Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises

 

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.

After a long half a year wait, I had the chance to defend my title in Twilight Imperium 4th edition and employ some new strategies I've wanted to add to my multiplayer heuristics. It was a bloody slugfest, and I never recovered from an early, critical error during my development, but I nevertheless tested how far I could exert a projection of power with no basis whatsoever.

Our group is ritualistic in our approach to TI. In the week leading up to the game, we have a lottery to carve out faction options for each player, which are only locked in once your home sector is uncovered during the building of the galaxy. That preceding week is a whirlwind of speculations and theory crafting among pockets of our group on who will bring what faction. The game begins long before we build the galaxy and strategies are fleshed out for the many possible options of neighbors and their factions. I entered this phase of the game with two front runners. I was dealt The Yin Brotherhood, The Naalu Collective, The Mentak Coalition, and The Argent Flight. My dialog tree well simple: If the The Emirates of Hacan are picked and trade flows freely throughout the galaxy, I make my boldest play as The Mentak and extort as much as I can from a careful string of neighbor-rich systems. If I was allowed to lock in last, I planned for The Naalu in their true fashion to boldly act first with an attempt for an Imperial play. Where I settled was the birds, wedged in between The Vuil'Raith Cabal and The Mahact Gene-Sorcerers. I wasn't happy with this, especially since the other side was a more modest waiting game between The Naaz-Rokha Alliance and The Yssaril Tribes. The real wildcard were The Ghosts of Creuss who had carefully made a web of wormholes spanning most of the galaxy.

My plan as The Flight was simple: command the board through voting power and create a union with my dinosaur neighbors. The first round was a whirlwind that played near-perfectly into my goals. Mechatol Rex was claimed, a speech was made, and the votes began as the table then witnessed how strong I could be with a meager 7 votes projecting to 19 votes across the first two agendas. I misplayed the sequencing for claiming my systems, not used to my factions funky fleet setup. This put me behind by a tech for the entire game and behind on my fleet's capital ships for too long when these were critical for early scoring. In spite of this, the votes were flowing early and my powers could be flexed while I assembled a swarm of destroyers.

The Cabal were fantastic neighbors. We carved out a deep alliance and their home system was left wide open to me the entire game so I never felt threatened by their run. They controlled Mechatol and commanded a powerful fleet to push into other home systems, while I set up a network of PDS cannons on Malice, the true center of the swiss cheese galaxy The Ghosts created. I began leveraging my cannons as a tax for safe passage, selectively firing only when the tax wasn't favorable enough to me. An early show of this force was enough to instill fear and I was allowed free movement through the galaxy to take systems for objectives. My systems were unoccupied for most of the game, but never taken in spite of that. It felt good, even if I was playing so far behind the pack. The votes were ultimately lackluster, and a better future play will be claiming politics more consistently. My the end of the game, I was projecting 17 votes into 29 during the agenda phase, and the impact of buying my vote was fun but not as beneficial as it could be from a better standing.

All said and done, I wanted to test heuristics surrounding early force projection. They proved helpful in giving me an image of strength far greater than my lack of scored objectives conveyed. Claiming a strong early blind vote and then a strong counteroffensive where an invasion force was wiped out by a single PDS and infantry with no ships in the sky can go a long way to giving you a strong social standing in the table meta, but ultimately tighter play in the opening and better fundamentals would have served me so much more.