I’ve played a few games of Towering Roots, and I think this is the first spirit where I’m really not sure what I should be doing from a high level strategy perspective. Like, what does this spirit want to do? My games have felt like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Any insights?
I'm on a chess kick, and I think part of the fun of chess is trying to get really good at the game. Obviously with such a high skill ceiling, there's a lot of room to grow.
Games with high skill ceilings are often, like chess, abstract 1v1 games. But I wonder if there are any solo games that people dedicate themselves to mastering. The only one for me is Spirit Island. I would also include Voidfall, but the game takes so long to setup that I simply haven't gotten enough reps as I would like to.
What about you? Are there games you've spent time trying to master? Would you consider yourself good at any game in particular?
You can use aspects, but they count towards the base spirit’s box rather than the aspect’s box.
I tend to like spirits with a spatial puzzle element, which includes control spirits, beast spirits, and Dahan spirits.
Base box - Travel River
B&C - Unconstrained Sharp Fangs
F&F - Wildfire
Horizons - Eyes
Jagged Earth - Many Minds
Nature Incarnate - Wandering Voice
Enchanted Ivy wraps you in fuzzy blanket with a cool breeze on your face, a warm cappuccino in your hand, and animated woodland creatures by your side serenading you with sweet melodies.
Seriously though, I adore this game! Enchanted Ivy remixes the tile laying and pattern matching mechanisms I love from other games and puts it into a ridiculously charming package that tickles my brain just the right way. And it has a campaign with unlockables!
Highly recommend!
I’m struggling playing Deeps Ocean against Prussia 4 (an adversary I’m usually comfortable with), having lost 4 times in a row.
I’ve tried multiple openings, but I keep getting terrible card draw luck. I fail to pull powers with long range targeting and/or gathering, and the invader deck keeps hitting the furthest inland lands over and over again. By the time I get 4 waters so I can start drowning the coast, the blight card has usually turned and the invaders have built up 2-3 inland lands. I usually lose to cascading blight, but one time I thought I might win, I ended up running out of invader cards.
Any advice? I’m starting to think that Ocean is just more satisfying in multiplayer settings where there are more coasts to hit. In solo, the invaders never get a foothold in the costal lands and so the deeps tokens end up not doing much.
I’ve joined a Spirit Island game group, and we’re 3 sessions in. For the first two sessions, we played with someone else’s set, and he would just run the game and not play his own spirit. At first, I thought this was strange, until…
This past session, we played with my set and I ran the invader board in addition to playing Mentor Memory, and wow! Bandwidth overload! I goofed I think 2-3 times, getting the order of operations wrong (playing the event before the fast phase or forgetting the event entirely). And I’m a seasoned player (admittedly mostly on the app) so I should know it by heart. But I found it tough switching back and forth between running the board and figuring out what my spirit was going to do.
Does it get easier?
I’ve always been curious about the development process of adversaries in SI, and I’m not sure if I ever heard Eric talk at length about it.
Using a bespoke deck to activate enemy moves is very common in co-op games, from dungeon crawlers to LCGs to deck builders. And SI has something similar: the event deck. And one of the adversaries has their own event card (France) but it’s drawn predictably instead of randomly. And another has their own invader card (HME).
So why wasn’t this concept pursued further? Can you think of a reason why bespoke invader and/or event decks, tailored to the theme of a particular adversary, wasn’t pursued further? Is this perhaps a fruitful design space for future adversaries?
Historically, I've been anti-sleeve. But as I prep my collection for a multi-player game, I'm coming to realization that SI cards are unusually difficult to riffle shuffle, even if you split them up into small decks. They feel much thicker and stiffer than most other cards I've handled. Am I imagining this?
So I'm considering sleeving just to have the ability to mash shuffle them. Do you sleeve? Which sleeves do you use? And perhaps just as importantly, is a two box solution still possible with sleeved cards (I have every set)?
I’m relatively new at playing Spirit Island multiplayer (I’m mostly a solo player) and I’m considering playing a support spirit for the first time. I’ll probably play Mentor Memory, but Serpent is a consideration as well.
How do you play a support spirit? Obviously you don’t want to quarterback, but how involved do you need to be in other people’s business? How proactive? To what degree do you need to be aware of the entire board? (I’ll probably be playing a 4-5 person game).
Both objectively (compared to all other spirits and aspects) and relative to their base spirit, what are the aspects you are most excited to play?
I played a few games with Fractured Days, and I keep running into the same issue: it’s hard for me to use the G3 option (the one that draws from the Days that Never Were) and generate enough elements to hit my innate thresholds. Do I just need to horde more time so I can clear the whole bottom track (and thus get 3 card plays)?
I’ve played this game a ton solo, but I’ve only recently started playing with an IRL group. The past two games, I’ve played old favorites Sharp Fangs and Keeper. But next time, I want to play a spirit that I usually avoid because they don’t shine at solo.
I don’t have access to the NI spirits or JE spirits that use badlands (because they’re playing with Branch & Claw rules at the moment). So my short list is Serpent, Fractured Days, and Finder. Which one do you recommend I try first? Which is the most fun with a 4-5 player group?
I played my first game of Vestige. My verdict? I enjoyed it. Like, really, REALLY enjoyed it.
It’s got a number of things that are catnip to me. First, it is a Euro with a huge spatial puzzle aspect. In this way, it reminds me of Istanbul and Rome: Fate of an Empire. Every turn you’re racking your brain trying to come up with the most efficient path across the map to get everything you need to done.
I also really like the AI. It’s a “Don’t feed the AI” bot, as I call them, similar to the systems in Isle of Cats Explore & Draw and A Place for All My Books. The AI doesn’t take turns in Vestige. Rather, it puts constraints on the players and forces them to come up with creative workarounds. Every so often it’ll through a wrench into your plans by laying down a threat card, which has the additional effect of ramping up its progress. But it also gives you a chance to address the threat and slow it back down. Overall, it’s a breeze to run, enabling you to stay focused on your own gameplay.
Vestige is definitely a keeper for me. Looking forward to mix-and-matching the different Nemesis bots. I can easily see how fan-made Nemeses can arise as well. They’re really only a deck of 12 or so cards.
And my verdict? I loved it!
As a father of young children, I haven’t had much opportunity to play board games with other people. But beyond that, I’ve felt protective of my Spirit Island plays. It’s my favorite solo game, and so I wanted to keep it in a tidy metaphorical box of solo goodness and not let outsiders color my perception of the game, as strange as that sounds.
Then recently, someone on my FLGS’s Discord server advertised a regular Spirit Island meetup, and I was already feeling like I needed to get out more and meet new people, so I thought “What the heck?”
As it turned out, playing with other people didn’t detract at all from the brain-burny puzzle that the solo experience provides. And on top of that, it adds the feeling of camaraderie as you try to hash out a plan with your team mates. And you also get to share the game’s emergent story with other people. I guess YMMV depending on the group, but the group I was with was super cool and worked well together.
Anyway, TLDR, I had a great time, and I wish I had ripped off the multiplayer bandaid sooner.
What’s your opinion of Final Girl’s card system? I’ve always felt it was a bit unwieldy keeping everything organized while also making sure there was no cross-contamination between my hand, the offer, and the discard. As a result, more than half of the total footprint of the game was taken up by action cards.
So I put everything into a spreadsheet (and thematically, is there anything scarier than a spreadsheet?) Not only does it make the game much smoother to run, but I can also keep better track of which actions I’ve done in a given turn and which results I’ve gotten (handy for when you forget to move the time or horror marker). AND it reduces the overall footprint of the game, allowing me to move the map closer in view.
I’ve been thinking of uploading a png to BGG, but would it break their ToS since I used some of the game art?
I love my kids. I want to enjoy playing with them. But I also need constant mental stimulation or I get very sleepy (I assume this is due to ADHD?). The types of games and activities they enjoy aren’t the most stimulating for an adult, and so I’m always fighting droopy eyelids.
Anyone have any suggestions for a parent who wants to have more fun and be more present with his kids?
I’ve become addicted to this new version of Awaken the Ancients, playing it several times since I’ve gotten it yesterday. I’ve also played the PnP version, but the new art in this version is stunning.
For those who find it too easy, I’d like to suggest a variant I’ve come up with that uses an action point system that functions as a timer. It forces you to be deliberate with each move and prevents you from playing too conservatively. The great thing is that this version already comes with a tracker, which is meant for the boss, but you can repurpose it for the timer.
You start off with 8 action points (which you can raise or lower depending on how difficult you want the game to be). Every time you move seeds, you lower the tracker by one point. Every time you awaken an ancient, you raise it by 2 if you had excess seeds, and you raise it by 3 if you had the exact number of seeds. You lose if you ever end a turn with 0 points.
I don’t have a goto mobile game at the moment, and as a result, I find myself endlessly scrolling social media and news feeds.
I want something that’s both fun and has a lot of depth—something that I’ll want to keep visiting over and over again. I’m thinking an RPG is probably the best bet? But I’m open to other suggestions.
The ones that look interesting to me are Sea of Stars, Octopath COTC, Star Traders: Frontiers, and Steamworld Quest. What’s your opinion of these?
Mayor of Chicago has become a sort of grail game for me because of how hard it is to get in the US, but I bit the bullet and paid the extra $ to have it shipped from a UK retailer.
It’s a cross between a tile-laying game and a resource engine-building game, and so far it’s been a lot of fun. I won my first two games pretty easily, but there are 4 levels of difficulty, so I plan to ramp that up.
I’ve loved all the InPatience games I’ve played recently (this, R.A.V.E.L., Skoventyr, and Cyberion). Sad that they are experiencing tariff woes.