PT.1 - Let's GO GO GO! (Spirit Island Playthrough)
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- Опубліковано 5 лют 2025
- Welcome to The BlunderSpeaker Show, a podcast and playthrough channel dedicated entirely to the board game Spirit Island!
We move swiftly on into episode 1 - the playthrough portion - with a game configuration designed to get me feeling like a beginner again. And boy did it do that... Base Earth + Base Shadows into BP 3 + Blitz + blind Power Progression cards and an extra island tile... Strap in, we gotta go go go!!!
Whether you're new to the game and think you'd enjoy it, or are a a seasoned veteran here to refine your gameplay with tips and tricks, I've got something for everyone and you will fit right in. Don't forget to get involved in the chat - community integration is what this show is all about. Enjoy the show!
Ooof - brutal game, that blitz scenario is nastier than I thought, had you on the back foot from the get go.
But that was a lot of fun to watch, and made me feel better to see some of your thought processes and how you go through and rethink and replan realize halfway through something isn't going to work.
Keep 'em coming!
Man, I was so on the back foot, it was crazy. The extra island board in particular was super tough 😭
Hello, I think there may have been a critical error with the blight card. Lesser spirits is 2 per board, normally 6 across 3 boards. Blitz does one less per board, so it would’ve been 3 total. You spent 3 immediately after flipping, so that would’ve been game over.
I know single player has a rule for redrawing that card, but I think blitz could also have an argument for redrawing these cards as well. Only getting one per player is quite punishing because it never gives you a chance to capitalize on the boon offered by lesser spirits. I get that the total blight is still the same because of the altered set up, but those cards don’t seem balanced for this scenario. I played this scenario as well and lost because of a 2 blight card flipping as well which is why I noticed this mistake. I redrew the card to see how it could’ve ended and I was able to pull off a victory with a different card not resulting in an immediate game over.
Ooooof, that's a huge blunder!! Thank you for pointing it out. Yeah, you hear me mention how it's a problem that I'm two players rather than one - I meant that I wasn't allowed a redraw.
You also notice how my instinct was that I lost the game, and then I get a bit befuddled when doing the maths. Blitz had me all over the place hahaha.
I have a few other notes and thoughts about your game specifically since I also played this set up (small asterisk here, described later).
I laughed when you drafted call to migrate. The initial double take, as your gut knew the card was unhelpful and off element. And then the second double checking as you couldn’t believe they’d straddle Earth’s progression deck with this card. I guess Dahan movement for sacred site defense and rituals could be helpful, but it was not what you needed or what most players want.
I don’t know if you randomized which spirit started where, but Earth on Board A is rough. They have 1 of their own board’s lands that’s 3 away and 2 others that are 2 away. Toss in the fact that they are only adjacent to a single land on the extra board and that right there can explain away a ton of issues with Earth frequently failing to maximize the usefulness of its (limited) plays when you played. In my game I started Earth on Board B and made A the extra board, giving him excellent reach into the bonus board and eliminating any lands from being 3 away on Earth’s board at the start.
I think Shadows missing the innate a couple times was very painful and impactful as well. Against BP, the innate should prevent a build/ravage cycle, PLUS you get a bonus energy which is really helpful for Shadow’s energy economy.
That said, I really think the biggest influence on the game was Earth starting on board A, and then not being able to quickly extend its reach greatly hampering its ability to influence the island.
Yeah, the board setup was hideous. I randomised and just dropped them right in. Usually, if I'm playing a very high difficulty game (e.g. a 6/6), I will choose my spirits and boards so that the game doesn't come down to something like this.
It's hard to say where the difficulty landed on this one. It certainly felt much harder than a standard level 6 game, but a lot of that may well be because of Earth's placement.
I take it you won the game then?? How did you find it overall, with the better board setup? How would you rate the difficulty?
Did I win? Well… sorta, but also not actually. I found it still quite difficult with my more advantageous set up. I will confidently say it was harder than a regular difficulty 10. But it also didn’t feel hopelessly unwinnable. I recently played Teeth Underfoot solo vs England, supposedly difficulty 11, but I’d say that England matchup was worse. But that’s kinda how England is against a lot of spirits. I’d 100% say a random pair vs BP6 would be easier than this.
1. This challenge requires insanely efficient action economy. Sadly for Earth, I don’t think you can realistically hope to beat Draw + Rituals + innate, especially with the innate giving an energy back. I didn’t draft a single card, and I only didn’t reclaim twice, once on the first turn, and again when I really wanted defend + blight removal, but that was still difficult to not pick the hyper efficient combo. The final straw leading to my turn of not playing the combo was that it netted me one extra energy to enable me affording 3 card plays and getting the repeat up to cost 3, which was vitally important for the next turn. The other benefit I hadn’t considered until watching your game is that reclaim all (and the innate combo strat) gives presence at range 2. This helped me get his presence into helpful places easier, further increasing Earth’s ability to have wide reaching impacts across the island.
2. I got lucky on my initial explore. They went into the empty board’s land with disease meaning there wasn’t a town present for future explorer sourcing. After that luck, I did everything in my power to prevent the invaders from getting a foothold into the extra board. This was rather successful but cost significant blight on the other two boards.
3. 2 blight per player cards are brutal with this scenario effectively making them one blight per board. I had a solid game going, but got ended on turn 4 by this with no chance for countering. I chose to continue on, redrawing the blight card because the scenario plus blight card felt particularly unfair and there is potentially some legal standing since solo play lets you redraw after two blight per player cards. I acknowledge it’s a loss, but I felt like it would be more interesting to continue to see if this challenge was beatable had I dodged that bad luck.
4. Lo and behold, it was beatable. Turns 5 and 6 I thresholded and repeated the Jungle Hungers. Given the minor power cards that were handed out, I should’ve seen it coming, but I was shocked at how perfect it was. I don’t think I could’ve gotten a better card. Rituals helped out knocking down a couple cities too and being able to play stillness on turn 5 was quite helpful for ensuring there would be a turn 6. But Jungle Hungers plus repeats were the closers for this “win.”
5. My quick summary would be: Starting boards are key. Repeats are necessary to keep up. A little luck on initial explores is nice. And 2 blight per player cards are brutal with blitz.
6. Lastly, thank you for proposing such a silly yet challenging game. I don’t think I would’ve ever played Blitz or with Power Progression cards, and it made for quite an entertaining game.
Awesome comment, thank you for all this detail, and the recap of your game
Yeah, you see myself that almost immediately, I realised that the reclaim loop on Earth was likely the way to go. If I had better appreciated the appalling range of his growth options, and dreadful starting position, earlier... I would probably have locked that strategy in on turn 1. But it's also not-nothing that I had an incentive to draft, given that the whole game was kind of based around the power progression!
One other interesting thing to note is that (if you ignore my complete cheat on the blight amount), I had actually made a key mistake that cost me this game. When I pushed the single explorer out of the jungle on the second-to-last ravage, I pushed it into the Coastal Mountain next door. This kind of play pattern is second-nature to most experienced players; loading in one land that's already a problem, and especially when you have Jungle Hungers in hand... However, as that land was ravaging next turn, it was a poor play. Had I pushed anywhere else, I could have survived the big Coastal Ravage the following turn (in combination with the Fear cards i drew)... I'll discuss this a bit in my breakdown episode on Sunday, as I found it quite a good learning moment.
Thanks again for all your inputs friend, hope to see you back for the next one!! (And if you ever want the specifics of my matchup configuration, please don't hesitate to ping on Reddit, or here, or anywhere)
Really enjoying the video so far! I'm at the point where you just removed presence (A8) from Earth from the Event card at 1:27:10 ish
I'm not sure if I'm right but I think you should have removed that presence at around 50 minutes when the land ravaged and blighted
I didn't want to comment unless you corrected yourself (this is considering I'm correct in my assumption) and maybe this could be a point that changes the game - I'll see what happens as I continue to watch!
You're spot on - I missed it during the game, but I did notice it in the meantime while editing. I'm pretty certain it doesn't influence anything from a targeting or legality standpoint, but as you say, I should have been forced to remove a different presence elsewhere. I don't think that ends up mattering either though, because I need to triple-stack at some point, which was redundant...
Thanks for commenting, I'm really glad you are enjoying the playthrough!! ❤️
@@BlunderSpeaker Yeah, it looks like it didn't really change the outcome!
At 2:15:00 ish, you moved a presence from Earth to (C5) which looks like it shouldn't be possible unless I'm missing something, isn't G1 only range 2?
I hope my queries aren't coming across as "mean". I just wanted to understand if it's correct or not
Finally, just to sum up some thoughts all in one comment
- As an introduction to Spirit Island, I'm not sure of the target audience but this is definitely overwhelming for a beginner but maybe it's part of your master plan to go back to basics in the next episode!
- From my perspective, I had no problems with the zoom of the camera, but maybe if you choose a different zoom, maybe it's better overall but for me, I had no problems with it
- The fact you edit the card onto the screen for us to see makes it a lot easier (another reason I don't mind the current camera angle) - Maybe add in the fear cards, too! I know you read the cards but sometimes you said adjacent to a "thingy" which can be many things! haha
- I really enjoyed your order of operations mentality, I think this kind of strategy is perfect for beginners as it helps them to make their own decisions based on priorities - weighing up ravages to lose a presence is maybe better than losing 2 dahan and cascading, etc (some people, myself included) used to/can think that saving presence at all cost is necessary - definitely one of my biggest take-aways!
- Also I want to praise you for being able to play the game while voicing your opinions and strategies without making too many "blunders" both strategically and mechanically, especially considering you're starting your podcast with a game mode / spirits you're not familiar with, it's so easy to forget little things so I applaud you for this, if it were me, I would definitely have started with something super easy / comfortable to make sure I got things right (I'd still make mistakes haha)
- I'm looking forward to the next episode!
Awesome comment, thank you so much for all of this. Please know that I *strongly* encourage any and all feedback, which absolutely includes pointing out mistakes in the game. I hadn't spotted the Earth presence cheat, you're dead right that I placed at range 3 instead of 2. As it plays out, I'm pretty sure I could have just gone into C4 instead of C5, and the game plays the exact same way, so it didn't influence anything in the end. But great spot!
Yes, looking back, it's kind of silly to think of this as an introduction game if new players are the target audience. I definitely achieved my goal of throwing myself off balance, and creating something that felt a bit like being back as a beginner...
However, doing that also meant putting a rather crazy, high complexity game up front and centre in my content creation... which, yeah, may not have been such a wise choice.
Lessons learnt for sure, and we move 🙂🤘
just seen the start of the show.
One little feedback:
the colors of the wooden discs are a bit to similar to certain terraintypes and so you have to look twice sometimes. Better go for some other colors like red.
Thank you, great input. I will most definitely keep that in mind for the next ones!!
I haven't watched past the first turn yet, but I think that using the power progression (especially blind) is a much bigger difficulty spike than you were expecting.
Significantly so!! I was thinking 0 or 1, it's probably more like 3 or 4 honestly, and it also pretty feels directly linked to the other difficulty modules.. so in harder games, this becomes even more difficult.
This was NOT a diff 9 or 10 game for sure. 😁