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What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

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18 Aug 2020 13:22 #313229 by Bernie
I wonder if the best thing they can do in the next expansion is something like what Chaos in the old world did and just replace the core deck of powers. Clean out the bloat while adding in powers that use tokens and just making it leaner.

I will report back with impressions tonight, not sure I want to play Finder in the setup my game will be, have all day to think on it though.

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18 Aug 2020 13:59 - 18 Aug 2020 13:59 #313230 by Gary Sax
Root did a really good job of this, as well, Bernie. They just created a new deck for the main card draw along with expansion 2 (moles and crows) and it's very different and in many people's opinion much better.
Last edit: 18 Aug 2020 13:59 by Gary Sax.
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18 Aug 2020 19:29 #313234 by Bernie
I kinda hate playing base Spirit Island as I really miss the Branch and Claw powers. I wonder if maybe cutting just B&C out might make things better. That should leave a good mix of symbols. I am not in any rush to do this yet though. Need way more plays.
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19 Aug 2020 08:24 #313237 by Bernie
So ended up playing Lure paired with Volcano. No added difficulty. Game was much easier than last time, likely the way invader cards played. Lure feels very strong. Got solid cards on my minor power gains. No idea what volcano had going on, but he was blowing stuff up. We hit an event that gave us a blanket defend 4 on the whole island when we wanted it. That made for a quick end of things.

I only gained powers twice but I was not lacking good cards in each draw. Too small a sample size to tell much.

Lure is much much more strait foreword than Mist is, just a real clean play experience. I like both so far.
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19 Aug 2020 09:06 #313238 by mezike
That's encouraging to hear, I think we'll next play again at the weekend. Still keen to play some more despite the first game being problematic.

I'm so used to putting either an adversary or scenario into play that maybe the way to go with the more complex spirits is to leave them out and the complexity of the spirit is then enough to contend with. Skimming off a couple of invader cards and adding extra fear cards is then a way to make it more challenging without adding complexity.
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19 Aug 2020 10:19 #313241 by Gary Sax
Waiting is killing me!

I think once my spouse plays Lure she'll never play anything else, she's a thematic gamer and she only rarely played anything besides the wilderness spirit from branch and claw because of theme.
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20 Aug 2020 10:48 #313295 by Jackwraith
So, finally got a game in. My girlfriend has a couple games under her belt, but we also had a friend who was playing his first. She took Lightning and he took Serpent because he thought it looked cool. I warned him that Serpent was a really slow starter, but that kinda meshes with Lightning. On the spur of the moment, instead of trying someone new, I thought I'd test the complaints that Mezike and I have voiced about the power decks and play a spirit that really relies on good draws, so I picked Sharp Fangs (who is also a decent "fast starter" to counteract Serpent's sluggishness.) We were using a Blight card and Event cards, but no Adversary or Scenario, since we had a new player.

I'm not a huge Sharp Fangs fan, largely because I think it's too impacted by the power decks. It has easy access to them, but if you don't draw powers that involve Beasts or especially placement of new Beast tokens, you're going to be hampered. The other problem is that Sharp Fangs is highly Presence-dependent (i.e. not much range) and, of course, Serpent wants to be swiping Presence.

My Minor draws weren't that great, but my first Major was spot on: Insatiable Hunger of the Swarm. That's pretty much the ideal Major power draw for Sharp Fangs, since it's fast and constantly generates Beasts, albeit with Blight. I pulled Thickets Erupt later, which is also decent, mostly for the Wilds tokens. Serpent would round out the Majors for the night with Fire and Flood, which pretty much put paid to the last significant outpost of the Invaders and which generated a relatively comfortable Stage II win. We got as low as a single Blight on our Healthy Island side of the card, but with Serpent's regular ability to remove it, we did OK. And, once again, the element tokens turned out to be a great addition, since I had Elemental Boon from turn 1 and kept feeding Lightning (and me) with the Air and Beasts we both needed to keep our innates operating.

Maybe the deck bloating isn't as bad as first thought? Dunno. Sample size issues on both sides of the argument, of course. Next time, it's a new spirit, for sure. I tried to tempt my girlfriend into the Lure/Oceans combo, but she opted for the fast, flashy guy. Not sure how well that combo, needing some build-up, would have worked with the largely somnolent Serpent, either.
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20 Aug 2020 11:13 - 20 Aug 2020 11:13 #313297 by Gary Sax
Having a good sharp fangs game feels really really good, in my experience. I think it's the methodical way you chain things together.
Last edit: 20 Aug 2020 11:13 by Gary Sax.
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23 Aug 2020 13:35 #313419 by mezike
We've managed to get three plays in over the last couple of days, two with JE and then my daughter expressed an interest so we stripped out all the expansion content for a learning game on base only, and my mood on JE has mellowed slightly. I still think it ups the complexity unnecessarily but our experience was much better than that first game. We didn't use any invaders or scenario, stacked four fear cards per level, and I double-handed Rampant Green (which for me is kind of an easy-mode if you use it to focus on spamming presence at all costs).

Volcano + Stone and Trickster +Shifting Memory were the spirit pairings with Rampant Green, and they were all pretty great. Trickster felt a little erratic, particularly when I started with the arson card and inadvertently burned down one of my own presence discs in the process. It feels very much like it is filling a design space for 'insert random chaotic character here'. I don't know if I would be in the mood for it very often as it does change the character and tempo of the game a bit. Reminds me a little of Wildfire where it can be frustrating for the other player's carefully-laid plans.

Volcano I really enjoyed, I love the way that its presence waxes and wanes in a similar way to Ocean. I didn't get a chance to blow up into the top end of it's innate, I think that is something which is only realistic when working with spirits with strong push/gather or defend - it's a slow build to get enough presence out and not worth blowing such a large stack of it unless there is a worthy target that has built up over time.

The learning game was super interesting as it put JE (and also Branch & Claw) into stark contrast. I gave Earth to my daughter as it's the simplest one to play, then I had Lightning so that I could make her go fast if she was struggling with her planning, and my son had Rampant Green so that we could help her get presence out and see how the spirits flex at higher power levels. It was a super fun game and refreshingly straight-forward, the turns just go by at a clip when you don't have tokens, events or side-rules to think about.
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30 Aug 2020 15:05 #313614 by Gary Sax
Still no JE in sight but my spouse and I got Spirit Island back on the table. I'm glad we did, it really takes a few turns to get back into the Spirit Island mindset.

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11 Sep 2020 20:34 #314009 by Gary Sax
I FINALLY got my shipping notification!!!
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19 Sep 2020 13:18 #314252 by Gary Sax
Sorting through this stuff. This a huge expansion---I got the two promo packs so it's kind of overwhelming. Especially glancing at some of the rules on a few of the more complicated spirits.
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22 Sep 2020 17:44 #314402 by Bernie
Sorry for the radio silence. For some reason my router has decided to block this site.
Have been unable to fix so far.

I ha e revived my copy and ha e a few games under my belt now.

Got my first game In As Finder. It’s a wild spirit. I was paired with Fractured. We rocked the game pretty hard. Lot of wacky plays. Finder is really neat. Lot of movement.

Played more games as Lure and Shroud. I still really like both. I think Lure is the most straightforward spirit in the expansion. Really strong. Was paired with the new Stone retaliation spirit. There were big death zones loaded with badlands by the end of the game.

Shroud is super fun. And plays so different. The way I was playing it I had a lot of invaders dangling in my lands. This works well for lots of fear. If you also ha e a constant churn of new stuff spawning. It’s a different feel. Kinda like how Bringer feels like your on a knifes edge till you turn the corner.

One more game as Starlight. What a cool spirit. I got lucky and got two strong earth / fire minors and proceeded to defend and kill with inates for the rest of the game. I found the biggest question to ask with this spirit is how to I reclaim cards. Once you decide that it’s not too bad.

I have had great experiences to date with the new minor powers and deck mix. Jane not really played with the majors yet.
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22 Sep 2020 19:16 #314407 by Gary Sax
We still haven't played, though a game with my spouse as the wildfire spirit and me as the new stone spirit is sitting on our a game table waiting.

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26 Sep 2020 14:33 #314582 by Gary Sax


Played the aforementioned game. God, what a design this is. The wildfire spirit is incredible in how thematic it is.

Completely understand the earlier comment about complexity. This is a definite complexity increase.
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