What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

mezike wrote: Going into the final round we had no less than twenty five blight on the board, the island was an horrendous mess but there were only two cities left which we were able to pinch off in the following fast phase for an excruciatingly close win – one invader card, one blight, and only three presence each on the island. It was the closest result we’ve ever had and a wonderfully tense game to go from certain failure to victory over just two action-packed rounds.

"We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

The promo spirits, Serpent and wildfire, are back in stock at GTG: store.greaterthangames.com/spirit-island-promo-spirit-pack.html

Yeah, we play this game enough in my house that I sort of regret bundling those two spirits in with my expansion KS since I could get them right now and get plays.

Gary Sax wrote: Yeah, we play this game enough in my house that I sort of regret bundling those two spirits in with my expansion KS since I could get them right now and get plays.

Yep, me too...

I ordered them lol. Cost as much as a regular expansion with shipping to Canada, but worth it

The wife’s last game with Shadows before she moves on to another spirit. This time I paired with Lightning.

We lucked out this game with the powerful blight card which flips to 5 blight per player + remove a presence per turn. This is normally bad, but with the ability of both Spirits to extend range we had no issues with minimal presence.

We do d a good job controlling ravages and builds up until the Level 4 England started to fortify in a central jungle. We merrily herded them in, just shy of the England win condition, then nuked the shit out of them with Shadows using Dahan to extend a 2x Poisoned Land while I went ham on the Cities built on the coast for a swift Fear Level 3 victory.

The combined fear output of both spirits was outrageous towards the end, with 3 cards about to be flipped before the final invader phase. We already won, but played it out just to see how thoroughly England was decimated: 2 surviving explorers were huddled together in the desert while everything else was dead. The Island may be spoiled beyond repair, but the invaders are gone!

Lightning is a tight spirit to play. His energy track is stunted, forcing the player to take Spirit Growth mostly for energy and early reclaims. The best growth option was forever taunting me; I only had one opportunity to take the double presence option right after the Blight Card flip. I was forced to be extremely conservative with energy expenditure and careful with presence placement throughout the game.

We reached our limit of complexity with an ill-advised mixture of two spirits each against level 4 France with the PnP of Finder of Paths Unseen accompanying Thunderspeaker, Fangs, and Shadows. Finder’s gig is that it opens portals into which you can push things and it also moves presence around the island and changes range on powers. With all four spirits relying on mobility and France being the ultimate whack-a-mole invader it became a real headachy mess to figure out what to do, when and where. Added in to the mix for extra fun was Powerstorm that was re-activating powers and another similar card that allowed us to put additional powers into play, which meant that we were getting seriously granular with the order of fast power activations.

We had been playing for two hours by the time we hit stage three and the island was infested with big settlements all over the place with a coastal ravage followed by the first double-build. It was inevitable that we were going to blight at that point but we had also just reached tipping point with enough options to clean out several lands per turn. Although we were up against it I believe that with the rebellion event about to come around we would have been able to hold the invader back well enough to drive for a fear victory, although it had got to a level of such ridiculously high stakes that it was equally possible we would run out of towns or suffer uncontrollable blight cascades. We simply had a mental meltdown with the complexity of our interleaving activations and with it being a school night we decided to capitulate rather than push ourselves any further.

Finder (in its current form) is extremely complex in how it changes the board state and reach of powers and mixing it with three other flexible spirits just made for too many options. It also has a crazy presence track where you move around a matrix of options rather than across two straight lines, so it requires a lot of focus and understanding to play well. I’m cautiously looking forward to the final version as it is far more demanding than any of the existing spirits.

Sorry I didn't respond to your last post, Mezike, it was interesting. It highlights something I think is key to the game---the spirit complexity markers are about how hard it is to play powers from a skill perspective, but they also are usually how time-consuming it is to play them. I can imagine playing a game of Spirit Island and just being like "let's use low complexity powers" just to keep game time brief and light. When my partner takes, say, the beasts spirit, I know the game will take a lot longer because arranging its innate powers in your head and combining them with your other powers is quite involved.

I just got the new kickstarter preview for a new rain spirit. I really love these updates, I usually don't give a shit about kickstarter updates tbqh. But these are such interesting insight into his process and he's so descriptive... I am continually impressed by the thoughtful design on this game.

Also looks like a very cool Spirit. So excited for this kickstarter.

Some awesome stuff here. Have not been playing for a bit, will look to change that this weekend.

That update was pretty awesome, just a great looking spirit that does interesting new stuff to the game. I had to set myself a hard rule that I will only play Many Minds Move as One so I have lots of new content when the expansion lands. Also to prevent muscle memory for spirits that might change. Seeker really calls to me though.

Keep up the great work guys

^same, I'm avoiding all the new spirits because I don't like to beta test in general, but especially because I want to have that pleasurable moment of just having a universe of new possibilities in front of me next year. And even the first two promo spirits will be new to me!!!

I agree with the sentiment, but my lad is soooo excited about anything SI and it’s infectious, so I figure we’ll end up making our way through a few more of them.

We are at the point now of getting a decent challenge from the 4-5 level Adversaries. Had our first game with a promo spirit: Heart of the Wildfire. Oh man, this thing is like an extra destructive nuking spirit which can lead to rampant blight issues if not played with some care. Paired him with River, which almost entirey negated the power issues and allowed a few early Major Power picks

Shellie, I will play with you the next time I see you if you like.

Had a super satisfying turn today. I was playing the Vital Strength of the Earth. He is not one of my favorites, but I run through them all and it was his turn. Kim was playing Spread of Rampant Green. With this combo we both had all our presence off our spirit boards before we hit stage 3, which is pretty sick. I got off my tier 3 innate to repeat a power that costs 6 or less and fired off Manifest Incarnation with the threshold met for a combined total of 25 fear. With some other powers that happened we landed 4 fear cards at terror level 3. It just felt real good. I so can't wait for more new content for this.

I can never manage to get Vital Strength higher tiers. I find its combo of elements difficult to fulfill.