What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

I tried the defend Horizons spirit and had a good, simple time with it. Strongly recommend Horizons as a product if you haven't tried spirit island, great value! For veterans, harder sell but I don't regret it.

Been playing a lot of Spirit Island, working on my Grinning Trickster game.

God damn, I find England so much harder than any other invader save maybe Russia at equivalent difficulties. Just punishing. We gutted out a late win against lvl 4 but it was a struggle.

Just had the same experience.
England tore us up. Was Fathom and Teeth, and we were just getting rocked. Turned into Major pray and spray.

I don't know that Trickster has a great kit to deal with England. Downpour would be my first pick. Maybe teamed with Fathom. Some strong stuff there. Isolate seems like the best way to deal with some of Englands game.

Sweeden on the other hand is Tricksters sweet spot.

Also been getting a lot of games of this in. @ six player games and a bunch of 2s. Mostly with the Horizon spirits but not exclusively. Been working on Downpour.

I was definitely struggling, my wife's late game Wildfire had to sweep in and drop the hammer on my half of the board a couple times. Trickster's progression and growth management is probably the hardest of any spirit I've played. It doesn't look tricky but his track is fucked on everything but card play. He needs energy to charge his "spread another strife" power but taking the extra energy option is extremely limiting on your growth early in the game. I only got to 4 card plays/any element on the track deep into a stage III.

It's extremely non-obvious, but I think that Trickster's 2nd line "Let's see what happens" power is very important---it has you add a card to your hand but, honestly most crucially, it has you also *gain an energy* which is incredibly hard to come by. It also cycles a card into your hand from your discard if you forget one of you discarded powers. I think you're intended to be doing this a lot even with powers that aren't a great fit.

Trickster really needs to start pulling major powers by about mid game. He simply does not have the juice to deal with big builds and cities without it, and his card play->energy option will power all but the biggest majors.

Bernie wrote: Also been getting a lot of games of this in. @ six player games and a bunch of 2s. Mostly with the Horizon spirits but not exclusively. Been working on Downpour.

Also, wow on 6 players. How do those go? Do they go long?

It depends.
I have played a few. Both of the 6 players had the same people in them. We did the second on the Canonical map. Which was a bad choice in hindsight. It's hard for me to read, so it was really bad for the rest of the table. Biggest issue was the noise. we were in a loud room and had to pause a lot so people could hear. but it went well. Nowhere near as fast as a 2 player. But it's a whole different thing.

First game was the 5 Horizon spirits and Lure. Second was Trickster, Thunderspeaker, Downpour, Fathomless Mud and Teeth maybe and something. I can't recall. Hard to take much from that game. We saw such things as a first turn 4 explorer kill from sudden ambush from Thunderspeaker. Lots of just odd things that would not normally happen in a game on open but the map provides there.

New expansion starting shipping next Monday. Let's gooooooooooooooooo!

Sadly, I have to wait as I got the new tokens. But my buddy will be in on this wave so i should get to play his copy!

ah shit, are the new tokens still on the ship? Then I'm waiting too.

its game and foil spirits getting sent atm, or soon.

Well, my friend has the game in hand! I have pics... so it happened!

Likewise, I now have Nature Incarnate in hand. I don't remember signing up for the foil Spirits, but they sent them, anyway. Can't say I'm really a fan because we tend to play in well-lit spaces because I'm old and need to see stuff and they just seem like they're going to reflect a lot of said light and just make it more annoying. I'll see what other people think. Some really interesting stuff in here, but now I feel like I just don't play it often enough to have accumulated this pile for it.

They were the "bonus" kickstarter content. I opted out of them.

Yeah, I was pretty sure I had, too, which is why I was surprised when they showed up. I don't need thinner boards when the regulars are so durable. I don't even like the fact that the ones from Horizons are that thin. However, it would be easier to get them all in the second box that the game now requires...

Well,
I got mine in the mail, but the box is caved in and the Spirit Boards are jacked up. So right now I'm pretty excited about the foil boards. As they make my game functional. So... yay?

The token pack two is really awesome though.

I'm going to get a big game day in with this next Friday. So that's real exciting. My first pick is the new fear / abductor spirit. Then the River / bloody pond.