I got to play Spirit Island yesterday!
It had been a while so my friend needed a rules refresher and then she proceeded to pick spirits… as we had won the previous games, she decided we should go with “High” complexity spirits because why not
She then chose Downpour Drenches the World and Foggy also known as “not my favorite spirit” and Shroud of Silent Mist–which of course I ended up with because Downpour is a lot easier to play–I happen disagree with Downpour’s rating as High. She said one of them was offensive (yes, Shroud is definitely offensive to me) and the other defensive and that would combine well. Not so sure…
Once again Brandenburg-Prussia Level 1. And good one we didn’t raise it to 2–we struggled and she kept saying “Oh I can remove that blight. Here let me place my presence there and I’ll do it… soon.” Only she never did. So the island flipped to blighted side sometime in the Level 2 Explore cards.
We got awfully unlucky with events. We had set up a beautiful defense using Downpour’s powers one turn–they can have 2 defense in their lands if they have enough blue plus a bunch of other symbols which is just enough to block the usual explorer+village combo–and got an event that basically said "in every land with a presence invaders do +3 damage on the next ravage. I think that was the turn our island went from healthy to blighted.
So while Downpour poured–she played with maximum growth and a lot of card discarding and repeating of the same powers over and over… Shroud was their usual terrible self: doing nothing but being coarse and rough and getting everywhere… I never got to develop enough presence that I could play three cards and use my powers for better effects. But the “being coarse and rough” damaged enough invaders so at least it generated a steady stream of fear which brought us more and better fear cards that even helped sometimes–until of course another event punished us for being too frightning.
To win we caught 2 lucky breaks: I got a major power that not only generated 4 fear it also prevent a ravage + blight + cascade that would have lost us the game. For some reason, I also had a card that allowed me to keep the beast population strong and in another event those beasts brought in another 4 fear and so along with Shroud’s regular 3-4 fear at the end of a round, the event, the poking of yet another city with my 1 damage power to finish it off and playing the major power again… we jumped to a “win” on the turn where the second Level 3 exploration card would have come up and just before the coastal lands invaders would have destroyed the island. We had 2 blight left on the island card…
(End of game board state when I explained how we would win during the beginning of the next turn)