Spirit Island

Game 11# of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” is “Spirit Island” Played with Jack(9) both here and digitally.

So far this summer, we haven’t looked at anything too complicated, with most of the games being fairly family-weight. But today we are going to step it up a notch and look at “Spirit Island,” a fairly complex euro game that I played the other day with Jack.

It’s worth noting that while I’ve only played this game once physically, I have played it more digitally to give a more balanced view.

I think that “Spirit Island” might be the highest-rated board game we have reviewed here in terms of its complexity rating on Board Game Geek. As such, I can’t give you a full overview of the rules as I normally would because they’re quite complex and there’s a lot of nuance to them.

Essentially, “Spirit Island” is a cooperative board game where you and your friends play as island spirits defending your island from invading colonizers. Here’s a basic rundown of how to get started:

You start by picking your spirit, all of which have unique powers and play styles. It’s quite handy that the game ranks these in terms of complexity, so the first time you play, you can choose one of the easier spirits to pilot. You set up the board, which is modular and quite cool because it means that as you add more players, the board gets physically bigger. You set out a set amount of invaders and Dahan (the island’s native inhabitants), and place your spirit’s presence markers on the board according to the setup instructions for your chosen spirits.

The game is divided into a number of phases. You collect energy based on your spirit’s presence on the island and any special powers you have. You then use this energy to play and gain cards from your hand, which then activate at two points in the rest of the turn. Cards are divided into two categories: fast and slow. The fast cards act straight away, and the slow cards act after the invader phase. This is a good risk-reward mechanic where generally the slow cards are stronger, but you risk that whatever you’re trying to do might be too late by the time it activates.

During the invader phase, after activating the fast abilities, you have land damage and blight appearing, invaders building new towns and cities, and new invaders arriving in certain regions throughout the map.

Time passes, and the round starts again with you trying to manipulate both the Dahan and intruders to gain one of two win conditions. You win by scaring away all the invaders or destroying them completely. The victory conditions can change based on the current terror level, which increases as you make the island scarier for the invaders. You lose if the island becomes too blighted from invader ravages or if the invaders completely overrun the island.

A quick way to describe “Spirit Island” is as a much more complex “Pandemic”-like game with a few caveats. While I’m not saying that this is a bad game—far from it—I think this game has a lot to offer and is a nice level of complexity. One thing that could be a lot better is its rulebook.

Normally, when you read rules, they tend to have a linear structure where you eventually have some sample turns. But the “Spirit Island” rulebook does this weird thing where it explains the basics of a concept and then leaves you to dig through the fairly chunky rulebook for the one line that you need to answer a question that really should have been in the main part of the rules. One of the main reasons why I played this game digitally after playing it physically was largely because I was not convinced we hadn’t made some mistakes due to these frustrations.

I’m not really going to give a recommendation either way for “Spirit Island” largely because this is a considerably complex game. Even though I did manage to get through a game of it with Jack, he found it pretty heavy going, and I think I need more time before I introduce him to it again.

What frustrated me a little bit, though, is that I don’t actually think the complexity of the game is above what Jack can manage, but rather the complexity of the rules and how they are written down, as opposed to the innate complexity of the rules themselves.

It is also fairly fiddly, with a lot of bits and pieces, and some of the iconography on the cards is not that intuitive.

Once you finally work out what your doing its not as complicated as it first appears but its hard work getting there and should a second edition be made they need to totally overhaul the rulebook.

If you are looking for a game for much older children that could up the level of complexity from a game such as “Pandemic,” then definitely this would be a strong recommendation. For anyone else, this is probably going to be above what most of our children can manage complexity-wise.