This long-form review will cover:
What is it?
What makes it unique?
How does it feel to play?
Our recommendations
Feel free to skip sections if you don’t want all the dirty deets
Spirit Island is a heavy, cooperative board game that <PERSON> and I have played dozens of times in the past few years. Mostly just the two of us have played it together, but we have played it a couple of times with friends. Both of us consider it among our favorite games because it is a well-made, strategic cooperative game that works well with two players, manages to avoid alpha-gamer issues, and has incredibly diverse content.
The river spirit at the start of a three-player game. Even at the lowest difficulty level, the invaders start rather entrenched. The three-player board has the most typical island shape.
What is it?
In Spirit Island, you play as powerful island spirits working together to fight off colonizing invaders. Players are assisted by the Dahan (who are the people native to the island). The invaders are trying to settle on the island: they explore new places, build towns and cities, and intensively farm (which damages the land and is represented by blight tokens). Fortunately, the spirits have some tricks up their sleeves to deal with the invaders and protect the island. It's been described as reverse-Catan, and while it isn't the only game to focus on an anti-imperialist theme, it is one of the first major ones to do so.
In order to win the game, you need to eliminate invaders, scare them off, or a combination of both before the invaders blight the island beyond repair.
You lose the game when the invaders damage the island so much that you run out of blight tokens. There are other ways you can lose, too: you can run out of turns or have a spirit die, but those are pretty uncommon, and I don't remember ever losing from anything other than blight or special loss conditions from various invaders.
Throughout the game, both the invaders and spirits get stronger. The rate at which they get stronger depends on which invaders and spirits you're playing with; some of the spirits even say explicitly that they are much stronger in the late or early game.
Like many other board games, each turn of Spirit Island has several distinct phases in the following order each turn:
Growth: Spirits can choose between getting more power cards, getting energy to be able to pay for cards, adding presence tokens to the board (which are used both for targeting powers as well as getting you more energy and card plays), take back cards ( ), or other short-term benefits. 366
This is one of the major ways that spirits get more powerful throughout the game, but it is a bit of a balancing act between short-term and long-term benefits. More presence on the board (and its associated income or card plays) might be really useful later, but it won't do you any good if you lose the game this turn because you don't have enough energy to pay for a critical card now.
A Major Power card. These are stronger, but come with the cost of forgetting a known power, like in Pokémon. Minor Powers can be gained with no loss (there is no 4-power limit).
Playing cards: After the growth phase, it's time to choose what power cards to play and pay their cost in energy, which is basically money in this game. This usually happens at the same time you're doing the growth phase, really, since you want to be sure you're going to have enough energy to pay for the cards you want to play, or that you'll have presence in the right spot to target your powers, etc. This part of the turn is where a lot of the communication in the game takes place, as you decide who to attack, what bad things to let happen, whether to defend somewhere or not, etc.
Fast powers: Power cards are either "fast," which means they take effect before the invaders act, or "slow," which means they take effect afterwards. For example, consider a power that lets you destroy a town. If it's a fast power, you can destroy the town during this phase, which means that the town won't be there when the invaders have their turn. All fast powers happen during this phase.
The invader board a few turns into the game. There’s one earned fear card (middle left), which will hopefully let us deal with the ravage in the wetlands and the build in the sands. Last turn’s fear card (bottom left) wasn’t helpful since we didn’t have presence in the jungle. And we better plan ahead for that recurring blighted island effect...
Blighted island, event, fear: If you're playing with blight cards, at some point you will probably need to flip the blight card because too much blight has been added. 629