What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

Thunderspeaker and Shadows vs England. For the first time, we won in Fear phase 2 by removing all cities and villages from the map. It was jut a savage pounding of settlers from the beginning. The wife with Shadows murdered explorers, I waged a Dahan war. Very aggressive with a decent movement of fear counters. Shadows I feel is a very underrated spirit; the combination of settler control and fear gives a double whammy in preventing build actions, and pairs very nicely with an aggressive damaging spirit who can level buildings.

Prior to this we tried a game with Nightmares and the lightning bird that went horribly. Within a few turns the island was so blighted and overrun we just sort of conceded lol. Combination of the wife learning the bird and I feel just a poor pairing.

Further up the thread we touched on how Lightning can actually be pretty tricky to play well because you can very easily get stuck in a loop of focussing on blowing up towns to save the island which puts you into a cycle of leaning heavily on the reclaim growth option. With that combo I can see how it broke down quickly!

I think my approach would be to go with a ‘broken island’ strategy, with Nightmare focussing on herding lone explorers while Lightning double downs on spamming presence and just allowing the invader to grind in and build big cities. Nightmare creates safe lands for Lightning to build powerful sacred sites across the island giving lots of reach for destructive plays later in the game. I’d also focus on card plays for Lightning’s growth in this instance. There will be lots of blight and cascades, loss of Dahan and maybe even some lost presence, but a few turns in I predict the spirits will come back as heavyweights.

Speaking of getting trapped in that cycle...

We went back to the island tonight, playing with one new player. We went with Earth (new player), Lightning (me), and Shadow. It was a good combination because we could stroke the Fear deck and do some direct damage with Earth to back us up if we got into a tight spot from Ravage. We won in Stage II, even though a Coastal Lands card set us back a couple turns. We played straight (no extra Growth to start) and still won pretty handily. There were a couple of sticky spots and I had the problem that, in trying to get to four Fire, I need to dump four cards out of my hand every turn. And I'd like to get to five Fire, but to do that, I need Presence. If I don't pick up my cards, my turns swing between overwhelming to mediocre, at best. It is quite tricky. But I picked up Steam Vents, which is great for Lightning, and I never had trouble playing all my powers as fast abilities and giving the Boon to Shadow to speed up his, so we did pretty well.

Had a day off work this week to look after my son and we set up a four spirit game with Shadows, Serpent, Fangs and Ocean against Sweden and the Guard the Heart scenario. We were conscious that with two spirits each we would have a lot to think about so we set Sweden to level 2 so that we wouldn’t keep forgetting to implement the higher level effects. We had the island set up with the big jungle in the middle which seemed appropriate for the scenario. Doing it this way is both a blessing and a curse; when Jungle comes up it means that you clear it out completely and don’t have to worry about the invaders for a while but on the downside it presents a really big challenge to have to clear all four areas at the same time.

We nearly got shafted in just the third round with only a fortuitous card draw giving us enough options to get rid of all four explorers that had landed there in the previous round. After that point it became a very controlled game, the good spread of elements meant that we never had a problem in affording the cost of event cards and energy was in good supply with both Serpent and Ocean beasts at generating more than they need. I haven't used Shadows often and I was surprised at how quickly it ramps up, by mid-game I was able to knock out a Major Power every turn with only a little help from Serpent. It’s innate was a perfect match for the scenario too, in fact I think it might well be the perfect partner for Lightning if you want to have options for targeting explorers and towns alike.

We had a slow start on fear but then it started to come in thick bursts that gave us some extra edge. Really it was a game of destruction though and before Serpent had even fully awakened we were causing large scale carnage across the island. In the final turn we managed to clear all but one solitary explorer from the island who was left stranded on the coast with no less than three beasts under Fang’s presence.

The difficulty may have been set a bit low for us but it was by no means a walkover with the scrape with disaster and some big settlements that became threatening at certain times. We really enjoyed masterminding our dominance and the preoccupation of managing two spirits at the same time so I don’t think it’s necessary to have a tough challenge to feel the experience was worthwhile.

mezike wrote: I haven't used Shadows often and I was surprised at how quickly it ramps up, by mid-game I was able to knock out a Major Power every turn with only a little help from Serpent. It’s innate was a perfect match for the scenario too, in fact I think it might well be the perfect partner for Lightning if you want to have options for targeting explorers and towns alike.

This is what we discovered in our game last night, too. The ease with which Lightning can remove towns and with which Shadows can remove explorers works in perfect sync to stall Invader development. Plus, with towns dying and Shadow's powers all generating Fear, we had snowballs just like you're describing. We went from getting one Fear card in the first few turns to getting the second and third and into stage II in a couple turns. One turn later, we had the buildings cleared and it was game over. That last card before a stage change is almost always a huge bonus because you shift into the bigger effect before that card is revealed, so it will always have more impact than it otherwise would have.

Trying to imagine playing with some of the spirits (fang comes to mind) while playing another Spirit hurts my head. Fang has such intricate ballet of powers that it's about all I can handle to just get that down.

Yeah, my son plays that one all the time though so it’s second nature for him now. We decided to go for one complex and one simple spirit to stop our brains from melting. When he picked fangs out for this particular game I asked him if he was sure that he wanted to handle two complex spirits (with Ocean) and he said “dad, this one IS the easy one for me”

Then again, he’s 12 so knows every damn thing at the moment.

Sounds like everyone has had some experiences lately with Shadows dominating the exploration and fear elements of the game. Such an under appreciated spirit. I’m guessing some assume it’s a weaker spirit due to its relative simplicity.

Shadows is a spirit I love to play, It is also one of the most reliant on its inate's. Or more reliant on the inate accomplishing control. Where as they are perks for a lot of spirits Shadow is really doing things with the move a explorer. One of the things that the event cards do is sometimes mess with this. Shadow also really suffers from best power available in growth. Shadow may be the best "things are running at maintainable" spirit there is.

Lightning is in a simaler boat, but you can feel it less. Unless your playing at a pretty hard setting or the game goes super poor. You can land a big turn, sometimes a turn of nothing to just play presence and then reclaim for a huge turn again. But it has cards that do more than Shadows.

So, I guess the preorder page for Jagged Earth doesn't exist any longer, since the link I had leads to the now completed KS campaign. I realize it's not coming out until May, 2020. Guess I should just keep it in mind next year?

Hey, did you try the link that I posted on page 7? I tried it just now and it goes through to the Backerkit site where you can place a preorder.

Did now/ Sorry. I remember seeing that at the office and thinking I should get back to it not on the office computer and forgot about it. All set now. It basically just puts you in line and they charge when it eventually gets released, so at least I'm not tossing them money and they're sitting on it for a year. I know I'm probably just describing a process that all of you are well aware of, but I generally don't do KS stuff, except one time. Closest I've come is GMT's P500... which should be delivering the new Time of Crisis today, now that I think about it.

Had a nice smooth game this evening I really enjoyed, we rolled Prussia level 3 nicely. I used Shadows Flicker... I find it a tough spirit because it gets no energy to start but also needs to get to 3 cards pretty badly for its innate... so the growth decisions are very tough calls. I made a swerve after midgame and just went into energy which I rarely do and picked up major powers.

Again, I think any power that generates a lot of fear is easy to overlook because the fear is *critical* to win but it's a very incremental, non-material progress you're making. It's hard to see exactly how you helped.

Had an amazing game yesterday with Wildfire, Serpent and Lightning against Prussia level 4.

Wildfire is a tough one to get started with as many of it’s useful powers require blight which isn’t generally an option on the first turn, so we ended up being fairly overwhelmed right out of the gate especially when the event cards went against us and put even more invaders onto the map. We ended up in a war of attrition, everywhere I was going with Wildfire to save a ravage was dropping blight anyway and I just couldn’t get enough plants in play to clean up my own mess behind me. Lightning was panicking with needing to contain invader expansion on two fronts with Serpent continuing to slumber, and was stuck in the infamous loop of reclaiming every turn in order to keep powering up its innate.

Eventually the blight got out of control and for the first time in ages we had a blighted island. The flip side of the card was the one where we all lose three presence but then piled on five blight per spirit as compensation – all of this actually worked in our favour as it meant that Serpent no longer had to worry about limitations on presence and there was plenty of fodder for Wildfire to go on an unhinged spree. With minimal presence, only three invader cards left, and about thirty fear away from hitting terror level three we had quite an uphill struggle. We opted to throw caution to the wind for an all-out desperate survival plan of maximum fear and focused city destruction, ignoring ravages and builds unless they were getting in the way of our goal.

Lightning stopped blowing things up in order to drop a new and much needed sacred site whilst I went digging for major powers. I ended up with the card (I want to say Maelstrom?) that allows another spirit to place two presence which finally roused Serpent and on the following turn pulled the most perfectly matching Firestorm to replace it. Lightning had collected Sweep into the Sea and, with our snake buddy now able to wind up to a massive twenty pus damage in one region, between us we decimated the invaders across a goodly swath of the land. It was costly though as we also had to put out a blight cascade that bounced across no less than four different regions, the biggest I’ve ever had to make. Going into the final round we had no less than twenty five blight on the board, the island was an horrendous mess but there were only two cities left which we were able to pinch off in the following fast phase for an excruciatingly close win – one invader card, one blight, and only three presence each on the island. It was the closest result we’ve ever had and a wonderfully tense game to go from certain failure to victory over just two action-packed rounds.

Wildfire is great, but absolutely not for the faint-hearted. It makes a real mess of everywhere it goes in every sense and without blight cleaning powers in support it can make things go bust. We were fortunate to get the blight card that we did, any other one would almost certainly have resulted in us losing the game.