What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

Had to link this because the work is amazing: www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/j14...tom_presence_tokens/

They already responded to the idea of producing and selling them on Etsy or somewhere. Said it's not cost-effective (each spirit took about an hour and this doesn't even consider the potential licensing requirement with GTG.) Pretty cool, though.

Those are great!!!

So got some games in with the girlfriend today. Her first with jagged earth.

Game one was Grinning Trixter and River at base difficulty. Fun game. Not sure how I feel about Grinning Trixter. This spirit for sure has the best named powers in the game. I realize only one unique power has randomness but so does a relatively easily triggered inate. Not sure I really like the randomness. I do love what the spirit does with strife. The special rule that lets you drop a second stride within 1 space is totally baller and feels great.

We ended up winning it just took us a while. This may have had something to do with using one of the new boards and one of the old. I missed the marking on the new board that indicates which board it should not be played with. We really found this out in game two.

We got rolled. The team was River and Vengeance burns. Vengeance starts slow, we hit a bad open with mountain being our first retain flopped. We both had starting cities in the mountains. I think we went to blighted island on turn 3. This flip killed 3 presence each leaving us both at 1. We got 10 blight on the new card. It barely mattered. We got totally blasted. It was impressive. 16 blight on the board.

This was my first game with vengeance. I don’t have a good feel for it at all. This was also a terrible game to really study. I can say for sure that it starts slow. Should get a new game in with Vengeance soon.

Got two more games in tonight.
First a rematch on different boards with vengeance and river. We were more successful this time. I am not really digging vengeance. It does some neat stuff, but it takes so much work to do it. The reward with it does not match the effort put in. Targeting restrictions on powers, both cards and inates just crush any sort of early game play. The lack of any tool to really play off your partner or teammates is felt here. You have one intate but your so restricted that it’s all but mandatory you use it on yourself.

Second round was river and memory of ages. This spirit was a much more rewarding experience. Maybe a little too generous with the teamwork powers. I’ll need more plays but a fun spirit. Easy to work I ate defense goes a long way to making a spirit solid.

My next game I will be playing as downpour and I will be teaming up with Lure. I think. I know life is super solid and feels great to play. Time to see how downpour does. This should be my second game where I really get to try out isolation. It’s a pretty awesome new mechanic.

On that note I’ll say a little about badlands. They are great. Fun to play with and can really change how you play. They make one damage powers so much better.

Love the badlands too. Had a great, great time with the blight rock spirit that plays off them.

I have the same reaction as you do to the ultra complex spirits. It's just too much for me. I *like* the strategy guard rails that the spirit design gives you, so when they're too complex it's just sort of bewildering. Feels like the pleasure of working on your car rather than driving it.

It’s not the complexity that is an issue. I love lots of complex spirits. Bringer is one of my favorites. Vengeance just has this feeling of helplessness. My normal thinking when taking powers is strong symbol synergy then immediate use. These sometimes flop depending on board state and goals. An example I’ll often take defend over symbols if it saves Dahan and they are important to my strat. But turns that don’t trigger inmates feel bad. Vital strength of the earth is the exception here. Generally you do more with a lesser power and an innate than a slightly better minor. It also lets you effect more area.
With vengeance I was taking cards with none of my symbols to get disease on the board so I could use my starter cards. Granted the two cards I had did decent stuff with or adding disease but I don’t think this was a matter of complexity overload. Or playing on the knifes edge like when you play bringer.

This was with only a blight card and the event deck for difficulty. I only harp on this because prior to this my least favorite spirit was Sharp fangs. I know sharp fangs can do work it is a spirit that just does not click for me.

I’ll have to gone vengeance more play. Maybe with a teammate that supports him better. But really who does spread of rampant green just not make better. Off the cuff I can’t think of another spirit that throws down disease and that’s the really limiting factor. Sure I can get a fear and not trigger the disease during build but is what I am going to do better than the possibility of that explorer not building and dying to a Dahan.

Where bringer feels like your are on the edge of everything going wrong you are still always doing productive things. Vengeance you are doing things to them maybe do productive things.

It may be that I am too used to being a little more in control of the game and playing from the position of getting wrecked to do
more is to alien to me currently. But I don’t feel that’s the case.

All my ranting aside. I am totally in love with this expansion.

Expansion rules. We played Volcano and Many Minds today. Both unique ways to approach the game. Many Minds is like the defense version of the original sharp fangs beast spirit.

Yep, we immediately set up another game. Russia is neat, it has a killing beasts win condition. That's a fun twist, usually beasts are pretty much invulnerable and exist kind of underneath the board as a resource used by events and some of the powers and spirits.

Finished up that game we set above, it wasn't so good! We had the same experience as someone else did, the disease spirit is pretty frustrating to play. Particularly in combination with Russia lvl 2, which has unkillable explorers who do 2 damage. A particularly unsatisfying nuisance combination.

We won but only by completely running out the fear deck and coming within a hair's breadth of losing. We'll think twice before combining that spirit and adversary again.

Got some more games in. My partner is learning Lure. I played as four different spirits with two games as downpour.

I ha e a few takeaways. Downpour is a lot of fun. I played better my second game with them. It was still not great as due to the need stop things from happening got my play cards use of the water symbol card repeat / energy gain out of sync with the 2 presence 2 water symbol growth. Even out of sync as I was I was able to do some power moves. 2 repeats of the one unique will kill an entire zone of all buildings. That’s a huge deal. This spirit is super defensive too. It’s quite fun to play.

Volcano is next. Quite fun. I played it ok. Real powerful 3 cost unique. This game was with a less well played partner. We were both making mistakes. We won but it took a while. Don’t have a great feel for how I could have done better. But it’s a pretty cool experience.

Somewhere in here I played Finder. My second game. It’s still so good at moving things. Being able to move cities with a starter card is bonkers. Partner was on game two of Lure. So we were both less than our best. Keeper is up there with most awesome team mate at helping you do what you want to do. This is really true for the new spirits like Lure and volcano that can make kill zones.

Last I played starlight for the second time. This spirit is fun. I think my game was worse this time. But that may be because I had a different build from different power cards. First time I had the amazing Unquenchable flame. 1 damage and a badlands and pretty sure it has both the symbols to power the damage dealing innates on Starligjts board. It also has earth for the defense innate. This time around it felt like I could not draw cards without learning a new defensive power. I had 4 or 5 plus the innate. This was fine as Lure was full agro. This spirit can really move. It felt like I was setting up a different sacred site somewhere each turn to defend from. Lot of fun. I was also getting lure new powers on almost each turn.

Have been able to use a good few of the new cards in the minor and major decks. Much more of the minors than majors. I really like the new defensive cards. These are pretty straitforeword. But nice variations that separate them from prior iterations ina good way. I have enjoyed the new cards. And some old cards that felt out of place before or left me wanting. Overall it’s been great. They minor deck feels pretty great.

I want to try vengeance again. See if I grok it any better. I think downpour may make an ideal partner. So that’s my current future thinking.

I'm sure you can, but I was having trouble understanding how you could get past the 4 disc destruction to any of the higher levels with the volcano.

Those big eruptions look like one-off end of game big bangs. You’d likely need to use a slow-build strategy where you use the x2 presence at zero range growth action a few times and aim to get x3 fire per turn so that you can combine your slow innate (gain a power on x3 fire) with the card gain growth action to stall the need to recover and therefore keep putting presence out. I would likely uncover the first fire on the lower track then focus on the energy track to take majors in order to be effective in the meantime. Once you do a level-6 eruption you can also recover three destroyed presence on your slow innate so you can then afford to chain multiple dwindling eruptions, real “end of the world” stuff to wipe the board clean. Here’s a fun combo for you though - Shroud + Volcano in a board setup with adjacent mountains, Shroud can turn presence destruction into a push action which enables you to chain big eruptions in quick succession. Add Finder to the mix and you can theoretically teleport Volcano’s destroyed presence to any other mountain and wreck the island into one big lava flow.

Speaking of Shroud, it’s become my new favourite spirit. I enjoy the tertiary mechanisms where it has to gain energy from leaving broken stuff on the board and from drawing power cards, then it slips and slides presence and manipulates the game state. It feels a little puzzley at times but benefits from having really straightforward inmates so I find the focus is entirely on doing tricky and sometimes wild things with the board-state and not on jumping through increasingly complex hoops. Plink damage also becomes far more interesting because you actively want to hit invaders for a single damage and then milk them for fear over a few turns instead of destroying them outright. Feels like it addresses things that are otherwise a bit frustrating at times in the game.

I’m warming to JE a bit more but still find the Major Power deck to be super-janky and random now that it’s been diluted.

I don’t have a great feel on the Majors. I have mostly been playing minor cards. A lot of them. So you may well be right about the major deck being diluted.

On my phone and I don’t have the game in front of me but pretty sure volcano also has a power that lets them shuffle presence between places. That will also let you do bigger kabooms.

I like JE. I just need to grind some games with the spirits to figure out how to play. I still have no games with the final iteration of Many Minds. I also have no games with Fractured, although I have a game paired with them. I also have yet to dive into Aspects. I am pretty excited to do that. I really like Shadows Flicker and want to clock some games with its aspects. There is just so much content in this box. You are looking at like 20 games alone just to play each spirit and aspect once. Very happy so far. Hope to get some games in this weekend.

Just a quick psa to say that Downpour + Wildfire makes for a very satisfying two-spirit game. Downpour has some tricks to mop up Wildfire’s destruction plus can put destroyed presence back into play, enabling Wildfire to really run rampant. Given that Downpour can also repeat powers and both spirits start with cards that give energy buffs to each other it makes for a happy power-couple.

I'm doing the Stars very high complexity one in our next game. Gulp. Wish me luck.