What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

Gary Sax wrote: the 4 token additions fit into the game really well, it definitely feels like they may have been designed in and taken out. That extra lever/board state feels important.

You are absolutely right, they were part of the original game along with a bunch of other stuff that was taken out to reduce complexity. There must have been a really intimidating barrier for new players coming to it - this highlights once again how important it is to have a good developer.

Welp, messed something up. I thought a player couldn’t have more than two influence tokens on a zone, which made playing the Ocean far more difficult than it should have been.

Instead of taking the double growth action when I wanted, I had to set it up by spamming out a few turns of pushing into the shore so I had room. Turned it into a bit of an odd puzzle.

Well, now I feel like the idiot. We finally got this on the table tonight; just me and my girlfriend and played 2.5 times and lost all of them. The .5 came from one game that we interrupted halfway through because we thought we'd been playing the Explore rule incorrectly and didn't want to keep banging our heads against the wall because Invaders were already blanketing the map.

We went with the basic map setup for two-player and, no, we didn't use the additional Growth rule. She played River and I played Lightning. We never really got out of the gate and got blown up by Blight. It seemed really difficult to find powers that were both pertinent to our situation and would provide the necessary elements to access Lightning's innate power.

Aborted second and completed third games were with River and Earth. I enjoyed Earth a lot and was doing everything I could do defend the Dahan and allow them to the bloody work for us, but we got through the entire Invader deck and couldn't draw another card and lost. River and Earth don't have a lot of Fear powers, so we didn't even get past the first stage of the Fear deck until quite late in the game, when we realized that basically the only way to win the game at all was to get to stage three because there was simply no way we could control the constant building and we had to resort to hoping to wipe out cities. But since one town in any land means the next build in that land will be a city, we went from having one left on the board to four in one build phase and that was the end.

I'm not sure my girlfriend played River to its full capacity, as she spent most of the game retrieving cards (once you have presence in all or most of the wetlands, it becomes much less of an issue) and using the same powers to blast things over and over. I was very immersed in what I was doing, so maybe there were different moves that could have been made. The element system, while obviously crucial, seems a bit out of place here, since the pressure that the Invaders put you under from the outset makes trying to line up elements with card plays extremely counter-intuitive. You see problems that need to be solved NOW, so playing cards that have less or minimal effect to try to achieve a bigger one is probably the biggest mental hurdle of the game.

You're probably right, Gary, that using the additional Growth at the start may be the way to go. I can see that there's an interesting game here and there was obviously a lot of work put into it, but I'm not feeling it, at the moment. It's, by far, the worst AP game I've played in many years. Both of us were spending far more time agonizing over decisions than actually playing cards or moving pieces on the board.

Congratulations on finding the learning curve! I guess...

Some thoughts for you particular situation. Growth is vitally important in order to enhance your capabilities and in the early stages of the game you simply cannot deal with everything so don't try to. It's usually better to avoid reclaiming and just do as much as you can with whatever cards you have left in hand, picking your battles carefully. With some spirits you can draw without reclaiming which is a good way to search for something you can use right now whilst still placing presence, allowing you to keep going for another round. As Gary Sax advises, take the bonus growth option as it will help you to see the value of this approach. I think there is also a start option where you take a minor power into hand which I think would be worth combining with the growth boost (or just do it anyway, the game is pretty robust for playing it your way).

Let some of the locations slide. In the basic game it could be five or six more rounds before that location comes up again so focus on making just one or two of the lands safe and let the other ones grow and blight. I'll often use push and gather powers to shove errant explorers into those lands which creates empty lands and means that the invaders skip activations later on which will put a lid on their expansion. If in doubt prioritise the centre of the island where you might be able to create a safe zone. You can also try putting the island tiles end-to-end as it makes for an easier two-player game than the traditional setup and safe zones are easier to make (this is now in fact an official variant).

Earth is a great beginner spirit because your sacred sites allow you to defend against a town and an explorer so it's easy to stop the early ravages and great when combined with Dahan fighting back. Otherwise the spirit rankings are to do with complexity which, as Bernie in particular made mention of, does not necessarily mean that they are good ones to learn the game with. I would however suggest pairing Earth and Rampant Green as you will hit the accellerator on growth and not be troubled much by early ravages, which in turn will help you avoid reclaim actions and enable you to dive into the power decks.

When taking cards or thinking about what to play, certainly think about prioritising element symbols. Any card you play is going to help, if not right now then they will at least set you up for the future, and your innates are free actions so you want to get them working if you can. Moving invaders or Dahan and removing blight are every bit as valuable as doing damage. In fact I think that is the main stumbling block to get over as it's easy to come to the game with a warlike mindset wanting to just do damage. Of course there are plenty of cards that deal fear directly which is another reason to dig through that deck.

In short: focus on growth, don't sweat invade expansion so long as you are growing, try to create empty lands and safe zones, activate your innates.

Your narrative sounds exactly the same as ours (see first page of the thread). Try not to get discouraged!

We played again this morning. This game has grabbed us.

Spread of Rampant Green and Shadows Flicker Like Flame. Holy shit this can be a strong combo. With Shadows eating up explorers so well, I mostly focused on sacrificing Presence to prevent Build rather than Ravage invader actions. The invaders were thusly unable to get a foothold into the island and we focused on pushing the survivors onto the shore. Shadows already has a strong early game, and a few bumps from Green makes it obscene.

Ashleigh got Tsumani and I picked up Poisoned Land, so we washed away those that remained and won on the second turn of Phase 2. This was by far our fastest victory, largely won by ignoring Ravage to focus on slow powers to halt future builds. There was quite a lot of blight by the end lol. A few presence disks were lost, but Green helped regain lost footing.

Next game we are going to add a nation into the mix. I really enjoyed playing Rampant Green, he’s my favourite by far. Great support and able to slow down invaders nicely in multiple areas. He matches my love of multitasking.

Had a real knock down drag out with Sweden lvl 3, I had Thunderspeaker, spouse had wild then switched to green. It was tough, we lost in 2-3 turns in the first game! Triumphed in the 2nd but it was touch and go at times. Thunderspeaker gets so little Mana unless you slow her down with one presence growth.

Yeah, growth with Thunderspeaker is tough because she really feels ineffective in the first couple of rounds when compared to other spirits but ramps up very quickly if you give her the right conditions. I often go for the double presence to get started and open up both tracks as that second card play is too valuable to pass over and getting the trickle of energy flowing is vital. After that I tend to focus on the energy track for the element symbols because with this spirit it's really vital to activate the Gather/Push innate if not the destruction one. Sometimes though I'll have to start with the energy giving growth option and open up the additional card play if I need to get my more expensive cards out early on, specifically so if the invaders are going to activate in a land on my board that they were populated in on setup. That is particularly true with Sweden because the ravages can get out of control and you don't want to lose Dahan even if your presence discs are safely out of the way.

Because she has that double presence placement she is great when the other spirits can give her energy or power cards so good to pull those minor power cards to assist her if they come up. I would also advise pushing/gathering invaders into super-cities as even in mid-game she is absolutely terrifying in the amount of damage she can drop into a single location. Sharp Fangs and Thunderspeaker are a fun and aggressive pairing which we like to refer to as 'murder island' when we play. On that note though, if you are going to play with Sharp Fangs then I really recommend using the event cards as they do interesting things with beast tokens.

Sharp Fangs is sort of like a alternate universe Thunderspeaker that does less damage and can't hurt blighted areas... but has invulnerable tokens instead of dahan.

And unlike Thunderspeaker, doesn’t lose presence from lost animals. That Thunderspeaker drawback can be huge!

Alright, everyone, I got an offer to pick Spirit Island up from a guy at work for a VERY low price and I’m taking him up on it. I’ve only played once and I couldn’t have cared less about it but I’m giving it a fair shake. Stay tuned.

Good luck. I recommend reading Bernie and mezike's posts earlier in this thread on good ways to start. And unless you're a really good game player like Samoko, I would use an extra growth phase before the start.

SaMoKo wrote: And unlike Thunderspeaker, doesn’t lose presence from lost animals. That Thunderspeaker drawback can be huge!

Definitely, especially from random stray dahan since it's a 1 range drawback.

I find these push/pull elaborate movement powers tons of fun but a bit AP producing.

We dialed difficulty back one level tonight and tried new powers. I'm still trying to figure out how to get Shadows Flicker to work smoothly. I need to focus on the fear and the good I'm doing there.

Next up is doing the "canon" island at the reduced level, we haven't tried it yet.

Don’t call me good yet Gary. I’m still playing on newbie difficulty without an adversary lol.

I have a feeling my reckless embrace of blight and ravages will screw me at higher levels, but it’s great at low level play!