What Spirit Islands are you comboing?

I added the two old promo spirits to my kickstarter order, but that's coming in 2020! Serpent sounds very interesting.

We played 3 more times today. We're up to difficulty level 1. We beat Prussia, we're trying England next. Ratcheting up the difficulty and being deluged by towns (Prussia) but still pulling it out was very, very satisfying. I was River and I pulled Fire and Flood (7 mana!) or something like that and immediately played it, along with two zero cards. So I had an 8 damage zone and a 4 damage zone, and then swept through with my level 2 innate power. IMMENSELY satisfying.

This game is so fucking good. Played a couple times yesterday. We played rock/wild which was almost comically ponderous in its speed of expansion. It led to very dramatic games that weren't probably weren't in reality that dramatic---once you surmount the huge power curve if rock and wild you can seriously cast some wild shit to bring things back under control.

We also played the ward the shore scenario. I almost never play scenarios in these types of games, but these are really well designed.

Played three times today. The rituals scenario is a real motherfucker, we barely won with like 100 towns and cities crowding most of the board. The growing green and beast spirits are not a good combo, especially when you have to gather dahan repeatedly. I lucked out by getting a gather 3/push 3 and we just let the island burn by the end and got the third ritual done.

By contrast, the lightning spirit is hilariously easy to use. Your only real option is to look for orange/purple 0 and 1 powers and drive toward your level 4 innate powers. It's just too little energy income to do anything else. Still agree with Bernie that even though it's dead simple it is *not* a good introductory spirit.

One of those deeply, deeply satsfying games where you get the right spirit, the right card combo, at the right time:



I was absolutely raining death by the end of the game. I love how different spirits fit different personalities. The rock dude really fits mine.

Is the expansion for Spirit Island worth picking up, or something to wait on for a bit? My order for the base game should be coming in tomorrow or Friday

Well, well worth it. You don't need to run out and buy it, the base is extremely feature rich, but the expansion has two of our favorite, slightly tricky spirits and the event deck (which I haven't used) is supposed to be essential long term. Finally, 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.

Alright, so what are your tier lists for the spirits in this game? I haven't played enough to really know so this is all just speculation:

Keeper Wilds
____
Thunderspeaker
Lightning Strike
Spread Green
River Surges
Strength of Earth
____
Fangs and Leaves
Ocean's Grasp
Shadows Flicker

-Dreams and Nightmares (haven't played)

I looked on BGG and supposedly the Ocean is like top tier. I get why it's low for us, it requires a lot of cooperation to play the Ocean, ideally you should be planning every turn together in lockstep to get dudes pushed into the ocean's maw every turn. We don't cooperate that much when we play, we definitely talk about problem areas and discuss some cooperation but we don't do like a synched single minded pursuit of victory. Ocean is not as good in that situation.

Keeper of the Wilds seems to be high on other people's lists but from what I have seen it is just devastatingly good. My partner uses Keeper in most games and it kind of feels a little OP at times... I'm sort of struggling along staying above water and right as I crest my power curve I see her over with 20 energy and most of her board clear....

Played my first game with Earth Golem and River Thing. We won in fear phase 2 by wiping out all villages and cities, mostly by herding the invaders into a few spots by the coast then wiping them out.

River Thing’s ability to push guys around is amazingly good, and Earth Golem’s defence works really well with Dahan. We slowly pushed the invaders back each turn towards the sea, prioritizing containment area ather than preventing build/ravage spots. Eventually the invaders had a hard time sending explorers out beyond the coast. I have a feeling a few lucky Fear Deck draws helped us contain so well.

We played without a nemesis nation, a blight card, or a scenario, so we likely need to up the challenge a bit! We didn’t use the scripted powers, that seemed silly.

Game is ridiculously fun. Hitting those elements seems to be key to squeeze out extra actions.

Elements thing is key since they're free... some Spirits are almost solely premised around them (lightning, somewhat river).

I suspect you guys are more skilled gamers than we were, see all the advice Bernie, mezike, and others in the thread for how much trouble we had at the start. Definitely crank the difficulty if you're having easy time.

Yeah, looking it over and the blight cards especially would have messed with our ability to recklessly destroy the island to fight the invaders. The fact we used blight as a finite currency to spend rather than something that has more lasting concequence would change the game.

And yeah, we removed a disk if a land we were on was blighted. We instead used minor cards that let us blight the crap out of areas invaders were in lol

Spirit power levels, there are two things that shift them a lot. The first is their paring. The second is the Invader.

I think Keeper is badass, he struggles in Brandenburg games and possibly England. Brandenburg being so fast, and England just bypassing wilds to build.

Keeper and any spirit works pretty well, Keeper and River is just mean. My simple rule with keeper is try and end the turn with 2-3 energy, if I can do that then generally things are going to go well. I think there are stronger combos than what Keeper can do though. River and Thunderspeaker for example. Rampent green and Heart of the Wildfire might be the most broken. the synergies between the two of them is just silly. Ocean and Dreams is also pretty great. Green makes Shadows and Lightning really good as well as extra presence plays gets both spirits out of the super awkward phases of their presence tracks.

I can see why you are frustrated with how you are perceiving Keeper at low diff. Keeper is a way better spirit than Earth at low difficulty and without events. Earth has a style that needs games to go a bit, but also benefits from the randomness that events bring. When the game is in hand or getting that way his sacred site defense happens once, maybe twice a game per site. that is not a lot for a key thing e does. Keeper is way lest restricted and just kills stuff. If on the other hand you are teamed with River or Dreams, or even to a much lesser degree Thunderspeaker who can move dahan into trios or easily shove invaders to your sacred sites Earth gets better, it just takes a lot more effort.

Event cards are kind of a big deal as you get the feel of the game, The have a few that really mess with some styles of play. Double explorer placement for a turn, or play a village instead of one explorer on each board. Those really mess with spirits like shadows and Keeper.

My top few in just raw power would be Keeper and Thunderspeaker. Shadows is my weakest, although if you get good draws Shadows can really take over games. The power to target Dahan with powers is really big, and makes a lot of so so powers really amazing.

That went a little rambly but there you are.

Thanks for popping back in, Bernie, I hadn't given much thought to how events would affect relative power of spirits.

My one good game with Shadows was exactly because of that dahan target power, in retrospect. There are some powerful cheap minor powers that are range 0 as a drawback, and drawing one or more of those could be very useful...

Yeah, Shadows is weird, I will take powers that I never fire but play. There is a zero that has Shadows symbols, that I think causes fear and pushes, but also plays a blight, I play the power a ton, but never fire it, its is totally for symbols. The other super amazing one is the defend 10 on a sacred site. So very good when you can just target dahan. Shadows has some of the most impactful inates. When you start landing the second inate power you feel pretty in control of your and maybe the whole board.

Game two was a narrow victory! Difficulty is still low. We used a Blight Card but no Adversary. Spirits chosen were Nightmare Guy and Ocean Eat. I’m not sure I’m sold on this team right now, but they were fairly difficult to play compared to our last team.

Could be bard luck; we never seemed to draw powers that had matching elements. And there was a big forest city growing off on an inland corner of the map we couldn’t do anything about . Moving some Dahan in there would have made sense, but they always seemed to be too far away and needed elsewhere. Probably poor positioning on our part.

I should try Thunder Woman next, Will likely improve my Dahan game.

Thunderspeaker is probably my favourite one to play, it’s particularly great to pair with spirits who can move Dahan so I’m really looking forward to trying it with Finders of Paths Unseen which is one of the ones in the next expansion.

I don’t know how I’d rank individual spirits as my feelings change a lot depending on which ones are in the team. Lightning for example is definitely more valuable with more spirits, Earth works better with Spirits that have lots of low cost powers as they are more likely to make use of their innate, Ocean really needs spirits with either push/gather powers or the ability to keep the lid on the heart of the island for the first few rounds, etc.

I quite like Dreams & Nightmares with Ocean as you pile up the fear whilst shoving invaders into the coast or straight into the water. Ocean can quickly ramp up to spamming Major Powers with some help feeding it so I get why a lot of people rank it highly.