What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

I never plan around isolation, it's more just a bonus "maybe this will help, shrug" thing *except* if there is a lone town in the back country or something.

That is how I do it as well.

I wonder how much better it would be as a main focus of a pair.

Would have to be Fracture and Downpour or maybe Fracture / Finder.

Isolation when you know it’s gonna land seems like it could be a possible strat. It helps that downpour is just awesome and Fracture and do crazy stuff. Rolling a stage 2 card back to a stage one is pretty crazy strong without isolation. It’s almost like skipping a huge portion of the game if setup right.

Too many really cool spirits and not enough games . A good problem I suppose.

I feel like isolation is very situational, like it must be super useful against some scenarios or adversary. The only practical application I can think of in general play is using it to create a safe zone by stopping a town/city from being a source of invaders somewhere inland, which in itself might not be very useful depending on the adversary or only valuable during the early invader stages.

Right. In isolation that would be true.

If you build to trying to land haymakers you either need it in proliferation or fore knowledge. Or both. Downpour let’s you wall off the coast with it repeated. (Is this better than repeating other cards?) or you use Fracture to isolate and then pick your invader card for the turn for maximum bang for your play.

This is likely way too much effort for the affect It it seems fun to try.

There’s a couple of power cards where it can be a useful combo. The one that breaks down buildings into explorers then pushes them for example, as the push would stop dead and then a one damage to all power would clear the land. Thinking about it a bit deeper I think that isolate would be a great support with lots of push/gather powers as you could create a mega city and then keep shutting it down from spreading anywhere.

Event cards! Jury still put for me after mezike, sornars and I played with them!

I can’t really play without them. The game is not random enough. I need the possibility to get screwed by an event card.

I totally get that it’s not for everyone but the game feels two rote without them for me.

I love the chaos they bring, you can never be totally certain that your plans will work out as expected, but I also love how they add drama. We had a few great moments in our TTS game that were entirely caused by events; the first was when I lost a sacred site as Thunderspeaker due to invaders getting an attack buff that broke past our defence, wrecking our plans to nail down a corner of the island. We had one of those very Spirit Island "all is lost" moments that swings back the other way later. A few turns on and a similar thing happened again but we were also gifted some additional Dahan defence that rescued the plan. There was an epic moment where the beasts went wild and due to Many Minds being in play the island became a hotbed of terror for the dwindling Prussians, as well as some timely push/gather actions that allowed us to finesse the impact of some powers as much as the little hiccups that were undoing our efforts. I really couldn't play without events now.

Despite finding the game pretty overwhelming as it is, I do like the event cards for disrupting the (mostly) deterministic puzzle and as mezike says, generating moments of drama.

I really struggle with this game - I want to like it much more than I do. I believe the solution is to simply play more as what's lacking on my part is intuition on strategy. As it stands I find myself in a situation where to get experience I need to play solo and solo with one spirit feels a bit like half the game but playing two handed solo is even more overwhelming! I'm starting to convince myself that this is a lifestyle game like Magic or Warhammer where continued repeated play is heavily rewarded to the point that you play this to the exclusion of other games.

Which explains why I think this game has been such a hit with duos/couples, it's the perfect game for gaining experience with together. It was super interesting to see two good players coordinate with spirits that synergised in powers - it is how I imagine conversations inside a war room would feel like with multiple commanders coordinating forces in a war/battle to win the day.

sornars wrote: it is how I imagine conversations inside a war room would feel like with multiple commanders coordinating forces in a war/battle to win the day.

Yes, exactly that, that is spot on. There's a bit more of a puzzle to it because although you can see and plan around big trends (e.g. the Jungles will be a key battleground for the next few turns) it is very tactical in nature due to the capabilities of each spirit being so dynamic from one turn to the next - the combination of growth option, cards in hand, and the associated balance of elements triggering innates and power boosts.

For me it’s a whole bunch of stuff.

As I said earlier, I need the events to make the game less rote. And that if for sure true. Without events blowing holes in your plans the game is too simple. I understand how crazy that is to say about a game complex as this one but without events you have perfect information. There is one important part of events which we have not touched on.

Events make the island come alive. It adds a much needed sense of vibrancy to the game. Beasts move around and stalk things. The Dahan migrate and change locations. Plan raids or learn the ways of the invaders. The plague comes and invaders squabble with internal politics or issues. Magical things happen that later the Spirits who experience them changing them in unique ways.

All of this is made possible by the event deck. For me it’s just not the same game without it.

Sornars mentioned the huge puzzle aspect of the game, for better or worse. My wife and I play it as a multiplayer puzzle. Once we are in that headspace, the events to randomly disrupt or help play don't really do much.

If you know me, I am usually *all about* systems randomly disrupting game equilibriums so it's not a normal thing for me to say. Something about the typical environment I play the game in. Glad to play it with events, though, I recognize it as the canonical way to play the game and it doesn't bother me much.

So Handelabra Games released their (wonderful) digital version of Spirit Island for iOS and Android last week and that gave me the format I needed to continuously play and get the experience I needed. If you crave more Spirit Island I can give a huge recommend for this implementation, the UI is clear and everything is easy to navigate, just disable animations and use the 2D board instead of the 3D ones.

In any case, I've finally cracked the code - I feel like I'm actually playing the game now. I focused on grinding out games with the basic spirits using the progression decks until I started being able to understand the flow of things. Parts of the strategy behind this game are very opaque such as figuring out when to cut my losses and just use Blight as another health resource or when to pivot away from towns and just focus on cities as you're ramping up to Fear level III. I've finally graduated to the full game with moderate spirits and have started throwing in adversaries. The digital implementation has a quick play mode that sets up the game randomly to a specified difficulty level which makes it easy for me to try new things without the difficulty ramping up too much.

It was after ten games or so that I used Thunderspeaker and realised that I had transcended this morass of rules and systems and had actually started to enjoy myself and have fun. I have to admit I have never given a game so many second chances as I have this one. The wonderful presentation, clear evidence of good systems and testimonials from you all were required for me to get to this place, I genuinely wonder how it got to be as popular as it is!

In getting here I've made a few observations about the game:
1) Branch and Claw is almost essential. The event deck and extra tokens (strife/disease/animals/etc.) are required for the game to feel alive. I'm delighted when something swings in my favour and pained when they conspire against me.
2) I would never want to play this solo by myself in the real world. The UI tweaks of the digital version were essential for enforcing correct play and making decision making more clear. The undo function was used liberally to see where a card could be targeted and what my range would be if I put presence in this land instead of that land, etc. I could obviously do that in person but it'd be tedious as hell. The digital version defaults to letting you undo up to the last point where new information was revealed.
3) As a result of 2, I'd play much faster using this version than analog or TTS. I'm not an AP prone player but this game brings out the worst of me. I worry about slow playing if playing with other people. For the time I spend thinking and taking back moves, the digital version makes up the difference by automating all of the movement and exploration bits.

On reflection, I had a similar arc with Sentinels of the Multiverse. I bought a physical copy hated it but gave the digital implementation (also by Handelabra) a chance. I ended up enjoying it quite a bit but only digitally.

TLDR: I think Spirit Island is a much better video game than board game and I'm finally starting to enjoy it on those terms. This may just be a hallmark of Greater Than Games's design ethos.

I think there are elements of fungibilty in the design that create some entanglement because the detail/complexity obscures how much flexibility is available - you don't need to make the perfect play, there's always another target land, any of the power cards you have will do something, you can't cover everything, etc. and throw in the events and fear cards and everything goes slightly off-kilter anyway. Like you say, it takes a while to realise that it's totally okay to add blight, lose Dahan, even to lose presence, and it's not even such a big deal if the island blights or if your anticipated power combo sadly fizzles out; but these are opaque concepts that need to be learned because the immediate goals are to stop the invaders and keep the island alive. Unless you are going for super-high difficulty levels there is quite a bit of latitude to make mistakes and roll with them.

Both games you mention start with a simple premise that then rapidly evolves into complex decision trees, and I think that is more of GTG's thing than anything else; I often compare Sentinels to 1k blank cards because it has the same format of starting with two or three simple rules and then every turn another two or three rules get added, so on ad nauseum. Spirit Island front-loads a lot more of it's rules of play but that can be to the detriment of understanding the difference between "what are my goals?" and "how do I achieve them?" because you get everything thrown at you all at once and things then inevitably get much worse before you reach the turning point and start taking back control.

It is a great dynamic puzzle, so I totally understand how you would feel it's better in digital form, Sornars.

My spouse and I played against lvl 4 Russia today, difficulty 7. We ended up with a pretty comfortable win, it helped that she was Lure of the Wilderness. Wilderness absolutely hoovers up explorers and kills them in great clumps, which is exactly what you need against Russia. I used River, who I really enjoy, and I used my favorite version of River with the ability to ferry dahan around in the growth phase. Really love that version of the Spirit. It helped that I had pretty good draws, including getting the blue/yellow dahan creating coastal power early which was pretty clutch. My board ended with 13 dahan on it.