Spirit Island

i play the tabletop vers with my frinds and we though why not own the pc version as well. BOY IS IT HARDER we realised IRL we skipped over rules by accidents or skiped over explorations or even misread some cards! the games does the thinking for us and it leaves 0 space for accidental cheating or even 0 wiggle room for error. god we are glad the undo button exist, the amount of time we went through a growth phase misreading our cards and realising ''woops i can't play that.'' is ALOT. we also found it was a shame the best cards are in the DLCs....

It took me some time to get comfortable with Spirit Island. It isn't a game that's easy to understand for new players, there are alot of moving mechanics that players have to understand not to mention that it isn't entirely clear what you should do to play well. If you have played the board game already, you will love to hear that the digital daption is great. All of the visual elements are made clear and most of the stuff that players have to handle themselves is handled by the game itself instead. You don't have to spend 10 minutes after each step to make sure that you didn't forget anything. If you haven't played Spirit Island before, let me help you to understand it better so your first time playing it is easier than my own. The goal and theme of the game is about an island that is inhabited by powerful spirits that have to defend their land from european invaders that set their foot on the island. The invaders on the other hand will explore the land, build structures, first villages, later large cities. Because the invaders don't care for nature, their way of living will damage the land as well as the natioves and the spirits that live there. If the island becomes too blightes you loose the game. Winning ont he other hand can be done by driving the invaders out of th eland. Either by removing every single invador or by inflicting enough terror on them. Powers and destruction will cause fear and if enough fear has been inflicted, you will gain something clalled a "terror" card which has a negative effect for the invaders. These will make it easier for you to control and remove invaders and if you gather enough terror you will also eventually unlock easier victory conditions that reuire you to remove only part of the invaders to win. If the terror deck ever runs out you asutomatically win which is a powerful way to end a game even during a losing situation. Spirits are very distinct and all have their own unique powers and cards they start with. Each spirit has a bunch of "growth" options that allow the spirit to grow in power over time. The player chooses one of these options which includes gaining a new power card, adding presence on the island, reclaiming used cards or simply gaining more energy to play more expensive cards. The most important one is adding presence. Each spirit has two tracks, one ofr energy, one for the number of cards you can play. If you remove one presence from that track you can that extra effect for the spirit. The removed presence is added on the island and defines the range of your abilities and where you can use them. Having two presence in the same land coutns as a holy sire which allows you to play more powerful abilities in that area. Since this is different for eevry card, the player has to make sure where he wants to place their presence. Each spirit has one or two innate powers as well as four power cards. Let's go over power cards first because these are simpler. A power card has an energy cost (although some are free), can be quick or slow (more on that later) and might have limitations like the range of the power from your presence, what type of land it can be played in and if the land has specific tokens in it like natives, invaders or blight. These cards also have different colored symbols on the left side which are called elements. By combining enough elements you activate the innate power of the spirit. This power is free to use but the requirement makes it difficult and requires the playert to play specific cards to activat it which can sometimes be detrimental. Innate powers are usually very powerful and define the general concept of the spirit, for example a spirit who is more about control will push invaders out of land and gather them where they cannot do harm while amore destructive spirits simply will damage to invaders to destroy them. Spirits also have aspecial ability that is always active, usually that provides some extra benefits or change the rules of th egame in some way to make the gameplay more interesting. The general flow of the game is like this: Invaders first draw a card from their deck that shows a land type. Now they will send an explorer, a single, mostly harmless unit in every land that matches the type if possible. After that the card is moved to the "build" field which shows where invaders will build next. Now spirits decide their growth action and after that their powers. One of the best aspects of the digital adaption is that it ourtight tells you if the cards you play will activate your innate power before you hit the "end turn" button. This makes it easier to see and manage your innate power and sometimes you might want to change a power to activate it. After each player selected their cards, the actual meat of the gameplay now starts. Spirits that used fast powers might now use them. In a game with multiple players, the order doesn't matter, this is a cooperative game so you can discuss and decide on your own who uses which power first. Slow powers have to wait however until the invaders made their next turn which happens right after all players hit end turn. Since the exploration card moved to the build action, all explorers will now build in the land that is shown on the card. This starts with villages and becomes cities if there are already more villages than cities there. Usually this means an explorer will build a village on a tile he just explored, although tiles that already had villages will now provide cities that are harder to destroy and deal more damage. Which brings me to the ravage step. The card from the last round (so the first round doesn't have one) will now be used to decide where invaders hurt the attack the land. Each invader does one damage per tier (so explorers one, villages two, cities three), If the ravagers do at least two damage to th eland it will create blight and remove one presence from each spirit there. It also damages anmd kill natives on the land but if they survive they will fight back, possibly killing invaders in the process. It obviously is best avoided that invaders damage the land since you lose presence and it counts for your lose condition. Sometimes however you cannot avoid it, especially in the early game, so your best option is to do damage control. Keep in mind, you always win once your victory condition is somehow triggered, so even a blighted island might still win. Aftet the ravage happened, the card is discarded and the build card now moves over to it for the next round. Now the spirits may play their slow powers. Because of the interaction between fast and slow powers as well as invader actions, players have to plan ahead in time and decide when is th ebest tiem to strike. Your fast powers are usually designed to prevent ravages and builds when possible while your slow powers have more impactful effects but you have to keep the next round in mind. After all spirits are done the round is finished and the whole ordeal begins again. I simplified some elements to kep it easy to understand, the actual rules in effect behave a bit different but you'll see this for yourself once you play. The core game has 8 different spirits to choose from as well as three adversaries, special invaders that change the rules of the game and add extra challenges depending on the chosen difficulty level. This provides a good amount of replayability, either alone or with others. The last thing I can say is, don't give up. Check some youtube tutorials if you get stuck on how to play the game efficiently and you will get better.