What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

Ha! Both Bernie and I were quick to promote the "Shadow's fan club"

And clearly. After I posted that without stuff I for my of me I show my ignorance.

The sport is Moon with fire and a smattering of wind. I have some free time and the information of me and will make a more informed post in a little.

My night clearly consists of watching football and theroycrafting spirit island.

So. Some breakdowns of the minor deck.
One of the aspects replaces the Dahan range special with a second innate that heavily uses air. So I factor this into my breakdown a bit.

There are 3 cards in the minor deck that have moon, fire and air. And one of those is the grant 3 to another spirit and get me too. Both of the other 2 cost zero which is awesome. But one of them places blight. That almost never stops me from taking the power with shadow. But I almost never fire the power. It is for sure a bit of feels bad. So three cards only one you really want. Not a great start.

Next is moon and fire. Eleven cards. Some real standouts here though. I’ll talk about four.
Unquenchable flame is first. One fear and damage to buildings with a stop to end of turn healing is great. Add in a badlands for a 2 fire threshold and range 2 from a sacred site and I love this power. It has some late game synergy with your innate too, if you can work it.
Domesticated Animals Go Berserk. New power. Range 0 1 fear defend 5 and a kicker of 3 moon add a beast. It’s great. Only target lands with buildings. But shadows is one of the best at killing explorers so who cares.

Quicken The Earth’s Struggles. I mentioned this before. It’s still great. Defend 10 at range 0 from a sacred site.

Growth Through Sacrifice. This is worth looking at as it’s presence acceleration which is amazing for shadow.

So that’s four standouts from eleven. Some decent stuff there though. Now to dive into the last two pools of cards from the minor deck.
Fire and air. Ten cards here headlined by Fire in the Sky. Some other decent stuff in there but it’s not ideal.

Moon and Air. This also has eleven cards. And some pretty decent minors at that. Two defend cards found among them. And lots of fear generation.

Last power I’ll single out is Gift of Power. It has a moon and gets you a minor at 0 energy. It has some value.

I have not broken this down by every spirit but I imagine two cards with all your symbols is near the lowest in the game. Out of spirits that seek 3 elements. Now unless you play with the Foreboding Aspect Air is pretty minor in your needs list. With Foreboding it’s a pretty huge deal.

Garry you played with Madness. Which looks pretty neat. It for sure hurts your starting cards and their flexibility a lot. With no way to increase range the strife play it grants is really a big deal. I imagine this really complicated the way you had to play.

Amorphous makes you play a lot like Shroud. It does fix some of your energy costs that would normally go to playing cards where Dahan are which helps.

Reach the last aspect seems really strong as well. Just ignoring range once per turn is real real strong. This also helps a lot with energy income.

I think three of the aspects help out fixing one of the two major issues the spirit faces. That being some of the energy starvation faced right at the start. It’s pretty neat that they use different ways to do this. Madness does not help with this issue, aside from taking away the ability to pay to increase your range. So I guess it does reduce your energy needs after all. But at the cost of playing pretty different.

TL;DR
This is a spirit that faces a lot of adversity right off the bat. Crap opening stats of 0 energy and 1 card play while needing very the symbols it wants very badly. And that it’s uniques require the extra range provided by its special rules to really make the most of. That’s a lot to overcome right off the bat. All of this being said, I still love to play as this spirit.

Bernie wrote: I think the other problem shadow faces is that it’s innate for a so good that it feels bad when it’s not going off. Like real real bad. It is also a sport that can get wrecked by events or some adversary’s. Anything that plays 2 explorers or replaces explorers with villages is brutal to the flow shadow requires.

This was very tough in the aforementioned game because we were playing France lvl 1, which has the very tough double explorer drop for any non-town/city space.

I like the 2nd level of the innate, but this was such a tough ask because I was pulling fire and moon but only pulled one fire/moon on the same card (the one that brings a town or explorer into an empty space). IMO, Shadows only shines when you're firing off the lvl 2 innate and that requires you to have plenty of fire and moon cards lest you constantly cycle cards. I think one easy solution for Shadow's problems is to be a little more generous about the fire and moon distribution in the opening cards so the innate would more reliably go off early without trying and once you get 3 card plays it would be easier too.

I ended up grinding up the enemy eventually using the yellow/red major that costs 3 that does 2 damage per dahan in fast, then pushes and does 2 damage per dahan in the destinations. I managed to get a yellow/red that added dahan on the coast and a yellow. I was playing 3 cards and only had 3 energy coming in through the mid to end game, so it was touch and go. It's just very funny to get into a situation where you are reclaiming a combo that uses *none* of your elements. I may have just had some bad luck. Per your most recent post, if I had pulled that defend 10 fire/moon I would have dominated the game so it could have just been a lack of luck which happens sometimes.

My spouse with vengeance was really taking it to the board. Like you, she finds vengeance an impossibly interesting mystery and has played it three times now. I showed her your posts and one from BGG and this time she was very assertive about just letting her presence die and blight hit the board. She had a much stronger game, though was one of those VERY thinky games where I was looking at my phone while she was puzzling through her complex moves. She had four blight in one area at one point and put the hammer down, which was fun.

Yeah. That’s a really really bad mix. I can understand the frustration with that matchup. That’s likely a hidden difficulty increase. Akin to spirits that are trash at explorers playing Russia. That’s a hard road.

Awesome to hear about her luck with vengeance. I am excited to try it again. It’s a not with my girlfriend spirit for me. She does not consider the game a wi if the island is unhealthy. Which is a fine difficulty bump. It means that I have to be pretty careful with some spirits.

Because we don’t Do it quite often Enough

I really enjoy this thread. Thanks for all the posts and chatter.

I looove talking game strategy, it's a pleasure. Feels like I just read people's initial three games of something over and over sometimes, even around here which is better about that

My spouse has a real intense need to play out full final turns even after we win to see how much she can flush off the board.

It's interesting, we're hovering around 3-4 difficulty these days. We were playing at max about... 6? But when we try new spirits it just makes a lot more sense to go a little easier.

We got in a couple of games over the weekend and I tried my hand at Vengeance after being inspired by the chatter on here. I went with the strategy of allowing the island to ravage and blight and deliberately losing my presence. This is absolutely the way to go because by mid-game Vengeance can get it's damage dealing innate to easily pick off a city every turn with the damage buffs from blight tokens. You need the disease out on the island more than you need destroyed presence for it's power card, although having a steady stream of discs allows you to steadily hit back as you build up your potential. It really is thematically vengeful, it gets knocked down and almost wiped out then comes back and stamps on everything in revenge.

The actual game we had was an odd one though. We pulled an event in the first turn where we had to swap either disease for beasts or beasts for disease; because daughter was playing Many Minds we went with the former to give her more options for maxing out fear and defence which meant that I had NO disease on the island and had to do it the hard way by sticking myself in the way of ravages. This made it hard to get range on anything in the early game due to lack of presence. Later on we had another event that destroyed presence and then the island blighted with the card that destroys three presence each so suddenly there was disease (and blight) all over the place but I had only one measly presence on the island and most of my discs were in the dustbin. It didn't matter much though as it was a cinch to start wiping out invader strongholds.

So my verdict on Vengeance in its finished state is that it feels unsatisfying to play because of its counter-intuitive nature (let the invaders build and ravage! Destroy my presence, please!) and has a slow build as it uncovers its tracks without having presence on the board. The double presence placement is incredibly useful though, and much like the discussion on Shadows above it is something that allows Vengeance to pop up pretty much anywhere on the island, particularly in the late game where there are plenty of invaders and blight to provide the requisite stepping stones.

That is just a really bad string of events for you.

The starting disease is so important. It feels bad if you don’t make it over to another board before it builds or n the land with disease.

Vengeance has a cool concept. It’s just hard to get past the feeling that anything another spirit would be doing would help faster.

I still want to team up vengeance and stone and see what happens.

Played a game with deep lure, my spouse, and me as lightning against England lvl 1. Lighting is my go-to easy decisions spirit if I'm feeling pretty burned out. We're still playing low difficulty (3) chill games since we're playing with new spirits.

The big challenge with lightning is trying to grit your teeth and keep doing 2 presence places as long as is humanly possible, even giving up a bunch of blight to do so. Once you get to like 4 card plays and reasonable income you can just spend of the rest of the game recover/card/energy every turn. On my 3rd turn I literally played no cards and ate a couple blight. That wouldn't have been possible with a higher difficulty level energy enemy, so the game is balanced. I probably would have had to turn at least one of the sit on two presence plays into a 1 presence/3 energy play and been more active.

The combination was really overpowering. Lure really likes being able to go fast powers at latest every two turns, it makes preventing builds really quite straightforward. I find that a number of specific spirits are hugely empowered by lightning.

I can see Lure really messing with the board with a fast power. That gather power fast could really shake things up.

Have not gotten to play of late. Hope to get some games in soon.

Lots of games recently with Spirit Island back dominating our game time. There was one standout game that we had yesterday worth mentioning, which is that we went ahead with the combination I recently posited of putting Volcano together with Shroud and Finder. I had the magic bird whilst my son double-handed the other two; it's not a huge overhead in this case as the strategy was fairly well fixed from the start and Finder does most of the hard work in this team.

Volcano sat in a central mountain and spammed presence until it got up to six discs, occasionally dropping some damage or clearing blight to keep errant invaders in check. We would often follow a pattern of allowing ravages to happen in heavily populated areas and just clearing blight beforehand to prevent cascades, and pushing smaller groups out of risk areas. Shroud was collecting damaged towns and slipping through Finder's portals to accumulate invaders into mountainside mega-cities. Meanwhile Finder was all over the island working hard to push and gather - it's innate is really incredible for consolidating invaders as it can easily clear the looming threat from three or four invader pieces including cities (I think it might be the only way to move cities in the game), and even deal with larger groups by layering on some card plays with push/gather. The approach that I used with growth was to start at the top track, move to middle and head for the "move presence" spot. This was crucial because while everything else was going on we also had to ensure that both Shroud and Finder had presence in mountains. Then I took an additional card play and "move a town" to reinforce my innates and to keep consolidating the invaders.

Volcano reached six presence and then we activated the combo of a huge eruption with Shroud turning presence destruction into a push and Finder opening the way to slip it into another mountain region. Then we just reclaimed cards and ran the same thing over again four times in a row. It ended with a total board wipe, not even a single explorer left alive, and hugely satisfying to play. Here's the downside though - I think this combo is illegal as Shroud's card talks about pushing instead of destroying so depending on timing it may be that the damage from Volcano wouldn't actually happen. I've asked for clarification on the GTG forums as it's the best place to get a sensible answer. We didn't care though, it was so much fun to play and visualise this terrifying island where volcanoes were erupting in every corner that the colonists happened to settle.

Afterwards we then tried Finder plus River plus Ocean with the aim of feeding invaders into the deep, and were immediately stymied by Finder's penalty for destruction by drowning, so not so easy as we thought it would be. Even so we made it work, again by creating mega-cities and cleaning blight before revages. We had one coastal location where we were starting to run out of space due to everything we were piling into it, and then a timely push by Finder managed to slide no fewer than five cities and six towns into Ocean's maw in one go. It was well worth losing a couple of presence discs for! River was then able to drop a "one damage to all invaders" card which cleared out the remaining explorers who had just witnessed their entire development disappear into the waters. Another powerful trio but a bit more head-scratching and not quite as fun as the other one.

Got some confirmation back pretty quickly that Shroud + Volcano doesn’t work. Shroud’s power creates a modifier not an action so it doesn’t interrupt, it just lets Volcano push instead of destroying so there wouldn’t be any damage caused.

I also learnt though that when Finder plays with Ocean it can place/move presence into a sea area where Ocean has presence. Any spirit can do this of course although there is usually little point except that Finder can then make that sea area adjacent to any other land it is in. Invaders moved by other spirits can therefore go straight into Ocean’s maw without triggering Finders penalty. Crazy!

So, after my drought of games I knocked out three last night.

First game I dusted off lure while my partner played river. No difficulty. We blew through the game aside from some crazy events. There is a new event that instead of exploring by land the it puts an explorer everywhere without a building. This is a pain when you have a whole section of the island clear. It was a pain in one of our later games too. No real remarkable information gained from this game. Lure is still awesome and easy to play. I don’t know that I have a super great grasp on how to advance them for maximum value.

Second game provided more interesting feedback. I changed up to Shadows Flicker like Flame. I went with the aspect that gives you a new innate power. Pretty cool aspect. I can’t understate the big deal it makes to not need to spend energy on adding range to shadows powers. It makes the growth tracks feel better. This power also gives some decent push which is very welcome. I quite enjoyed the complexity increase of the spirit. My power card draws were not great. But with the second innate that works off air and moon it does not feel as bad to grab minors with those symbols. There are a lot of great cards with those.

Third game I changed aspects but spirits stayed the same. Now I moved to placing strife when you play presence and fear when presence dies. So first thing about this is you have no power range bump. You can still aggressively play a little like Vengeance to land your zero range stuff. Not sure I liked the play style as much as the other aspect, as it messes with growth as sometimes you need that range three presence play to strife. But it was solid. I had bunk power draws again. Better than the prior game though still not great.

Really dig the aspects for Shadows. That’s my takeaway from last night.

Excited to mess with more. May give Vital Strength a run if I play tonight.