I’ve rekindled my love for Spirit Island after a nearly two-year
hiatus. Finding space on my table was a physical and mental barrier to my
enjoyment of the game, but I’ve reclaimed that space and the game is better
than ever before. Spirit Island is a game where you take on the aspects of an
island as it defends itself from European invaders. The island has many faces
that embody the natural and primordial features. Each spirit represents a
different aspect, working in simpatico as you coordinate a plan to oust these
invaders. Each spirit has a slew of strengths and weaknesses that must be
exemplified or mitigated as you fight back a endless onslaught of invaders arriving
in new lands, proliferating their towns and cities, and then ravaging against
the land and the native peoples, the Dahan of the island. The game fluidly
blends theme and function incredibly well through each spirit having a set of
unique powers to use that are influenced by the natural elements inherent in
the island, but also a set of shared powers that can modify each spirit’s tableau
of powers. Herein lies the puzzle of how best can you destroy and scare off the
invaders.
Spirit Island shines in how you dig into the engine of the
game. There’s a cyclical rhythm that you must conform to as the invaders
telegraph their next attacks and you preempt their actions by growing stronger
or refreshing your capabilities. Each spirit has a specific rhythm that defines
how you develop over time and each invading kingdom likewise has a rhythm. These
antagonistic game plans resonate between one another to create a new tempo that
you must match or be overwhelmed. The game and the scaling difficulty settings it offers are a testament to the philosophy of finding the tune and keeping the tempo. It can often be enough to play along with the other players in a syncopated rhythm, but to truly exceed you must strike out and improvise.
It's hard to pin down how many games I’ve played after obsessively
tracking the game for years before a fallow period where I wanted to live a
more zen life, disregarding the scores and how many times I played to live more
in the moment. It may have also been prompted by switching phone operating
systems and losing access to the score app I preferred. Regardless, I would
venture that I have now played at least 800 individual games in cardboard and
another 300 or so digitally. I’ve spent a lot of time digging into some of
these spirits more than others, building upon learned heuristics against each
of the adversarial kingdoms. The depth of this game never stales. There is
always something more to learn about how to handle a situation. The health of
the island is a critical resource that you learn can be spent. Sometimes this
cost proves too much to bear and the problems cascade into one another, but
other times sacrificing the land to improve yourself will make a world of
difference.
A big takeaway from my time playing the game was realizing
that hundreds of my plays were just practice games. Games where the stakes were
identical to every other game, pushing the envelope of the difficulty level as
I would any other, but crystallizing new ideas and formulating new game plans.
Very few games stand out to me as ones that can be played so many times and
still feel fresh. Typically this level of replayability is associated with the setup
options to game offers. Spirit Island and the wealth of its immersive
expansions has 37 spirits to choose from, many now with various aspects that
could be swapped onto them to change how they play. Near-endless combinations
of spirits in a multiplayer game that can be paired against 8 different adversary
kingdoms and variability shaped island setup any way you like. There is an
infinite gradient to modified setups, but this is not the source of replayability.
That belongs to the satisfaction the game brings even when practicing an
underplayed spirit or an underplayed strategy. Every success, every failure,
every gut-wrenching event impacting the land you needed to stay safe. All of
this is compiled into the dense network of heuristics that dictate how the game
is played. My biggest joy has come from seeing how others play my favorite
spirits. Looking across the board and seeing a plan that looks foreign, a set
of actions that somehow is diametrically opposed to what I would do, and watching
this plan flourish or watching the anguish of a failed experiment solidifies
the fundamentals of how we play.
I am more excited than ever for the next one thousand plays of
this game.
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