, which won't stop a build but will at least keep it from adding a city. Taking out the sands explorer at the bottom actually will stop a build despite England's ability, as the counterattack in the wetlands will leave it with only 1 adjacent building.  Again, Ocean can't really do anything about the inland ravage but Bringer defends and counterattacks.  I do avoid one sands build, but the next explore card comes up sands which means I'm in for back to back ravages. This is going to get particularly messy with England, and the escalation also makes Bringer's coastal sands turn into a big problem in a hurry. The escalation also dumped an extra town on Ocean's home coast, which quickly turns into extra food as usual.  With plenty of energy in the tank and Gift of Constancy to help string out my reclaim cycle I decide to pick up a major on Ocean's reclaim. Pillar of Living Flame is interesting and has the range to make up for Ocean's placement issues, but it won't actually be able to do a lot to fix the issues on Ocean's sands. Talons of Lightning is great, but limited to terrain types that aren't immediately relevant. Infinite Vitality is the ultimate defensive power, but Ocean has trouble building sacred sites that aren't in the ocean itself. I opt for Entwined Power, which can help both spirits' targeting issues and also bulk up my hands.  Since Gift of Constancy let Bringer reclaim Winds from its plays last turn, I opt to use the reclaim one option and get Wings of Sunlight back for another big defense turn.  I use Wings of Sunlight to move the wetlands Dahan next door, and Lure of the Unknown grabs a town out of the sands to bring the ravage down to a more manageable size. Winds of Rust and Atrophy blocks one of Ocean's sands in order to prevent a cascade; I don't think I'm going to be able to keep the blight card from flipping, but this should at least postpone it a turn.  I use Entwined Power for a shared major draw and get a very nice spread. Dissolve the Bonds of Kinship is kind of a dud unless you can get the threshold, but the other three are all fantastic damage powers. Cleansing Flood is a no-brainer for Ocean; Vigor of the Breaking Dawn and Blazing Renewal are both very nice damage dealers for Bringer, but with Wings of Sunlight I decide to lean into the Dahan theme and pick up Vigor. You still have to forget cards to pick up majors through Entwined Power, so Bringer drops Dread Apparitions as I probably have enough defense for now. Ocean forgets Entwined Power itself.  My only fear card is Overseas Trade Seems Safer, which gives me an irrelevant Defend 3 in coastal lands. Ocean now has blight on both its sands, and all the sands are building up. Jungle comes out next explore, and I gently caress up here and forget an escalation! It winds up not being terribly relevant; if anything, I accidentally postponed my victory by reducing the number of buildings available to kill.  With most of the sands being inland, Ocean just chows down where it can, with a little help from Tidal Boon.  Bringer is running low on energy after a lot of major plays, so I go fishing for a Sun + Animal power in the hopes that I can hit the threshold on Vigor. No luck, but Call to Migrate is the next best thing; I've got the cards I need to threshold Vigor next turn, so this will let me set up a big play with it.  Ocean has to reclaim and picks up a minor. Sap the Strength of Multitudes is almost tempting, but Reaching Grasp is just impossible for Ocean to pass up.  Bringer goes Dahan mode; since I don't have the elements for Vigor I just use my Any element on moon for my innates. Ocean goes for maximum flood.  Bringer's innate lets me peak at the next fear card, which gives me some interesting possibilities.  I had planned on using Vigor to hammer the coastal city for fear, but knowing that I have defense coming I decide to use it to clear out the smaller sands while trusting Grasping Tide to defend the coast. If you've looked at the invader tracker off to the right you may have figured out why this extra defense is crucial: England's extra build phase means that with back to back Sands the invaders are now queued up to build in sands and then immediately ravage there. This is England's biggest dick move, since even if you clear out a land ahead of the ravage there's a good chance it will just build a town for a 2 damage ravage and blight anyhow. (This is why forgetting the escalation ultimately didn't hurt much, too; I would have sweat the big sands ravage a bit more, but the fear card would have taken care of it.)  A second fear card provides even more defense; more than I need, although it does also net Bringer an energy.  So, as usual Bringer manages to defend + counterattack its lands while Ocean is hit with a double cascade. This is enough to empty the blight card, which means...  ...we're on to the second blight pool, and the blight card is now in effect. There are only 2 blight cards in the base game box, so you can have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Spoiler: the other blight card is almost identical except it gives you the option to forget a card instead of destroying a presence, and only has 4 blight per player. Downward Spiral has a reputation for being extremely nasty, but it really depends on the spirit. A lot of spirits can afford to lose some presence without really hurting, and even the ones that are tight on presence can string it along for a few turns before they really start hurting. As long as you don't flip the blight card super early the downside is pretty manageable and in return you can afford a lot of blight without losing.  On to slow powers. Reaching Grasp is still in effect, so Ocean gets to whammy the deeper inland sands with a whopping 14 damage and clean up some of that blight. As usual, Tidal Boon and Ocean's innate nibble away at the towns on the shore, and Call to Migrate sets up a big pile of Dahan.  Unfortunately, since I couldn't play Gift of Constancy and still hit Flood's threshold last turn I'm a little short on cards for Ocean and can't make 5 plays this turn, but I can at least hit 4 again. I'll be playing both my off-element minors, so I grab Gift of Power for elements; this should also help fix my hand size if the game goes on much longer.  Bringer does a full reclaim, and... I think I forgot to pick up a card. Oh well, I'm pretty well set; Vigor and Wings cover each others' elements nicely, so with the extra Air + a Sun from my Any space I can hit the threshold on both of them.  First up, I play Vigor of the Breaking Dawn on the wetlands, dream-killing the town (it's still spirit damage even if it scales on Dahan) and persuading it to evacuate into the nearby sands...  ...and then the threshold allows me to push 1 Dahan into each of the jungles. You will note that the threshold on Vigor specifically says that in each land you pushed into you deal 2 damage per Dahan, not per Dahan pushed. So the inland jungle that has 1 Dahan deals 2 damage to the town there, and the coastal jungle that now has 5 Dahan deals 10 damage, dream-killing both cities and both towns. Which then get pushed into the ocean, kill-killing them. So that's, uh, +20 fear when all the dust settles. This is kind of Bringer's Thing.  The threshold on Wrap in Wings of Sunlight lets me pull 3 Dahan back into the wetlands (mostly grabbing the scattered ones to leave as many as possible in the big jungle), which then get sent flying over to the corner jungle on Ocean's board. If left unchecked that would be a chain cascade, so taking care of it is pretty important (although I probably have enough blight on the card to survive anyhow.)  I use the first of my four level III fear cards to empty the two inland mountains, although I don't know that I'm actually going to be able to block those builds.  My next draw is a doozy. Scapegoats at terror level III is one of the strongest fear cards in the game against higher level adversaries, racking up a ton of town kills (which flips a 5th fear card) in addition to clearing out most of the accumulated explorers.  Wary of the Interior is pretty meh at level III, although taking a town out of the corner wetland does mean I can rely on not getting a mountain build.  The next card is Emigration Accelerates which does the same exact thing; with no important towns left I decide to clean up a few stray explorers. But the final card turns out to be a doozy: 2 damage per Dahan neatly demolishes the coastal jungle before it can ravage. I've now nearly got a clean board, against England, as a spirit that literally can't destroy invaders by itself.  The incoming build ruins it a bit, and wetlands come out next. Ocean picks off a couple towns on the coastal mountains. (Also, I have a bad habit of forgetting the blight card at the start of invader phase, so I fixed my mistake and destroyed 1 presence from each spirit.)  Ocean reclaims and picks up another minor. I don't have much use for most of these, so I decide to continue playing to my innate with Pull Beneath the Hungry Earth.  Again, Bringer got to retain one of its played cards with Gift of Constancy so I go ahead and use the reclaim 1 growth to pick the other one back up.  I use Wings of Sunlight to gather up 3 Dahan, but I only launch 1 Dahan up north to deal with the mountain ravage. The other two stay behind and drive two towns into the sea with Vigor, then Vigor's threshold also lets me send one inland to pick off the explorer (I made a mistake and killed the explorer instead of pushing it to the sands, which shouldn't have happened, but it's not going to matter anyhow.)  I was counting on the 2 additional fear cards I'd earned to take care of the lone city ravaging on the coast, and they did! Normally this one is pretty bad, but it does let you double up on spirits' choices to downgrade a city straight to an explorer.  The next card couldn't be better either, letting me finish off the leftovers in two of the sands. Bringer achieves board wipe.  Unfortunately, a sneaky adjacency immediately undoes it as Bringer's inland jungle gets to build and then immediately vomit out explorers into the interior.  Ocean launches another long-range Cleansing Flood to clear out the interior wetland before it can ravage, while a fully powered innate helps clear out the coast with a little help from Pull Beneath the Hungry Earth. At this point I'm 2 fear short of the last fear card, which would empty the fear deck and immediately grant me victory. Accidentally skipping an escalation actually bit me in the rear end here: I'm out of drowning targets for Tidal Boon, but if I had escalated in Bringer's coastal sands then I'd be able to eat that town, plus Ocean's coastal wetland would have an extra town that I could have killed with Pull Beneath, netting me the final 2 fear.  Instead, next turn I have Bringer play Winds of Rust to downgrade the last city on the board, notching a rare terror III victory against England on the last fear before I won automatic fear victory.  There have been many millenarian movements observed among colonized peoples, most famously among them the Ghost Dance movement of the American West and the Taiping Rebellion, but many other examples exist: Pueblo revolt, the Cruzob movement, the mass cattle-killing movement of the Xhosa, etc. One lesser-known case, noteworthy for its remarkable success, is the "Dream Calling" movement among the Dahan people of Spirit Isle. Today, Spirit Isle is a mostly autonomous territory nominally under the control of Tuvalu, being more remote than most of Tuvalu's islands as well as being notoriously dangerous for navigation due to its treacherous shoals; even the Polynesians have difficulty safely navigating the surrounding waters, and as a result the Dahan have maintained a unique language and character with relatively minor influences from its nearest neighbors. Such freedom, however, may be regarded as something of a fluke. In the early 18th century, the East India Trading Company chartered a colony on Spirit Isle, hoping to establish a base in the South Pacific to outflank the growing colonial reach of their Swedish rivals. With the weight of the Company's resources behind the endeavor the colony quickly grew and the indigenous Dahan found their land was becoming increasingly circumscribed by the expanding colony. Fearful for their future, the Dahan began to gather together for elaborate ritual ceremonies in honor of one of their chief mythical figures, the "Dream Caller." Limited anthropological studies indicate that the Dahan of earlier eras had regarded the Dream Caller as a figure of awe and dread, but with the coming of the English the increasingly desperate Dahan turned to their god looking for salvation, perhaps believing that they were so powerless in the face of the intruders that only in dreams could they see their lands returned. However, even dreams can have power in the hands of a sufficiently charismatic leader. When news spread that the English were building an extensive mining operation on Snake Mountain, a particularly holy site to the Dahan people, several tribes inspired by these new religious teachings undertook a forced march across the island to confront the settlers. According to some accounts some several hundred Dahan crossed some 70 to 80 miles in a single night through rugged and wild terrain--while this is almost certainly an exaggeration, suffice to say the Dahan managed to move with such swiftness that the English were caught completely off guard and the fledgling mining town razed and scattered. After the failure of the mining outpost, and ongoing difficulties settling the rocky northern harbors, the English turned their efforts to the eastern coast of the island where more accessible shores offered access to the island's interior. The English found that with some effort the northern lowlands made an ideal environment for sugarcane plantatoins, and for a few years the new colony looked as though it had a promising future, but the Dahan were emboldened by their religious visions and continued to haunt the settlers. Although skirmishes were relatively rare and small in scale, the colonists were gripped in a sort of mass hysteria, perpetually convinced that the Dahan were on their way to slaughter them. This mania culminated in tragedy when a mob of colonists stormed the naval base at Fort Edward and commandeered several ships that were in drydock for repairs, launching them before they were fully seaworthy. The leaky ships foundered and sank sea less than a day later, leading to a near-total loss. The survivors at Fort Edward were shaken by the tragedy and when the Dahan did eventually attack the next year they surrendered the fort almost immediately, despite having the natives massively outnumbered and outgunned. To make matters worse, over-reliance on irrigation had destroyed the native wetlands' ability to manage flooding, resulting in catastrophic flooding that wiped out several prospering plantation towns in the north. The East India Company tried to persevere, refusing to cut its losses, but these setbacks had a profound impact on the settlers' psyche. The memory of the Dahan's masterful forced march on Snake Mountain gave birth to constant rumors of even more miraculous movements; several times the Dahan were reported to have marched across even greater distances the length of the island to make lightning raids on the surviving northern farms, although it seems more likely that the dwindling colonists simply lost track of the ordinary migrations of the Dahan. Captain John Davies, who launched an expedition in the colony's later days to try to establish a new outpost in the interior with an eye towards reclaiming the lost mining settlements on Snake Mountain, wrote in November of 1721: "The Devils do nightly Vex and Harry me; scarcely an hour can I sleep ere I awaken to the terrible Blow of their cruel Clubs and Arrows. In the light of morning I feel the twynge of these phantom Wounds, and tho my body remains whole and unbroken I find myself an Invalid. Last-night I dreamt a laughing Savage cleanly hewed my arm with a stone Axe, and e'en now I must rest my Endeavors frequently to feel with mine own hand that my Limb is still there. The same worries etch the faces of the men, and there is not a Man present that would rather not perish bodily in battle with the Savages ere they faced these Night Terrors once more. I would gladly forsake the right Proper Church of England and bow to the Pope himself if he could but deliver me from this worldy Hell." Fortunately for Captain Davies' religious convictions, he did not have to convert. Twelve days later he abandoned the camp and returned to England; by the end of the next year, no surviving colonists are known to have remained on the island. Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares + Ocean's Hungry Grasp is a classic combination, enabling Bringer's town pushes to remove invaders permanently, although to some extent this is more important in larger games; in smaller games with Ocean inevitably the coasts get cleared anyhow, and focusing too much on helping push towns into the sea will actually wind up starving Ocean from lack of buildings to eat. Playing against England does help a lot, though, as having a constant stream of towns makes for a lot of energy. It helps if you can arrange the escalation effects to fall on coastal lands, which both keeps inland territories from getting even further out of control and also gives Ocean more food.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2023 01:34
|
|
|
ngl my mind kinda imploded when I saw "Tuvalu" because I still associate that with the evil island take-over scheme that shows up in one of my favorite YA novel series from when I was a teenager, the Michael Vey books. (I enjoyed them when I re-read them semi-recently but I'm not going to claim they're anything spectacular or anything)
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2023 03:06
|
|
|
I never found Downward Spiral or the other base game blight card all that nasty (though some spirits definitely suffer a lot more under them than others), but I've always hated them for the reason you demonstrate in your post: I find it really hard to remember the bookkeeping on them. It made me really happy when the expansions started coming out with more, both because of that, and just because with the two base game ones so similar, it's much cooler to play with more diversity so you don't know exactly how things are going to start going wrong. As for the game, well played, and a great demonstration of IMO a very fun spirit team-up. England is one of my least favorite to play against on the tabletop because I am terrible about remembering their "build with two adjacent buildings" power, which I find kind of fun on the Steam client because it makes it a challenge, but hard to manage on the tabletop because I'm never confident I didn't forget it so long that I unintentionally cheated.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2023 04:23
|
|
|
Junpei posted:ngl my mind kinda imploded when I saw "Tuvalu" because I still associate that with the evil island take-over scheme that shows up in one of my favorite YA novel series from when I was a teenager, the Michael Vey books. Canonically the location of the island is supposed to be vague, but it does noticeably skew towards a Pacific setting, so I just grabbed a plausible Polynesian country that was not overly heavily colonized. Most of the references to specific flora and fauna are flowery and nondescript ("gnawing rootbiters", "savage mawbeasts") but there are references to tigers and an expansion card depicts sun bears. Granted, y'know, magic. Ultiville posted:As for the game, well played, and a great demonstration of IMO a very fun spirit team-up. England is one of my least favorite to play against on the tabletop because I am terrible about remembering their "build with two adjacent buildings" power, which I find kind of fun on the Steam client because it makes it a challenge, but hard to manage on the tabletop because I'm never confident I didn't forget it so long that I unintentionally cheated. I find England's rules pretty easy to keep track of compared to later adversaries. You only really have to keep track of anything new for the build phase and really, unless you are extremely aggressive about trying to break England's build rule then you can just assume that every land is going to build regardless. It's when adversaries decide to be cute and randomly throw in some inconsequential bonus during a phase they otherwise don't care about that I get tripped up. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Apr 16, 2023 |
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2023 05:07
|
|
|
This spirit combo is fun Bringer: I can't kill, only push, and cities can't be pushed. Ocean: push you say? Don't mind if I drink what you push. A coast town dream killed by Bringer is 5 fear. That's a lot of fear for a town.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2023 08:55
|
|
|
I played a game where we had Downward Spiral and I played Looming Volcano and out of any spirit, Volcano suffers a lot from presance removal, to the extent that we lost the game because I could not establish any kind of presance in any of the lands I wanted to set up.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2023 10:16
|
|
|
the holy poopacy posted:I find England's rules pretty easy to keep track of compared to later adversaries. You only really have to keep track of anything new for the build phase and really, unless you are extremely aggressive about trying to break England's build rule then you can just assume that every land is going to build regardless. It's when adversaries decide to be cute and randomly throw in some inconsequential bonus during a phase they otherwise don't care about that I get tripped up. My issue is that my brain just fixates on the "cut off builds" thing because it's usually so important, so as the complexity of the board goes up I'm at risk of just forgetting the rule exists. If I just thought of it as "can't cut off builds at all" that might help though, yeah.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2023 04:33
|
|
|
Omobono posted:This spirit combo is fun Yeah, it's also fun because it can get so incredibly binary what you care about and what you don't. Anything that's not an inland city? Haha, get eaten idiot. Inland cities? The whole team is close to powerless. I like dynamics like that where you end up focusing in on trying to plug a really clear gap - it's not always fun on repeat plays, but it's a neat dynamic puzzle to solve the first few times you play the team.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2023 04:35
|
|
|
Shadows Flicker + BoDaN seems like the best pair to go for a full Fear victory.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2023 02:07
|
|
|
Junpei posted:Shadows Flicker + BoDaN seems like the best pair to go for a full Fear victory. That would be true if Shadows Flicker were any good at all. Alas, it's pretty clearly the worst spirit in the game IMO, and I really don't suggest trying to use it at higher difficulties. I can certainly believe someone better than me can make it work, and probably Spread of Rampant Green could carry it because that spirit can carry most anyone, but there's really just nothing that Shadows Flicker brings to the table that isn't better done by another spirit, sadly. It gets somewhat better if you have Jagged Earth and can use the variant rules, but even then it's not great because there's just nothing it does particularly well. It's a shame. Base game I think it's probably just the combo we saw here, because Ocean has a fair bit of incidental fear as well, though any spirit teaming up with Bringer can get there with the right picks from the deck, and the expansions add some other good options. That said, it's IME pretty rare that you get a pure fear victory without actively trying for it no matter what the spirit setup is - even for someone like Bringer, it's usually pretty easy to get a win once you only have to get rid of the cities, unless you're just not trying to do it at all. I've had maybe 1 or 2 run out the fear deck victories ever I think.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2023 03:11
|
|
|
Shadows Flicker's main contribution to fear victory is not being good enough to clear the board of towns/cities before you run out the fear deck. BoDaN solo is the easiest way to get fear victory, since the fear pool scales by player count and no one else is going to get close to BoDaN's fear output. Getting a land wipe on 2+ cities will get you 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through the fear deck. Base game, yeah, Ocean is probably the best fear partner although it has a tendency to trigger victory before then. (This isn't dead by the way, things have just been hectic the past week--next update is about done, just been too busy to sit down and finish up the screenshots.)
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2023 03:25
|
|
|
Dunno how anyone else feels, but I think I'd find it easier to track what's going on on the board with some MSpaint arrows showing piece movements and MSpaint crossing out destroyed pieces Great LP so far, though - I just got into the game myself and it's rad to see how a more experienced player thinks.
|
|
#
?
Apr 26, 2023 15:08
|
|
|
 I've gone through all of the base game spirits and adversaries, but that's not nearly all of the Spirit Island content out there, or even all of the content in the base game box. For starters, the island boards are double-sided and there's an entirely different map to use on the back, labeled the "thematic" map. The standard boards are laid out and balanced in a fairly uniform fashion, with terrains given bold abstract pattern fill for visual clarity; the thematic map by contrast is laid out in more organic fashion, with meandering terrains clumped together in unusual patterns and more representational artwork and game pieces littered about more liberally. These pieces include a number of tokens that we haven't seen before. While you can use the thematic map with the base game it was always aimed at using the full set of rules with the Branch & Claw expansion, which we'll be using. So this will double as a way to ease into some of the expansion rules.  I'm still going to hold off on the Branch & Claw spirits for now. Instead I'm going to be getting into the promo spirits that were offered in the original Kickstarter (later offered as an add-on pack from the publisher, and eventually boxed together with later promos to make up the Feather & Flame expansion.) These promos were designed to be compatible with the base game, although they do briefly touch on B&C concepts. Heart of the Wildfire is another high complexity spirit, although arguably a little less than Bringer or Ocean; Wildfire doesn't have the same sort of fundamental restrictions that either of them have, but on a practical level it still warps the game considerably. Heart of the Wildfire also demonstrates the possibility of spirits having setup rules that add more than just presence. In this case you start with 2 extra blight in your starting land; these do not come from the blight card, so theoretically if you were to remove all the blight from your board you would wind up with 2 more blight than you would normally have to work with.  Wildfire's tracks aren't great and its growths aren't that amazing (you do have a scaling energy option that can be quite hefty late game, but it takes a long time to get there), so most of your power winds up being wrapped up in its special rules.  And its main special rule is a bit of a double edged sword. Your presence placement is effectively an offensive power in its own right, which goes a long way towards making up for your mediocre energy and plays... but it also comes at a cost of blight. You do get to ignore some of the repercussions of blight, but it still makes it very difficult for Wildfire to keep the island healthy. (The animal paw icon is also the first reference to B&C content; it's a very minor interaction with the B&C tokens and you're not missing anything if you're adding Wildfire to the base game, but it's there.)  Wildfire has some decent innates that build further on the theme of Blazing Presence. Firestorm is a pretty decent offensive power with some serious scaling potential, but it requires blight to function. The Burned Land Regrows allows you to clean up after yourself, but an unblighted land is no longer eligible for Firestorm so you have to be very deliberate about where you choose to remove blight. Note that both innates rely heavily on Fire+Plant elements. This makes your element draws very feast-or-famine; a lot of spirits have some wiggle room to focus on one set of innate elements or another, but your draws either work for both your innates or neither of them. Your element curve is also a bit wonky: in the early game it is extremely important to reach the critical threshold of 4 fire as much as possible, but past that point you scale more with additional plant than with additional fire, at least until you reach the lategame 7 fire threshold (should you care to unleash it.)  Your cards add even more offense, although they run a bit expensive for how weak your energy generation is. Asphyxiating Smoke is almost identical to Shatter Homesteads, although it adds a 3rd element (giving it a very useful trifecta for you) and a mandatory Dahan push. Sometimes you can use the Dahan push to help set up Dahan where you need them, but more frequently it just spoils counterattack opportunities. Still, you badly need the range that it provides since most of your offense is concentrated on lands where you place your presence. Flame's Fury is a great support power. It's net +1 energy and can rack up decent damage on spirits that are playing multiple damage powers... which Wildfire itself will do pretty frequently. Even just doing 1 damage (potentially fast) for a net cost of -1 is a lot of efficiency. Flash-Fires is pretty expensive and bad, although with elemental investment and the right card combos (such as Flame's Fury) it can be elevated to being expensive and OK. Threatening Flames is another range 0 blighted land power, generating a decent chunk of fear and some fast invader management. Throwing it down on top of Firestorm (and possibly a presence placement) can clear out a built up land in a big hurry.  Wildfire's partner from the promo pack is Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island. It's another lore-relevant spirit, in that it is the island, or at least a representation of the island. This also gets into spirit lifecycle and ecology somewhat; I've touched on this before, but in the lore spirits come in all sizes, the vast majority of which are either too insignificant to have any real effect on the invaders or too large to operate on a timescale quickly enough to react before the island is lost. The player spirits start out as being basically the biggest spirits that humans can meaningfully interact with, and it's only through unprecedented efforts that they are able to temporarily scale up while retaining the focus to try to keep up with human timescales. (This means that the state of various spirits depends on which spirits are in play. Ocean's Hungry Grasp exists whether or not it's in play in a given game, it just only happens to fall in that narrow band of powerful-but-immediately-relevant when someone's playing it. Also, "immediately relevant" is a generous description; if you look back at the first two games, the turn 1 play for both of those spirits consisted of spending a couple years doing nothing except hanging out and vibing at the invaders. This is considered a "pretty big deal" for spirits.) Serpent Slumbering takes that concept and flips it on its head; instead of being a spirit just big enough to barely operate on a scale to fight the invaders trying to scale up, it's an immense spirit that operates on a far grander scale trying to rouse itself to pay attention to things normally beneath its notice. Canonically this is just a fragment of Serpent's broader consciousness.  Its spirit board has the most radical departure we've seen yet, with presence actually curving and crossing over to act as a combined prerequisite. Serpent starts at 1 energy and 1 card play and the most you can get to is a whopping 1 energy and 2 card plays until after you fill out the first half of both tracks and get past the crossover point, at which point your tracks absolutely explode and cap out at 12 energy, 5 card plays, two reclaim 1s, and 4 elements + 2 "any" elements. (The growth options are a little unusual too: you pick two different choices out of the 4 options each turn. In practice it's a lot like Rampant Green's "always place presence" feature, except you have the flexibility to substitute another growth option in lieu of placing presence. But presence placement is obviously important given how much of your power is gated beyond the 7 presence mark. Individually, the growths are pretty decent but not mind-boggling: you get a solid reclaim and you can conceivably get up to +5 burst energy if you're willing to forego presence placement, which gives you deceptively good energy despite being locked at 1 base income for so long.)  As an additional wrinkle, your special rule actually limits how much presence you can have out on the island at a time, so you can't just shotgun as much presence as you can. Your presence normally scales slowly enough that it's not a huge issue, but if you're going to try to cheese it by having Rampant Green reclaim spam Gift of Proliferation then you're going to be fighting the limit a lot. However, if you lose presence to blight then it no longer counts against the limit, so you can get around it by being deliberately reckless with presence.  You do get the benefit of some meaty innates, although even with all the elements on your track it can take some effort to hit them consistently. Serpent Wakes In Power is a great support power, but note that none of your starting cards have any plant element at all! The first level is an easy lift that will juicy your energy income (and can be spread around to teammates), but the second level is a bit of a problem given that you are locked at 2 card plays until very late in the game. If you get 2 card draws with perfect elements you can trigger it as early as turn 4 unassisted, but most of the time you will have to wait until you unlock the midpoint earth element on your track. Naturally, Elemental Boon or any other method of cheesing elemental thresholds get stupidly good on Serpent. And then it also eventually lets you get free major powers, for not much more demanding elements than the second level. Serpent Rouses in Anger is a solid staple offensive power with built in scaling that also turns into a board-wide nuke at full power. The top level is so powerful it has an energy cost on top of very demanding elements; even with your tracks cleared coming up with the elements and energy can be difficult and requires some tough choices. It does help that unlike power cards you don't have to pay the cost upfront, only when you use it. You also really want to have as much presence on the board as possible for maximum effect, so if you sacrificed a lot of presence to dodge your presence cap then your ultimate power is going to be a bit less ultimate.  So, let's look at cards. Serpent has the most support-oriented hand we've yet seen; not only do you have very limited energy and card plays for most of the game, your starting cards have very little direct impact. The upshot is that you can juice the hell out of your teammates. Gift of the Primordial Deeps is fantastic, giving a combination card draw + extra play. And if you don't want or need the extra play, you can keep the card and take a few bonus elements. It relies on having a teammate that needs one of those specific elements, so it's no Elemental Boon, but it's a nice contingency use for a card that's already got one strong use. Gift of Flowing Power is similar, with +1 energy and a more flexible extra card play option, with the same fallback element clause. I think Primordial Deeps is more impressive, but this one has somewhat higher demand elements. Absorb Essence is a bit more complicated, and exists mainly to interact with your special rule. Bringing Serpent up to full strength doesn't just take time, it also requires other spirits to donate their presence, which then gets put on the Deep Slumber track to improve your presence cap. This also allows you to share the benefits of Serpent Wakes in Power, and splashes around some immediate goodies as well; the card costs 2 energy, but gives energy to both the donor and recipient, so the net impact is +1 energy for Serpent and +1 energy and 1 temporary "any" element for a teammate. Not bad for a card with 4 elements you want for your innates, although it does require an upfront energy cost. Elemental Aegis is your only board-affecting card, and it's also pretty passive although it's a big one. It's an AOE defend a la Encompassing Ward, but much easier to aim, and it has the benefit of scaling via Absorb Essence. At full power it's theoretically defend 8 to every land within range 1 of the target, which is insane for 1 energy. Even if you never get past 3-4 absorbed essence it's still a fairly unreasonable amount of defense. The downside is, Serpent is literally the only published spirit so far with absolutely no way to interact with Dahan, so good luck with counterattacks.  Confronting them I'm back to Brandenburg-Prussia, now bumped up a few levels. The later levels of Prussia all just remove more cards from the invader deck, speeding up the later stages and giving you a tighter time limit.  The good news is that at least there are plenty of Dahan on the board; Serpent's half of the island starts with 9, 50% more than the standard boards! This is partially offset by them being spread out more as board segments are no longer capped at 8 lands; these ones go all the way up to 10. There's also a lot more starting invaders than normal, although this is compensated for by having some additional goodies. One of the main additions in the expansions is these four colored tokens, which act as a sort of saved bonus for lands:  Wilds tokens sit in a land until the next time the invaders explore it, at which point you discard 1 wilds token and skip the explore.  Disease tokens do the same, but for build actions instead of explore.  Strife tokens are as you might expect a ravage-based equivalent, but since skipping an entire land's ravage would be outrageous they are attached to a specific invader and zeroes out their damage one time.  That accounts for all of the invader actions, so beasts tokens do absolutely nothing! However, some expansion powers interact with them and they also play a prominent role on event cards, the other major addition from the expansions (which I'll cover when we get there.)  Heart of the Wildfire takes a card and gets three 0 cost cards with fire, which is a nice spread. Call to Ferocity is lowkey great; it's a very strong push as long as you have Dahan where you need them, and note that Heart of the Wildfire gets an optional Dahan push whenever it places presence, so this would be a great way to deal with small problems outside Wildfire's reach. However, I'm going to go for Animated Wrackroot just for elements.  Serpent also opens with a minor draw. Guardian Serpents has some appealing elements and is thematically apropos; however, neither Wildfire nor Serpent particularly loves building sacred sites. Delusions of Danger is somewhat tempting since Serpent is very lacking in explorer control, but I'm going to go Gift of Living Energy for elements. Wildfire can be pretty hungry, so being able to shovel more energy its way will be handy.  Invaders explore mountains to start. Unlike the standard board, not every land on the thematic board starts with an adjacent building; invaders are more clustered on the coast, and the island layout has deeper inland areas. So the initial explore isn't guaranteed to hit every land, but some lands do start with explorers anyhow. I actually flubbed it here: I accidentally misread the extra town on land #3 on the east board as belonging to land #4, which would make the town adjacent to land #8 and causing a fresh explorer to land in #8 in addition to the preprinted explorer that starts there. But #4 has no town and #8 has no adjacent buildings, so #8 shouldn't have received the extra explorer. This is why I don't like the thematic board much. Turn 1 is going to be pretty slow; both spirits are stuck at 1 card play, Wildfire's only power is the slow Animated Wrackroot. We'll see what Primordial Deeps digs up, though. Although I don't have any other fast powers per se, Wildfire's presence placement did do 1 damage to snipe an explorer in the lone mountain in the northwest, which may help keep those inland wetlands from exploring.  Oooh, that's tough. Wildfire absolutely loves Reaching Grasp, as normally dealing with already-blighted lands outside Wildfire's presence is very difficult and Reaching Grasp makes it very easy. But Wildfire is also an element hog and it's a poor match. I'm going to have to go with Purifying Flame, which has great elements and can also help ease blight issues. I don't need to play it right now (and also can't afford it), so it will just go in my hand for later.  Since I'm playing with expansion rules, there is a new step before the invader phase: event cards! Although I'm using the recommend post-Jagged Earth errata to disregard the turn 1 event (but still drawing and discarding it unused for turn-tracking purposes.) As you can see event cards consist of several sub-events; some good, some bad, some mixed. Typically the top half of the card has some larger, nastier, variable effect balanced out somewhat by 1-2 smaller, generally beneficial effects. The balance can be a bit rough at times though, especially in the first batch of events from Branch & Claw. But we're just going to disregard this one per the current rule recommendation.  There are 2 mountains unaccounted for that build, then sands explore. The wilds token on Wildfire's coast gets consumed to block an explorer, which doesn't do much since it had a town there already from Prussia's setup rules. I replace it by playing Animated Wrackroot to add a new wilds token on the inland mountain. Wildfire excels at dealing with lands that have its presence + blight, so I'd just as soon keep the blight-less presence here free of invaders so I don't have to waste time trying to blight it.  Turn 2. Both spirits need to take energy to play their big cards, so no card draws this time.  Wildfire is able to snipe another explorer with its presence placement, and the Firestorm innate easily incinerates the explorer who wandered into Wildfire's blighted home. Serpent absorbs one of the extra presences from Wildfire's starting land, which also gives Wildfire a bonus "Any" element that I can use to boost Wildfire to 4 Fire for the turn. This also powers up Elemental Aegis to defend both mountains with defend 3 (I'm not going to bother putting a defense token on every land that's covered, though.) Although I do have 2 air elements on Wildfire for the Flash Fires threshold, I'm still going to hold it for the slow phase; Prussia's early stage III card is coming up and I want to try to nip one of the explorers in the bud. (The tracker lists it as Stage II--some event cards are based on the invader stage, and the early stage III card officially counts as stage II for this purpose.)  The first "real" event card comes out. You can see that this one has different effects depending on whether or not the blight card has flipped, which is a fairly common event template; the blighted island effect is arguably worse than most blight cards, so it's even more important to try to keep the blight card from flipping early when events are in play. Well-Prepared Explorers is usually a softball event, but I was holding Flash Fires for the slow phase specifically to snipe an explorer and now I can't. Grrr! Beasts Prowl is good for a free fear; Wildfire's presence forces beasts out, so the last presence placement had already pushed beasts into one of the more built-up sands. More Dahan is always good; occasionally it can whiff depending on Dahan placement, but it's good for 2 extra Dahan here.  The ravage is handled by Elemental Aegis, but 3 sands build and Prussia's early stage III flips mountains + wetlands. The good news is that the innermost wetland still has no adjacent buildings, so that's one less explore, but the eastern mountains and wetlands are going to get quite messy.  Since I'm facing a lot of ravages and have limited ability to respond I'm going to get a bit unorthodox with Wildfire. I use my regrowth innate to take a blight out of my starting sands, and then immediately play Purifying Flames to get rid of the other blight. With no blight in its territory Wildfire is going to have a harder time dealing with new intruders in its lands, but in return I get a hell of a blight buffer. Serpent meanwhile gets to activate Serpent Rouses in Anger with 2 Fire/2 Earth/2 Moon, which deals 2 damage to kill a town and adds another 2 fear (and could push a town if there were any left.) Flash Fires pings an explorer but due to the health boost from the event it just does 1 fear and fails to kill anything.  Next turn, Wildfire takes another power card. Nothing particularly inspiring here... there's decent defense and offense available but they're off-element, and I don't have the defense or Dahan offense powers to make use of Call to Migrate. Prowling Panthers might be OK; I at least have the ability to push beasts with my presence placement, so it might be good for something.  Serpent still has a big energy surplus from taking its energy growth into Absorb Essence last turn, so I go for an early major. Paralyzing Fright is always good, but I'd like something a little less stall-y. Dissolve the Bonds of Kinship might actually be usable here as it can clear out a lot of problems and Elemental Aegis doesn't mind having explorers scattered about, but it's still not aggressive as I'd like. Insatiable Hunger is a little too aggressive; with Wildfire out I don't want to be racking up even more blight. Smothering Infestation is just about right, the low threshold is an easy bar for Serpent to clear and it will help deal with some of the many wetlands builds we're seeing. I forget Gift of the Primordial Deeps for it.  I unlock Wildfire's 2nd Fire element, which means my presence placements are now a 2 damage + blight mini nuke. Serpent is tantalizingly close to the threshold for Smothering Infestation, but even without the threshold it will take care of one of the smaller wetland issues while I make plans to deal with the big ones.  I stack Flame's Fury + Gift of Flowing Energy on Wildfire, which gives me +2 energy that I can use to immediately play Asphyxiating Smoke. Flame's Fury also grants +1 damage on Wildfire's Firestorm, which at 5 Fire / 2 Plant deals 2 damage + 1 from Fury = a city kill in the sands where Wildfire's presence just blighted and took out a town.  The event is nothing particularly spicy. Invaders Surge Inland can throw a wrench in your invader management plans but usually isn't too devastating, and can occasionally give you a hand. Grim Toll is a very double-edged sword, but is better than some of the disease events out there. Canny Defense is pure upside and can combo nicely with the top event to let you capitalize on the extra defense. I take advantage of the event to substantially clear out eastern wetlands #3, using Grim Toll to kill a town and pushing the strifed town inland. The west board has no disease but the jungle towns get spread out a bit. (I also flip a fear card with additional Dahan defense, to no particular effect.)  The big coastal sands on Wildfire's side blight from the ravage, which is going to be a pain to deal with. A ton of mountains and wetlands build, mostly on Serpent's board. Jungles come up next, and I stick the escalation towns in recently-emptied sands.  Wildfire uses Asphyxiating Smoke to neutralize the mountains next to its starting spot, and Serpent uses Smothering Infestation to clear out the westernmost wetlands. Prowling Panthers can't really do anything particularly interesting as the jungle with beasts has too many explorers to deal with, so I just add more beasts in the adjacent jungle to expand my options later.  Wildfire takes a card, and I completely whiff on finding fire. Pact of the Joined Hunt is intriguing as it gives me a plant element and could put some of these Dahan piles to good use, but it really wants more Dahan support than either of these spirits have. Veil the Night's Hunt is more immediately useful, and Wildfire has some good options for stacking damage to get around the damage limit.  Meanwhile I take a reclaim with Serpent. I still have Gift of Living Energy unplayed and could pick up another card to play both, but I really want Aegis back for the big ravage.  Wildfire uses its presence placement to thin out one of the mountains. Threatening Flames empties another explorer there, but really it's mostly just +2 fear. Serpent absorbs Wildfire's essence from the clean sands in the northwest, and the extra Fire element from it is enough to let Firestorm burn down the blighted sands again. Meanwhile Serpent drops Elemental Aegis. Thanks to the terrain clustering on the thematic board I get to defend 6 ravages at once.  We're at invader stage II, so I have to deal with Fortification. It can be a bit obnoxious as it can add a bunch of builds, although it's usually not immediately dangerous and can occasionally whiff. And it's got a couple juicy bonus events tacked on, giving us even more Dahan and finally making those lazy beasts earn their keep. I want to keep the beasts around in the mountains, so I use them to whittle down the explorers instead of self-destructing on a town. Jungle #5 in the west is all explorers so it gets cleared out (and I realize later that I accidentally tossed the beasts instead of one of the explorers--this will be corrected later, but for now just substitute a beast for that lone explorer.) I do opt to use the newly placed beasts in the coastal jungle to kill a town, sacrificing that beast token.  I flip a fear card and it's a particularly nice one. It's not a lot of defense but it's generally easy to stick it right where you want it, and you can even save it for when you need it later. But right now it's enough to bail out two mountain ravages, meaning I can weather the double terrain ravage without blight.  The mountains ravage without incident and I rack up a bunch of counterattack kills in the occupied wetlands. Jungles all build, and sands explore next with an escalation. I choose to stick the escalation towns into sands just because that happens to be where I'm best equipped to deal with them. (I also correct a couple board errors--as mentioned above I replaced the explorer in the jungle with the beasts token that I had thrown away by accident, and I also realized that I had never actually placed Serpent's presence after I took it from the track! I didn't want to take advantage of the new information uncovered since then, so I just stuck it in the long central wetland to make a sacred site. And then I promptly gently caress up and make another board error by forgetting the Fortification event after the rest of the invader phase is done--the timing on the event is the other reason it's annoying. I'm choosing to build up mountains, but I won't remember to actually place the buildings for a bit.)  Serpent immediately smashes the escalation town with its innate. A spare plant from its "Any" element space lets me trigger its other innate for +1 energy to both spirits.  Next turn, Serpent grabs a new minor to build out its handsize. I've got the energy to try for a major but I don't want to find myself short of cards. It's a good draw; Rites of the Land's Rejection is a very strong and flexible power that's a great elemental fit (personally I think it compares quite favorably with most of the Branch & Claw disease minors as far as blocking builds goes), but I'm looking at Gift of Power instead. It's one of the few minors with the Water/Earth/Plant trifecta for Serpent's presence placement innate (plus Moon)--there's a reason that Serpent is on the card art.  Wildfire finally has to reclaim and picks up a new minor in the process. Quicken the Earth's Struggles is intriguing, but sacred sites are extremely painful for Wildfire to make and are rarely difficult to manage. If I had taken Reaching Grasp earlier this would have been a gimme, but alas. Voracious Growth offers a helpful plant element and two options that are both very attractive for Wildfire, and I'm starting to reach the point where I have enough Fire to make the critical 4 Fire threshold without needing it on every card, so although it still needs a sacred site I think it's the better option.  After the big ravage last turn Serpent feels comfortable going full support. Wildfire brings out Veil + Flame's Fury, which does leave it short a fire element but Serpent is there with the assist from Gift of Flowing Power. Serpent also has its Reclaim One space, so it reclaims (but does not play) Elemental Aegis.  Just like last time Flame's Fury + Gift of Flowing Power gives Wildfire 2 energy to immediately play Asphyxiating Smoke. This time, I can bring out Veil the Night's Hunt to deal 1 damage to the town and explorer in the coastal jungle, with +1 damage from Flame's Fury that goes on the town to kill it. Flame's Fury also boosts Firestorm to completely clear the blighted sands on the coast ahead of the build.  Invader phase starts with another event, and I draw one of the most favorable events in the deck. The balance in B&C's events is a bit wobbly and most of the outliers are too punishing or too swingy, but this one is just plain good. It's also our first look at a different sort of event, the "choice event." Most top events will do 1 of 2 things based on game state (e.g. invader stage, terror level, blight card status) but these ones let the players collectively decide between two different outcomes. Some choice events force you to choose between two unfavorable events, but most of them (like this one) let you choose between taking an unfavorable event or paying for a more favorable event. Most choice events collectively cost a hefty 4 energy per player (so 8 for this game) paid for from any spirits in any combination, but they have an "aided by" mechanic that makes them a bit more manageable: for every element of the specified type any player has in play you get a discount of 1 energy. You can also discard matching cards from your hand for a discount of 2 energy each, and you can forget a card permanently for a discount of 4 energy (although if you discard it from your cards in play you lose the discount you were getting from its elements.) Often the benefits are fairly minor even if you pay and the main advantage is getting out of the nastier free event, but getting an extra presence placement is well worth forking over 4 energy or forgetting a card. Even if you don't feel like paying (which might be the case if you don't have any lands with Dahan eligible for the presence placement), the default option is actually pretty nice as far as choice events go. Sure, you have a decent chance of taking 1 blight on each board, but the invaders take a huge health penalty for all your big slow phase attacks. Occasionally it can be catastrophic if the state of your sands means you have a forced cascade, but usually the risk of blight isn't so bad if it gets you some extra kills. And then, beacuse that's somehow not good enough, on top of being one of the most favorable choice events it also comes with two of the strongest bonus events down below! If you took the health penalty option and there are any beasts in built-up lands you can take out 2 towns or 1 city per beast, which is insanely good, and the free defense largely cancels out the Dahan health penalty for most purposes. Serpent has 2 Water in play, so I need to come up with 6 more energy-equivalent to pay for extra presence. Since Serpent's got a reclaim space uncovered there's not much penalty to discarding, so I chuck Elemental Aegis back to my discard to pay for 2 of the remaining energy, and then just dump 4 energy from Serpent's stockpile. Wildfire gets to make a sacred site in its far mountains, which does cause a blight but gives me some new targeting options. Serpent builds its own sacred site next door.  Another timely fear card bails me out of the coastal jungle ravage. Doesn't help the larger inland ravage, but the Dahan defense from the event will at least get me some counterattack out of it.  3 defense isn't enough against the 6 damage jungle ravage to stop blight, but it does limit Dahan casualties to a single village, which lets the survivors counterattack for 4 to take out the city + explorer. At this point I finally realize I forgot to do Fortifications last turn, so I add the buildings that were technically already there in all the mountains. The next explore is coastal lands, which at least doesn't pile anything on top of Fortifications but is already a bit of a mess in its own right.  I take advantage of Wildfire's new sacred site to use Asphyxiating Smoke on the sands next door, taking out the town and letting me spread the Dahan out to the coast. Now barring any gently caress-you events the next ravage will result in that explorer being taken out by Dahan, blocking the coastal build immediately after. Serpent uses its innate to blow up the town in Wildfire's home sands. I also have Wildfire use Burned Land Regrows to clean up its coastal sands, as I'll need the extra room for blight shortly. Lastly, Serpent keeps up the energy feed with its innate and also throws Gift of Power on itself:  Personally, I'm not a big fan of Razor-Sharp Undergrowth and Disorienting Landscape is only somewhat better. Drought is always a fun time although again, I don't want to add even more blight on top of Wildfire. Nature's Resilience has great elements for Serpent Wakes in Power and also gives me some blight removal, so it's the obvious pick here. NEXT TURN  Now that Serpent has a decent number of cards it's time to take another major in the next growth phase. The Land Thrashes in Furious Pain is a classic; it's a great elemental fit and scales nicely with the blight that Wildfire throws around. It helps that none of the others are particularly exciting to me right now.  Wildfire is sitting on a decent energy surplus so it also goes for a major. Poisoned Land is obviously out for blight overload reasons, but Infinite Vitality is intriguing as a way around some of my blight woes. Cast Down Into the Briny Deep is a hilariously big nuke that's a bit too big and slow for Wildfire right now. Talons of Lightning promises to be fun times: it's still pretty expensive and not immediately relevant, but I'm eyeing that threshold and it looks pretty good to me.  I want to bank energy and cards for Talons, so Wildfire is playing light. Hitting the Fire + Plant space on its track means I can finally reach the 3 Plant threshold on Firestorm, which is a big damage multiplier.  So. The coastal sands have a city (3 HP), two towns (2x2 HP), and 3 explorers (3x1 HP.) Wildfire places presence there, dealing 3 damage for the 3 Fire elements on its track, and causing a blight cascade (re-blighting the adjacent sands that I just cleaned up for this purpose.) That takes out a city. Firestorm deals 1 damage for each of the 5 total Fire that Heart of the Wildfire has in play, which takes out the 2 towns and 1 explorer. Threatening Flames pushes out the remaining 2 explorers for 2 fear, wiping the land clean. Serpent meanwhile just drops a defend on the only sands on its board.  Unfortunately, I get one of the events that I really didn't want to see. +1 damage per land means that single explorers are now enough to hit the 2 damage threshold to cause blight (and Dahan casualties), and I have 3 solo explorer ravages. There's a decent chance that I'll get bailed out by fear cards, but if not things could get ugly quickly, including a potential double cascade. This is slightly mitigated by getting a free blight removal, and even more slightly mitigated by getting a couple disease.  Thankfully I have two fear cards. The first fear card lets each spirit add a Strife in 1 land with Dahan, which mostly bails me out. Normally it sucks to waste strife on explorers, but I have no real choice here. (There is actually a minor rules tweak that comes into play here, although it has no real consequence in this instance. In the original Branch & Claw rules, these lands would still take 1 damage from invaders: strife reduces the explorer's damage to 0 and then the event adds +1 damage to the invaders overall, and 0 + 1 = 1. The later expansion Jagged Earth supersedes this with a new rule that if all the invaders in a land have their damage negated they can no longer receive boosts to their total damage. This doesn't really make any difference in this case since it's only +1 damage, not enough to do any permanent harm, but there are events that can take a 0-damage land straight into blight under the original rule.) The second fear card isn't really much help. Quarantine is very hit or miss (mostly miss), although if your coasts are mostly cleared it can save you some headache.  The interior sands don't have the benefit of strife from the fear card, so the explorer still blights there. This is probably good news for Serpent as it gives me some leeway on the presence cap, but losing a sacred site on Wildfire hurts. We're into stage III proper now and get sand+mountain. Quarantine does keep the west coast clear, which is handy, although Wildfire is pretty well set up to handle whatever popped up there anyhow.  Since I don't have to worry about the western beaches right now I have Wildfire regrow the blight in the corner and then lay down some wilds to keep it clear. Serpent uses Smothering Infestation on its coastal jungle, and the threshold is enough to wipe the land clean. I also have enough elements to hit the 2nd threshold on Serpent Wakes in Power, which means I can plop down an additional presence on the coast. Wildfire has 2 absorbed presence and has the option to add its own presence as well, but I choose to hold off as I am perilously close to flipping the blight card.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2023 21:44
|
|
|
 Wildfire takes another card. It's LIGHTNING TIME this turn, so Lure of the Unknown offers me excellent elements at just the right moment.  I am ashamed to admit that I have inadvertantly made an ILLEGAL PLAY at this point, though. Serpent is at the presence cap but I placed a new presence anyhow! I have a habit of setting presence aside on the board and then placing it later, so I uncovered the 4 plays space and set my presence back down on the spirit board, which the TTS mod reads as not being in play and therefore reported as being at 8/8 presence so I assumed I was OK and went ahead and put the presence on the island (taking me over the cap.) If I had a little more foresight I could have avoided this problem completely, so I will let it slide as ultimately it makes no real difference in the outcome.  Wildfire places presence in the coastal jungle and then uses Lure of the Unknown to yank out one of the two surviving explorers, rendering it safe (barring another irritating event.) This is where I could have gotten around the presence limit: had I chosen to place Serpent's presence in that jungle last turn, I could have nuked it with blight and then brought Serpent back down under the presence limit so that I could continue powering up this turn. The extra presence where I placed it last turn had no real impact anyhow. With the threshold Talons of Lightning is one of the few AoE damage powers in the game, knocking the worst of the mountains down to a manageable size and taking out 4 adjacent towns. Having that much air element also means Wildfire hits the 4 Fire / 2 Air threshold to split Firestorm damage. With 3 plant showing, Firestorm has enough damage to wipe out both the sands and the blighted mountains.  The event is only mildly annoying. It can help thin out problem lands, but mostly it's very good at sneaking explorers into lands you'd already cleared. It's somewhat mitigated by the beasts event, giving you a shot at immediately eating some of the escapees.  The fear card also lets me clean up some of the leftover explorers on the east coast.  The ravage goes off without a hitch. Wildfire's board is basically cleared but Serpent gets some rather large builds. Wildfire cleans up some of its leftover messes now that its board is largely dealt with. Unfortunately, for all the blight on the board the nature of Wildfire means that the blight mostly is where the invaders aren't, so The Land Thrashes in Furious Pain turns out to mostly be a wet fart even with the threshold that repeats in an adjacent land, doing light damage while Serpent's innate does the heavy lifting to clear the central mountain.  The big news is that Serpent is at 3 Fire / 3 Water / 3 Earth / 2 Plant, which is enough to hit the first two thresholds on Serpent Wakes in Power... and, once I place another presence to uncover the next Any element (legally, since Absorb Essence raised the cap), I can gain a 3rd plant to hit the highest threshold for a free major. The sequential nature of power thresholds means that you can gain or lose elements from one threshold that affect later thresholds. Wildfire is up to 3 presence absorbed, so it gets a free major too (on top.) Pillar of Living Flame is highly thematic, but Powerstorm is just too much goddamn fun. For Serpent, Accelerated Rot and Trees and Stones Speak of War both have targeting restrictions that are not terribly useful. Mists of Oblivion might be fun if I can scrounge up some air (and I have 2x Any element if nothing else), but Fire and Flood is pretty tough to pass up for Serpent. It's expensive but extremely flexible, and when you can easily hit both thresholds it's just all around great damage wherever you want it.  I still need a little help hitting Powerstorm's threshold, so Wildfire goes fishing for minors and I pull up a whopper. Spur on with Words of Fire is pretty close to Serpent's Gift of Flowing Power, which is to say it's fun as hell, and it happens to be a perfect elemental match for Powerstorm.  Both spirits are nearly at full power and I get to really let loose here. Serpent is at its presence limit but this time I am able to finagle it correctly: I use the blight from Wildfire's presence placement to destroy one of Serpent's presence, giving me room to add another presence to the board. You're allowed to take spirit growth actions in any order, so this is perfectly legal.  Fast phase is a support power bonanza. Powerstorm and Spur On gives Serpent an energy infusion and an extra card in play. Absorb Essence is mostly there for elements, and Serpent uses Powerstorm to give Wildfire double Boon of Living Energy just because. Nature's Resilience cleans up a blight to give Wildfire a little more buffer, and double Elemental Aegis creates an unreasonable amount of defense to handle the big ravages remaining.  It turns out to be largely unnecessary. Farmers Seek the Dahan For Aid is a real fucker of an event; it's a choice event, but instead of getting to pony up energy to get out of it you just get to choose which way to get hosed. You can take virtually guaranteed blight and Dahan losses in return for weaker invaders, or you can get a bunch of invaders dumped on you to dodge a ravage. If you've already managed all the ravages when this comes out, it sucks! The bottom option turns into pure downside (especially if you had counterattacks lined up) and the top option sticks you with damage that you were carefully trying to avoid (which may very well be the difference between flipping the blight card or not.) If you've got a lot of ravage damage incoming when it comes out, it probably still sucks! If you were gambling on being able to afford whatever blight was incoming the bottom option is still generally worse than letting the ravage happen and the top option stacks even more blight on you, which may trigger a cascade if you have to put blight in a land that already had an undefended ravage. And then after one of the nastier choice events in the deck, instead of getting some nice softball bonuses at the bottom to compensate you get a very mixed bag. Sometimes trading a Dahan for a disease is decent, but if you have any hope of having spare defense then you're probably worse off than letting the build happen and then counterattacking. I'd like to keep the island healthy, so I take the second option. I want to try to keep my inland clear, so I stick the western town in the corner coastal sands and add disease there.  I'm on to terror level III, which makes my fear card particularly juicy as I can clear out many wetlands at once since the Dahan haven't really moved from their starting position. That does help ease some of the sting from the crappy event.  The disease I had built up takes away some of the sting of the double build, but it still sucks. On the plus side...  Serpent Rouses in Anger is fully charged, and I have plenty of surplus energy. That means 6 damage and 6 fear to one land, plus every single land takes damage equal to the number of Serpent's presence tokens in/adjacent to it.  With a little bit of assistance, this turns out to be enough to wipe the island clean. I had to use Serpent Wakes in Power to get a little bit of extra presence out, using Wildfire's presence to burn down the northwest coast and adding another Serpent presence in the interior to boost the quake damage.  While colonies failed for any number of reasons, few were as tragic as the fate that befell Snake Island. Settled by Prussia in the early 18th century, the colonists had expected a tropical paradise but were unprepared to deal with the island's challenging geography. The lush lowlands in the east were already heavily populated by the native Dahan and the new settlers faced difficult competition for the fertile farmlands there. Undeterred, the colonists attempted to settle the western shores but they had underestimated the rain shadow of the island's imposing central peaks. They soon discovered why native settlements were scarce on the arid western plateaus as their new towns were razed againd and again by the island's seasonal wildfires, exacerbated by an unexpected drought. Eventually, the Germans reached an uneasy compromise with the natives, taking refuge from the fires in the sparsely populated highlands and accepting aid from the Dahan in return for largely leaving the more fertile wetlands alone. For a time it looked as though the colony had finally found its footing. In the fall of 1718, the settlers began reporting unusual seismic disturbances. Some of the colonists believed these were an omen of God's wrath, especially after a catastrophically destructive storm gutted several towns. A few settlers began to flee the colony, but most stubbornly remained behind even as the quakes escalated. Their perseverance led to disaster, as the following year the island was wracked by a devastating volcanic upheaval. Although the volcanoes that formed Snake Island have been dormant for thousands of years, geologists believe that the tectonic plate below the island must have drifted over a hotspot containing an unstable pocket of magma. While this was not enough to revive the long-dead volcanoes making up the island's backbone, the tectonic forces produced by the magma shifting within the crust created a devastating seismic upheaval that leveled buildings to their foundations. According to anthropologists who have visited the island in subsequent centuries, there is an oral history passed down by the Dahan attributing this event to the wrath of the serpent god from which the island's common name is derived. Some critics are skeptical of this story's attribution, believing that the story is likely an unrelated preexisting myth that only coincidentally resembles the quake that led to the colony's catastrophic failure. Regardless, the sudden and terrifying total loss of the colony discouraged further colonization attempts for a generation or more, and with the outbreak of war on the European continent Snake Island was largely forgotten by Europe's imperial powers. So that's another game down. At first glance Serpent and Wildfire don't seem to be a very effective pair since Serpent hates blight, but in practice Wildfire keeps its lands so clean that Serpent generally doesn't care about being able to place presence on Wildfire's blight. In return Serpent has a ton of support to feed Wildfire (which is almost as hungry as Lightning) and Wildfire gets presence destruction on command to help Serpent duck its presence limits. It's a surprisingly effective combo; in small games Wildfire is almost guaranteed to flip the blight card due to how much blight your own presence adds, so keeping the island healthy all game is a minor miracle. I did have generally good luck with events and fear cards; events did throw up a few roadblocks, but compared to what you can usually expect out of the event deck I definitely got off easy. On the other hand, it's also a sign that I played too defensively. I got down to 1 invader card left in the deck, which means that if I was playing against Prussia on the highest difficulty level (which would take 2 more cards out of the invader deck, one for each remaining level) then I would have lost at the last invader phase from decking out. It still would have been a winnable situation, since I had them down to a couple cities that I could have knocked out before the final invader phase if I focused on them instead of trying to build up for the big snake quake. But when you have the opportunity to hit that max power threshold it's hard to resist.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2023 21:46
|
|
|
I've been trying to play Wildfire solo and it never really seems to pan out well. Out of most of the spirits, solo Wildfire feels like if you do even a single mistake right at the start, you are going to spiral down into a loss, especially since the blight buffer is so low that you can do an extremely quick blighted island if you aren't careful.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2023 00:09
|
|
|
Serpent is a really interesting spirit, and an extremely fun one. Surprisingly viable as a solo spirit, too: Playing the support cards on yourself does a lot to alleviate the initial lack of card plays, and on a single game board Elemental Aegis is kind of broken.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2023 01:23
|
|
|
Despite the absorb presence bottleneck, Rampant Green and Serpent remain IME one of the game’s premiere power couples. While having to weave in absorbs is a bummer, it’s always a bummer, and at least Rampant Green spits out so much of its own presence that it doesn’t care too much if some gets eaten (unlike Wildfire, where you can be in a rough spot with getting it back if you can’t remove blight from a land before letting Serpent eat presence there). Meanwhile a fully awake serpent is utterly terrifying, and this is true even if it’s “just” playing multiple major powers every turn rather than doing that and also getting full effect off of the inates, so if you end up managing the presence limit by getting a bunch eaten by ravages rather than purely by absorbs that’s generally enough to win, even at higher levels. Meanwhile despite the problem Wildfire can have with getting much presence absorbed, I like this combo a lot. It’s not nearly as powerful as Green + Serpent, but it’s fun to be able to burn off Serpent’s extra presence to help with managing that, and Wildfire’s extreme early game power helps cover for Serpent’s slow start. I always have fun teaming these up (and enjoy Wildfire a lot in general; Serpent less so). Good to have the Branch and Claw stuff unlocked. I like events a lot, even with the uneven power levels. I think having some unpredictability in the ravages is worth a lot, and personally don’t mind being able to have a bad or good run of them cost or save a game. Thematic Map I am not a fan of. I find it nigh-unreadable, but the Steam client can solve that because they have an option to use the more readable display for it. The bigger issue IMO is that it introduces wild early variance in the explore deck, with the good early explores sometimes doing almost nothing due to cut off lands, and the bad ones being an immediate nightmare. While I don’t mind the event variance, I find that kind of very early game binary less fun personally. But hey, you’re going to do something with the other side of the map board, and it’s a cool option to have for those who dig it, so still a neat inclusion.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2023 16:22
|
|
|
the holy poopacy posted:
Wait, what happens if you destroy all the boards in play using Cast Down? Is that an immediate loss, an immediate win, or something even sillier? (When we did that, we ruled that it was an immediate win haha)
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2023 17:22
|
|
|
dervival posted:Wait, what happens if you destroy all the boards in play using Cast Down? Is that an immediate loss, an immediate win, or something even sillier? (When we did that, we ruled that it was an immediate win haha) It's both a win (since there are no invaders left) and a loss (because there's at least one spirit with no presence on the board). The rulebook explicitly says that if players both win and lose at the same time is a victory; thematically it's a suicide victory where the spirits successfully repelled the invaders but it took too much from them and they will fade into nothingness, and new spirits will develop with time. In this particular case though I guess they will be sea spirits and Aquaman's problem.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2023 17:43
|
|
|
Omobono posted:It's both a win (since there are no invaders left) and a loss (because there's at least one spirit with no presence on the board). Ocean will be pleased at least
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2023 20:24
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 7, 2024 12:55 |
|
|
Love the big snek, definitely my most played spirit. Mostly because I've fallen into the habit of playing as them when introducing the game to new players, since it helps smooth out the earlygame for them and then if everyone did their job properly can close out to make sure we actually win.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2023 08:43
|
|
