What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

The Minds defend/fear combo innate is so incredible. Like, it'd be a great power even if it caused no fear at all.

Been playing a lot. I really like Starlight takes its form. By far the least annoying of the very high complexity spirits. More direction than those and the complexity doesn't lie in elaborate micromanagement of pushes and such.

With the school holidays in full swing we've been digging further into Jagged Earth where we still have a lot of unexplored content. We tried each of the three new adversaries and the Thieves scenario, as well s experimenting with taking the event deck out of the game. The Hapsburgs seemed fairly easy to work with, not too complicated, although you have to play a little counter-intuitively and let the island blight in a few places. Looking forward to trying them against Wildfire. Scotland weren't too much trouble although I would imagine some spirits will struggle like crazy against them, but man was Russia a tough one. The extra health per explorer is killer as it largely nullifies all those '2 defence' powers and having sticky explorers is also a real pain. It's begging to have Earth and Rampant Green nailing the lid down on them with sacred sites and ravage blocks, but a little too heady for us with more complex spirits involved. I figure it is likely vulnerable to spirits with lots of manipulation powers but is otherwise a real struggle. The Thieves scenario was too easy, kinda needs to be paired up with an adversary (Russia + Thieves must be a wild mix).

We also came to the conclusion that we really like the event deck and miss it when it is gone. The extra bit of swing keeps things fresh and stimulating, like the fear card effects but with some detriment wrapped in with the boon, plus it's also important for spirits who make use of tokens because so many of the events are tied into them.

Had a game of note with Lure and Vengeance that ended with a total board wipe. I've been avoiding Vengeance because I tried it during development and it felt massively overpowered, and after a handful of games my opinion hasn't changed in the slightest. You have to go totally against your instincts, pushing invaders into instead of out of blighted regions, allowing ravages to happen, keeping disease on the board instead of preventing builds. It's described as a late-game spirit but I have been finding it super easy to power up with double presence and the fear/disease power my standard first turn play, then blocking one ravage and allowing the other to half-destroy a sacred site in the second round. On turn three Vengeance is destroying entire communities of invaders, taking out cities and towns in one hit and only getting stronger after than. Energy is really easy to come by as well so it very quickly starts pulling major powers, and with those innates having major-level effects it can completely put the invaders on the end of a leash by the fourth round.

We ended that game with a solitary explorer in the mountains with a Dahan about to go into a ravage, technically the game was already over but we thought we should let the island have the punchline: boardgamegeek.com/image/6104635/mezike

Lure is just a savage spirit, my wife plays Lure a lot now because she loves to work with the tokens and kill mounds of explorers. Your commetns are interesting, we found Vengeance is a very tricky but moderately powered spirit, though that's only with my spouse playing it 3-4 times. What level do you play at? We hover around difficulty 6-7 consistently.

Yeah, we'll have to give events a shot again sometime but our first experience with them wasn't good.

That's interesting because we normally play with Events by default, since we so rarely play with Adversaries because we almost always have new players at the table. But the Event deck doesn't have any really dramatic results (like, say, in Arkham Horror) and it does provide a few interesting twists along the way.

I think it probably averages out pretty consistently (bad from screwing up your plans, good from additional beast and dahan kills). For us, though, it just doesn't feel good. I'd never argue with anyone's preferences, but for me the events provide randomness in the wrong place, a place that can really only serve to completely fuck up your very carefully laid plans at random.

Yeah usually around 6, some of the recent games have been down to 4/5 just because there was new stuff and we didn't want to go too wild. My gambit with Vengeance is to open up the top track first to unlock the beast element and then I open card plays to start firing off the innate. In the two early ravage locations I build a sacred site in one and let the blight eat one of the presence discs and the other I use the card power to block the ravage. After that you can place and push disease into blighted lands and then hit them with the damage per disease innate. Allow the island to blight, allow your presence to be destroyed, and encourage the invaders into blighted mega-cities - it's super counter-intuitive to play but the revenge attacks are massive. The other upside is that you get huge amounts of energy so can go very quickly into major powers and start landing them every turn.

I'll give that a shot, thanks for the rec. I find trying people's strategic approaches to spirits very fun and insightful. Totally changed vital strength of earth for me.

Oh yeah, and let the builds happen as you will want the extra disease on the board as well as the extra fear.

I utterly failed in my use of disease and hated it a week or two ago, then my spouse decided to use it again. Different strokes for different folks.

My wife just refers to weekend Spirit Island (in a positive way) as "date night" and we've just played it every weekend we're free, often many times into the night. We've been going at this game hammer and tongs, closing in on 100 plays, minor power cards wearing out. I played a little of the major power spirits recently and we've crept up to difficult 7 (France lvl 3 most recently). We played three times today, one loss with Fangs and then I swapped to Many Minds... tough game but we came out pretty clearly ahead and finished off the enemy.

Anyone have any advice on doing damage with Many Minds? It's its one huge achilles heel (along with energy, you're just not going to major power with it) and I'm not quite sure what to do about it. I'm not a total idiot, obviously dahan are your weapon but I just didn't pull any dahan moving cards besides the initial draw and it was a real grind of a game. You can only defend in so many discrete places.

I think you’re overtaking me on the experience front now so I doubt there’s much advice I could give you that wouldn’t already be obvious!

Only played Minds a couple of times and I just don’t think that damage is in the picture, it’s gig is to work purely in support? Stitching lands together gives reach to the other spirits and facilitates the guiding of invaders, helping to create safe zones (which are otherwise nigh on impossible to realise at higher difficulty levels) and to bunch the invaders into mega cities which reduce blight and create ripe targets for major power takedowns. It just doesn’t have the innates or the power generation to work with damage, a little bit of plink damage from minor cards is probably the best you can achieve (by design).

The time spirit confused the absolute shit out of us, I think it's kind of poorly documented. So is the sideboard of faceup powers in a stack? Or splayed so you can take any one of them if you take option 3?

The consensus seems to be that the wording “gain any one card” from the set implies that you are free to choose.

After a bit of a Spirit Island break I got a face to face game in last week. We decided to tackle level 3 hapsburg.

I was mist and I was paired up with Lure. We started kinda slow. The Haps did not and blighted the island on turn one or two. Lucky / unlucky for us we flipped a 4 blight per player lose a presence if you play paper that cost 4 or more or 3 power cards. We got a few turn respite from that as we were nowhere near that strong.

I do t feel like a had a particularly well played game. My power draws were uninspired. I did get the minor that give you and another player 3 icons of choice and basically had some uninspired turns while getting Lure to go ham. We were down to two blight. But we stabilized and eked put a terror two victory.

I felt super rusty. But quite enjoyed the game.

I got to game 100 a week ago and, fittingly, it was a landslide loss on a blight card flip which killed all our presence. 101 saw us kick their ass.