What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

Depends on your power, I think. You're dead if you do that and you're the beast spirit from the expansion, that's for sure!

But in all honesty I was going off your posts in other threads too.

Tried a couple games last night. I’m willing to eat some crow on this one, it did a lot more for me this time around.

But man am I bad a this game. Luckily I have all this talk to fall back on.

Seriously, the emotional "Aha!" in this game after 3-5 games is second to none. And the way it's perfectly set up to test your limits over the course of 30-40 games if you want to play it that much via its well-tuned "difficulty" chart is pitch perfect.

Just confirmed my stuff for the newest expansion kickstarter and I finally looked at the updates, since I generally just go in for a kickstarter and then intentionally forget about it till it shows up on my doorstep. It looks like they're going wilder and more creative with the new Spirits (e.g. Volcano) which is awesome. I had been waffling on adding the wooden tokens, but my spouse actually told me I should absolutely add the wooden token and insert options which, my spouse is definitely a pretty big gamer now, but for her to want me to buy overpriced frivolous aesthetic expansions says a lot about how the game has been received.

Glad to hear you are getting into it Josh. Not sure that I ever offered to teach it to you at a really great time. Still glad to hear your are getting into it.

The new spirits look great. I can't wait for them. Diversity in how you play is what really matters in this game, atleast for me, the scenarios mix it up, as do the adversary but really its playing the same and different spirits with different power power cards that make it hum.

On a difrent note, can't wait for one of you to try Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares. We have not really talked about this spirit. This is another one that really changes up the game in some fun ways.

I have been completely avoiding that Spirit! Still never played it. I just told my spouse last night that we should bring the difficulty down a level and then try new unusual Spirits. She has been getting way into Thunderspeaker after only playing Wild and Spreading Green... it was a good call to downgrade the difficulty so she could get to know it.

Holy shit we have been fucking up an important rule. We've just been flipping fear cards over when we earn them and planning around them (GULP). It may have messed with a couple of our wins at least.

I didn't realize how fundamentally I was messing that up until I decided to take Bernie's cue and try the Nightmare power, who has that specific ability as *one of its powers.*

Jesus!

Welp! I would have made this mistake if I hadn’t read over all the spirits first lol

SaMoKo wrote: Welp! I would have made this mistake if I hadn’t read over all the spirits first lol

Ha. Same. I was reading Nightmare before I had read the Fear rules and was wondering why that was so important. Then after a couple plays, I realized that it's a real edge for the players to know just how that card is going to be implemented, especially in Stage III, when the terminology ramps up to be more broad (i.e. instead of "Remove X Explorers", it becomes "Remove X Invaders", meaning you can sweep Cities away with the Fear card.)

Ha, yeah that's kinda a big deal.
Bringer is just fun. Landing that 24 or more fear turn with him is ever so satisfying.
Bringer also plays well with others.

Nightmares is a real motherfucker. My spouse was grumpy as well, so that might have been it too, but I felt like it was 10 turns of just barely pushing enemies around. We didn't come close to losing but it was still frustrating. Need to try it more. Good that the game still has surprises.

With Bringer, I felt like I was doing really poorly and barely able to stay afloat. And then, very suddenly, we won by blitzing the fear cards.

He’s a very aggressive Spirit who plays brinkmanship with board control. His fear foreknowledge gives just enough control to stay above water until you win. Good Spirit, but man it can be tense.

Bringer can feel that way. But then you land a turn where you flip 3 fear cards and it goes from terror level 2 to 3 and the game just melts on the spot.

The card that lets you gain a major is pretty great, 2 fear for your defense power is great. So can rolling the dice on a Major hail Mary, you can shift the game with it. or just gain the power for future turns.

I usually go energy track till I get the any symbol then go for 3 card plays.

The thing I find with Bringer is that it can cause the game to end on a bit of an anti-climactic note. The island is awash with invaders who all of a sudden just pack up and go home, which isn't quite as satisfying as directly removing them from the board. In that way Bringer is a good pairing with spirits that can easily do a lot of damage in one place so that you scare them into a death trap and get a double whammy.

In other news, it had totally slipped past me that the playtesting rules for Jagged Earth have been made available, with the relevant thing here being that they contain rules for playing without events whilst still keeping the tokens relevant. The draft rules can be found here .

"To play without Events, but keep Beasts tokens relevant:
Setup:
• Leave the Event deck in the box.
• Add tokens to each board per the usual rules. (Balanced boards: 1 on each board in the lowest-numbered land without setup icons. 1 on each board in land #2. Thematic boards: as printed.)
• Add 1 extra Fear card to Stage II of the Fear deck.
• Don’t use a Blight Card where the Blighted Island side has 2 Blight/player or only immediate effects. [For you, that means playing with one of the 2 Blight cards from the base game.]
Gameplay:
• Once during Invader Stage II and once during Invader Stage III, the Spirits may command all Beasts on the island during the Spirit Phase. (Consensus is required.)
• When you do this, each Beasts token in a land with Invaders does 1 Damage or 1 Fear, players’ choice. Each Beasts token in a land without Invaders may be Pushed to an adjacent land."

Victory. We're still on easy mode (extra Growth, no Blight card, standard Invaders) but we got a win in Terror level 2 when I used Lead the Furious Assault as a fast ability and destroyed the last town on the island. It was a three-player: me, my girlfriend Tricia, and our friend, Larissa. Larissa was the first-timer, but wanted to play Rampant Green, since she works for an environmental consultation firm. Tricia was determined to have an edge in the Fear game, so she took Shadows. I know you guys said that Green works really well with Earth, but I didn't feel like playing Earth again, so I took a new path and tried Thunderspeaker. Between her and Shadows, that meant we had a really Dahan-focused approach, so we were very conscious of protecting the natives wherever we could (not least because them dying wipes out my Presence, too.)

That trio actually worked really well. I made collecting Elements on power cards a point of emphasis to everyone, so everyone had ready access to their innates. That combo also has tremendous access to power cards, since Thunderspeaker gets two on recall and both Shadows and Green draw one on two of their three Growth options. We reshuffled the minor powers a few times and picked up multiple majors. Entwined Power was really useful, since both Shadows and Green can achieve a nice spread of Presence, so we could drop 2 players' minor powers all over the map. I had a little trouble with Thunderspeaker's Growth options, since they're pretty extreme and I had a couple turns where I had cards but no Energy or Energy but not enough card play options. But once I got a couple good-sized groups of Dahan, I could do massive damage by shifting them this way and that.

As soon as we got the win, Larissa looked up and said: "I like this game! I would play this again." I still feel like AP is a problem. It took us about three hours to play, which isn't bad, but a lot of that time is still spent agonizing over cards and combinations of moves. I know that will improve as we get more familiar with both the game and the different spirits, though.

Hell yeah! Congrats!

Yeah, AP can be a problem. I would recommend that you keep playing the same spirits for a couple games if you have people who need a lot of time to read cards. It really helps to know what is on your opening cards and your board. That reduces AP quite a bit.