What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

Played one game last night. Again as river and Shadows. This time I tried Amorphous. It’s a neat thing. Plays a little like shroud, which I like. Not sure I like it as much as the second innate, but with any of the aspects I found myself with plenty of energy. I was trying majors pretty quick. My growth pattern was two card plays then two growth from energy to get energy three and adding 2 cards to my hand. Then three card plays and gaining a major. This game I grabbed one early. As I had a totally whiff on a minor turn that worked out ok with the major.

The aspects really give more punch to shadows. My biggest issue was crap minor draws. I have not yet played with the 4th aspect. Not sure I will need to. I can see how it plays in my head. Great option for new players though. Not needing to spend energy to buff your range really fixes the early game energy woes that Shadows was plagued with. The last game we played River had to forget it’s other spirit energy gain card due to us needing to pay for an event and I payed all my energy and we did not miss a beat. It was pretty huge.

Doubt I will every play Shadows without an aspect again.

My next game will be with Vital Strength of the Earth. Trying out the different innate. I am not super interested in the aspect that removes defense but requires over eight damage to place a blight. I can think of some uses for that. Maybe a high difficulty Sweden game. But not on my list to try right now.

Had a wild game as Vital Strength of the Earth. Paired up with the River. I played with Might as my aspect and that replaced the defend 3 in sacred sites rule. That up front told me I was in for a different game. Might s an amazingly fun power. At its most basic it’s an extra card play for 1 energy. And so Vital can enter the world of two card plays turn one of you learn a minor. If you get really really lucky you can even fire your other innate and fire one again too. It’s a pretty big deal.

I got some decent minors but in this game the real stars were Vitals starter cards. They all did stellar work. With Mights middle two tiers adding damage to damage dealing powers I was dropping 6, 7, and 8 point Rituals of Destruction. I had a minor laying badlands. One turn I was able to Ritual twice. I did not bother to learn another major with Vital. It was a bit surreal. I want to try it again. That’s a pretty great thing for a spirit I have mostly given up on playing.

I really like Vital Strength's basic power without an aspect, but it just far, far too weak. It plays great from difficulty like 0-3 but after that every single power you face does enough damage to overcome your D.

I thought that Might replaced Vitlas innate. But it’s in addition. With 2 card plays from the get go and 2 inmates it increases the value of sun, plant and earth. Where old vital would dump starter cards for majors I held mine. This was made easier by river for sure. I don’t know if this will increase the difficulty you feel you can play Vital. But it for sure made for a better play experience for me.

Another day another game. Once again vital and river. Playing with the same aspect as last time. While my cards were not as good this time but the aspect still preforms.

It plays so well. The more I think about it it’s weird. I am not sure if it’s good or bad. The two cars plays makes Vital feel a lot like other spirits. The slow plod was character. I am way to in my head with this. I really like the new play style though. This confuses me greatly.

Last game with the partner for a while. May get some Skype call games in with my remote buddy while I am sequestered in precautionary quarantine as I have been in a very public building and Gabe interacted with people from all over the state of Pa.

Played as shroud teamed with river. I super dig shroud. I need to scale back my level of dangle with Shroud some times though. I had to begin the game but then an event threw guys on a build site I had just cleared and just like that I was behind the eight ball. I blew up. Lot of stuff. We won on terror level three by killing two cities. I was churning the fear. Finished with a healthy island only one blight away from that changing though.

Had pretty decent minor draws. I still love this spirit. It’s tricky to play though. It has so many tricks to do things.

Played the aspect for river that lets you move dahan like a conveyer belt. I really thought that was a great, well-designed, spirit. The aspects are a ton of fun if you aren't looking for a heavy, completely new spirit experience.

Just finished a wild game. Had one of the craziest power interactions I have ever witnessed.

Stone and Vengeance taking on lvl 1 Russia. I had rockstar draws with vengeance. I pulled Hazards spread across the island and gift of constancy for minors and then hit the trifecta of majors for vengeance. I got Vengeance of the Dead which is half the silliness that happened. If your unfamiliar bit does 3 fear and during the rest of the turn 1 damage for each building or Dahan killed in target land. With the kicker the damage can be I. Adjacent lands too. I also pulled Angry Bears and Settle into hunting Grounds. They do damage and have symbols vengeance wants.

So far this is just a lot of damage. Where it got interesting is Stone learned Weave together the fabric that of place. This merges two lands into one for a turn. Once again. It’s a pretty great power for Stone. Let them defend and kill stuff in adjacent lands.

We managed to tie these two powers together with our built in powers or rules to cause some truly obscene levels of dumb on what was the last turn of the game. We merged 2 huge lands that had one ravaging. Took the blight from the box and had 4 blight between the two lands at this point and stone retaliated and killed things. Which fired of vengeance of the dead and every building killed started a chain that caused 5 damage (one plus 4 from the blight) in said two lands or any land adjacent to them spent as we wanted. This resulted in a board clear.

I don’t think I have ever seen anything in the game scale quite like this did. It was pretty amazing.

I played Downpour this evening badly against a lvl 1 Russia. Defense without counterattack is not very intuitive to me, especially with so few card plays to strike back. Putting Downpour back on the table next time.

Yeah. Downpour takes quite a bit to wrap your head around. I do quite enjoy playing them though.
My most simple advice. If you can grab a card that plus badlands, give it a shot.

We did Ocean/Lure tonight. Split the island in half lengthwise. Cleaned up pretty easily at difficulty 4, but you *really* have to understand the tempo of the game to get Ocean just right. It's not like super complicated but it's easy to not see like 2 turns ahead that you're going to have no presence in the ocean or no presence on the land. You especially need to think hard when your card plays get high, you could be pushing out/pulling back in every other turn and pretty static. Lure is a little easier, I think, despite having a somewhat similar concept.

We ended up staying up late and playing three times a couple nights ago, it's like we just got the game again.

Balls to the wall on this game. Always set up. Played Many Minds Move as One this morning and it seems *incredibly* powerful with how its defend scales all the way up and it does so much fear.

This evening I played Vital Strength of Earth again against Sweden lvl 3 (difficulty 5), using the only energy till 6 energy, first turn major pull style. We won, but I struggled a little because my first turn major pull was the one that lets you pull more majors. On one hand, that's *exactly* what vital strength needs long term, on the other this is a risky, no margins strategy where you really need something to be doing some board effects on your first pull.

We're definitely getting our groove back, we ended on difficulty 6 or so before and we're almost backu up to about that level.

Three games this evening. Still hanging out at difficulty 5, we usually win but ocassionally we lose if the matchup is bad. Did the thematic island a couple times this evening with keeper/ghost. Lost badly the first game but the second game I push up the curve pretty quickly and dropped the hammer. Thematic island is definitely swingy-er.

This is one of those games where I'm just like "I should send this to everyone I know for christmas, especially if they have a partner in the house who would game." I resist that feeling, but...

Stress in my life has been at like nuclear, so we've had very little chance to play this. We had a long work all weekend in the office bout but got home late afternoon today and set up spirit island. Just a good time vs. lvl 3 Prussia, me as Many Minds, spouse as Deep Lure. We fear decked Prussia out with several cards left, Many Minds is just The Birds level scary.

These two have neat synergy, but then deep lure has fun synergy with just about anybody who has any use for tokens. Many Minds is a fun challenge, complex enough to get me thinking but not a ballbreaking too much work challenge like say Hidden Paths. The tension of trying to find the damage for Many Minds is somewhat stressful; it has tremendous, tremendous defense but can't protect everywhere or wittle down the enemy. Has to rely on dahan and i was just not drawing the dahan moving cards I needed.

We had a game with Many Minds over the weekend as well, I double-handed with Thunderspeaker while my son tried his hand at Starlight. Two spirits is a mindfuck so we did our usual thing of no adversary but with an extra fear card in each level and one less Invader card. It made no difference though as Minds + Thunderspeaker is brutal. Minds has a card that allows them to move Dahan along with beasts so it was never a problem to get the right presence in the right place. I just spammed x2 presence growth until I had maxed out the power track on both spirits and then milled reclaim + cards inbetween further growth spurts. Both spirits were rich in power so even on the first card draws I was dipping into majors. Minds eventually had the Major that sucks everybody into one region (something like five towns, fifteen explorers and five Dahan) which was the perfect setup to clear invaders into a non-ravaging land and then Thunderspeaker would hit them in the slow phase with the Dahan x Presence damage card - 25 damage without even having to work hard at it, whoop!

Meanwhile, my lad clocked on to how to make Starlight work well which is to pick a channel and double down hard. He also went for board control with some presence movement and town destruction that enabled him to hit a town anywhere on the board during growth and to mess around with explorers. It wasn't even a competition, and we made total board wipe during fear stage 2 invader level 2.

Minds + Thunderspeaker is right there in the 'ultimate combos' list, much more satisfying than even Sharp Fangs + Thunderspeaker. The combination of range plus mobility is just so devastating if you use it deftly alongside their base power cards.