What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

I’ll second that!
I forgot about those element tokens. I currently have some card-sized trackers that I made up a while back just for this purpose and which make life so much easier when trying to remember which elements you have chosen for the round.

My buddy received his copy, I put in for the playmat so mine has not shipped yet. We were however able to get a game in via skype. He played the Trickster and I played the Mist spirit. With no adversary I though we would do better than we did out of the gate but we flipped the worst two terrain types on each of the first two turns. That set us back a bit and it took us a while to fumble through our growth and draws but we finally took over at the end of the stage 2 cards.

The Mist spirit is pretty wild. It wants to play so differently. You just dangle tons of wounded stuff on the board and rake fear. Its pretty neat. It is also rivaling Thunderspeaker and I imagine the final version of Many Minds as the most mobile spirit.

Trickster adds strife and randomness, one of those two is certainly welcome, the other less so. It is just kinda like a free thing, so it is not all bad. I will need to play it to give better feedback. Trickster does win the best power names though.

One of these days I'll crack and get my own copy of this. The guy that runs my game group owns it and I would play it over there, but who knows when that will be a thing again (assuming he starts it back up again at all whenever this is all over).

It's so worth it. Definitely my favorite coop game.

There is a TTS mod for it. I'd be happy to teach & play sometime if we can make timezones work.

I would be down for that.

Bernie

Alrighty then.

It's not a particularly long game so I can be available pretty much any day for a start time between 12pm and 2pm Pacific (8pm and 10pm UK). I'm already locked in for this Saturday and probably the next. I know that makes it tough for trans-Atlantic gaming so I'm totally cool if you guys want to figure something out for a Pacific timezone evening, it's not like I don't get enough opportunity to play Spirit Island at home!

Jagged Earth just arrived. I am 'Carlton' dancing right now, 5pm cannot come soon enough!

That is awesome. It may take a bit to line up a game, but we can work at it. Enjoy the new toys.

I may get a game in with my buddy tomorrow. He wants to play volcano. At the top of my list is Lure, but I think I will try keeper first. That seems like a more synergistic combo.

We're planning on Lure + Ocean as I like the idea of all the towns emptying and the invaders walking mindlessly into the ocean depths as they follow the captivating lure. My son is keen on Volcano so I think we'll have Ocean as a third spirit that we play collaboratively.

There is a lot of stuff here. Happy to see the event and fear decks double in size. It's going to take a long time to work through all of these spirits!

We got our first game in last night and it was... strangely disappointing?

We wanted to keep the difficulty low so we used one of the new scenarios, advertised at difficulty level 2, that adds reactions to land types (e.g.building a city in a jungle adds blight) as it looked fun and fairly simple and then we stacked the fear deck with four cards on each level.

I double-handed Lure and Ocean. I think it makes an interesting pair because Lure cannot enter the coastline which is the only place that Ocean can go, but they do need to collect some push and gather powers between them to help each other along. As a pair they also start slow but quite quickly become an energy monster that slips into Major powers quite easily. Although Lure is supposed to be bringing invaders into the heart of the island it also works with lining them up next to the coastline but I would say that it is still at it's best when gathering to the centre as it really wants to guide everyone into one place. Could go really well with Volcano which is well-suited to taking out small numbers of densely-populated regions. Lure + Ocean + River would likely be a very satisfying combination, as would any spirit that does mass plink-damage (one damage to all invaders suddenly becomes very useful when buildings are broken down into a horde of explorers)

My son decided to switch from Volcano to Fractured Days which was probably inadvisable as it is one of the most complex spirits - and that is the perfect nutshell word to describe Jagged Earth in general, complex. It feels like even the new power cards are all leaning on the more awkward side of adding in conditional checks or giving you halfway-useful actions that you then need to top off by combo-ing with another card in order to get much done. It might just have been the cards we happened to draw but boy, this felt like hard work to play, and we called it after nearly three hours just after tipping into Stage 3. The island was a total mess and could have gone either way in the last couple of turns, but by that point it had just stopped being fun and we didn't want to grind out to the end just for the sake of it.

It's only one game and we had one really complex spirit in the mix so not significant of anything but my hot take would be a thumps up for new events and fear cards, some of the new scenarios and invaders I might play once just for the novelty but there are two or three that will likely hit regular rotation, and a bit lukewarm on the new powers. The element tokens are really great, a super useful addition. New spirits are all good but the most complex ones look like a nightmare unless you are particularly into the brain-burning high-optimisation side of the game. Might need some time to warm to this as it is a different beast to the straight-forward way the base game plays with low/moderate complexity spirits.

That's been some of my reaction, as well. I wanted to put an actual game together (i.e. more than just me) so I could relate something "real" for you and Gary, but haven't been able to convince anyone around here to get into one. So I've just run through a couple solo games and, while I was prepared for some of the new spirits to be cumbersome (it's pretty obvious if you just look at their boards), I'm having a hard time seeing a desire to play something like Downpour again. Similarly, with so many powers now dependent on tokens (Beasts, disease, etc.), my new power draws were occasionally underwhelming, as there didn't seem to be as many good options for my current circumstances and it felt like I'd wasted a Growth pick.

In contrast, a couple of the spirits felt really good. I expected Trickster to be one of the (ahem) tricky ones, but it worked like a charm for me. Maybe then was when I got the good power draws? Mists and Starfall were also quite fun, although the latter was kind of AP-inducing. I think I need more than solo reactions to really get a feel for it, though.

The more "open" spirits advertised during the campaign looked like a heavy lift to me. I'm more accepting of the complexity there than making the minor/major powers real complex and conditional. That sounds kind of bad, I get exactly where you're coming from. At some point there's an upper limit to the complexity of conversations on placement, powers, and stuff that I want to have with my spouse while we play this game 2 player. Hopefully the alt-spirits for the basic spirits will salvage the "simple" part of the game which was so appealing.

I find solo multihanded games of this to be really tough because the more complex spirits are really keyed into being the toward the upper end about what a single person at the helm could handle. Adding a second spirit, for me, just overwhelms me.

Thanks for reporting back...

Jackwraith wrote: it felt like I'd wasted a Growth pick.

I very much sympathise with this. New powers in growth should be a cornucopia of "OMG WTF!" where your difficult choice should be which amazing thing you now want to be able to do. In our Jagged Earth game I spent three rounds just digging the Major Powers looking for anything that would have some kind of synergy and ended up picking up and playing gnarly power cards just in order to get something done. That wasn't anywhere near as exciting as it should have been.

Apparently you cannot play the new spirits without adding the new cards because of the balance of elements in the deck. I kind of wish they had made more of an effort to design the spirits around the existing cards with maybe a dozen or so new cards going in to add a little extra variety rather than changing the whole personality of the piece. I trust that it's balanced and I know it has been super well-playtested, I just feel that it was perhaps tested by people interested in the more grindy and less-thematic view of what the game does?

Definitely want to play a few more games with Jagged Earth as I like the general idea of more Spirit Island, but equally prepared to strip it all out and go back to Base + Branch & Claw which for me was a perfect gaming experience.

It was! I'm at like 50 something plays of it and that's a huge number for a longer more involved game.