Board Games!

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My pandemic legacy game got put on hold because one of my roommates who I'm playing with was away for a month. But it should resume shortly... we only have November and December left.

Spoiler: January

Our coda is black. I am somewhat curious what degree the experience would change from that one simple difference - alas.

Spoiler: April

Probably the shittiest thing that happened to us was in April when the faded figure reveal happened. It happened on the same turn as an epidemic of course, and that epidemic had us drawing Istanbul from the bottom of the deck. Coincidentally, (1) istanbul was one of our two major research stations so we spent a lot of time there, (2) we drew it again from the top of the deck so it outbroke and (3) Eleanor, our scientist, happened to be there and got 2 completely unavoidable scars because of it...

Spoiler: September

And the other thing I feel like I should mention of course~ we lost Yaz (quarantine specialist). I really do love this piece of the game's design though. The paramilitary escort upgrade is like

holy shit this is so good it's too good to be true

and then it is.

We mostly had success from building military bases everywhere and then having free transportation/a free objective every game (until september of course). We only lost 3 games so far, both of the games in May and one game in August I think, and all of them were super close (to the point where a different topdeck on the last turn would have won us the game). Another interesting thing is I keep hearing about other people playing who used roadblocks like, at all, or extensively. We used roadblocks exactly once, when Mumbai started with 3 faded figures and we really didn't feel like dealing with its shit so we let it fall because it wasn't an important city for getting from place to place.

I'll look more at spoilers and perhaps say more about our game once we're done but I'm too terrified to accidentally see something I shouldn't~~~

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We finished pandemic legacy!

Spoiler: post-December

And we did quite well (871/1000 points, got all of the major high-level objectives). On the second-to-last turn of the last game the player to my right finished the search for the stash (I was the immunologist and was about to vaccinate the last two cities on my turn). He had one action left, and we were jokingly thinking of what things were useful. We considered self-sacrifice just so that we could possibly avoid a chain of 3 outbreaks, but I thought of another possibility: he was the soldier so he could pick up c4 and blow up our last military base in Atlanta (we never bothered to blow it up before because there were no faded cities in north america).

Cool guys don't look at explosions so we did it, and wound up getting the highest win level because of it. Which I think is just a hilarious/great way to end it.

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Spoiler: Also December

Also, with the exception of December (since we didn't have to cure diseases), we strictly won every game where we took the scientist and lost every game (4 games, 2 in may 1 in august 1 in november) where we didn't.

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@panzer
The leather patches and buttons aren't squares on the track that you stop on, they're rewards that you get when you move from one square that they border to the other square that they border.

You don't put the 7x7 on the quilt board. You do have to fill up a perfect 7x7 area of your quilt to get it, but it can be any 7x7 area.

Iirc I've seen scores in the 10-30ish range?

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evolution is great

Yes.

Evolution is a game that seems to have been popular with pretty much everyone i've played it with.

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yeah, that's the game i (and i think reck/panzer) was referring to. It's also got some expansions/modules that I haven't seen or tried but that seem interesting in theory.

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Meant to mention this - played a game of secret Hitler yesterday. It's interesting, seems almost like a good medium between something super casual like one night ultimate werewolf and something more argumentatively involved like resistance (at least with the people I've played it with).

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I think this Saturday I might finally get to try Captain Sonar.

I can feel jealousy coursing through my veins.

From my (not extensive) experience dead of winter played mostly like a co op game where people did shady shit and other people tried to determine if the shit was too shady to let slide. But ultimately it primarily felt like a co op game because the shared objectives were challenging enough that no one really wanted to just go off and do *entirely* their own thing.

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Got in a couple games online with a friend of race for the galaxy and tried tash-kalar which seems quite fun. Also got in a game of evolution.

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First impression of 7 wonders duel pantheon expansion is really, really good. It fixes basically every problem that we had with the base game (gives more ways to flip parity, incentivizes flipping cards faceup, adds much more depth, etc).

We played one game. My opponent was pretty quickly forced to commit to a science victory, i held a bit of an edge in resources and started pushing military. We both wound up activating the pantheon cards that we put as the highest costs for ourselves; i used zeus to zap the last copy of a science symbol and he used hades to grab it back from the discard. It basically came down to me activating the gate in age 2 and needing exactly mars from the red deck, and none of the red cards had been dealt so i had a 1/3 chance to just win the game immediately... and no dice. Age 3 starts with him having 5 science symbols and the weaker military, and of course there's the sixth symbol waiting for him as the last card dealt in the structure.

Really tense game.

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The interesting thing about it to me is that the first time I played it, it was with my friend and we were with a group of people that we vaguely knew. I wound up getting a military victory I think, and they were all surprised because in practice in their games no one ever won off of anything but VP.

I think around half of my games give or take have ended in military or science. I'm curious if the rate of alternate win conditions being achieved varies drastically based on some kind of metagame of how much people value going for them.

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I've played it a few times.

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Yeah, it's alright. I haven't played it enough to have a strong opinion. Crossroad cards are probably the coolest mechanic but they get a bit played out over multiple games as you know what some of the common triggers are or what some of the common effects are and it can be annoying to be punished for doing common actions like moving or killing. I like the idea in concept a lot of "there might be a traitor" and the objective cards are pretty well-made around it. It also does have its share of very amusing moments/stories, like the game where (minor spoiler of one of the objective cards since we didn't look at them before playing)

Spoiler:

i played super recklessly/explicitly antagonistically because my (non-traitor) objective was that a certain number of characters had to die, and i just kept having to say "cmon guys plz trust me"

I'd say it's probably a great game in the right group and a mediocre game otherwise. If it sounds like the kind of thing you'd enjoy it probably will be.

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https://goo.gl/JOmmi2

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Machi Koro just seems bad. I played it once and it was so unexciting and just blah on every level. No deep strategy, no real interesting decisions, the boring kind of luck that you have no control over, and just nothing exciting about it.

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THEY ANNOUNCED SEASON TWO TODAY.

i'm actually quite hyped.

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Some favorites of mine that fit are evolution and roll for the galaxy. Former goes up to six players, latter goes up to five. Evolution feels a bit slow around the five player mark but not to the two hour mark, and there's a (somewhat strategically inferior) fast play variant. Roll for the galaxy is a pretty fast (less than an hour, probably closer to half an hour once you know how to play) engine builder with great replay value. It probably fits all of the criteria you listed the best of anything I know. Off the top of my head at least. It also has largely concurrent play, but it is quite possible to feel like you're out of the game but it doesn't really matter since games aren't too long.

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I think the only opinion that I haven't heard anyone (other than myself) have about roll vs race is a lack thereof. IMO they both have their strengths. Roll is a bit easier to pick up because it has fewer symbols, it makes more sense or is streamlined in certain ways (having produce come before ship, having military not be a completely separate mechanic), it has more variety in the early game because you get two starting things instead of one (and most of the double-size starting tiles have much more interesting abilities than the starting worlds from race), and there's just the raw satisfaction of rolling a bunch of dice when you go mass settling.

Race has by far the better 2 player setup, which is probably the biggest thing it has going for it imo. It also gives you a fair bit more choice since you get to cycle through a lot more cards than you get to cycle tiles in roll. Roll moves most of the strategy from which cards do you keep/go for into which way do i arrange these dice. As a result roll has a little bit more player interaction in the sense that you have to think a bit more about which phases are likely to be played by others - in race, the most this usually boils down to is something like "should I develop this expensive thing that I really want out soon that means that I won't be able to settle if someone else picks it, or should I explore this turn so that I get more cards so that I'll have enough to both develop and settle if they're both played?" And there's really no way to predict if someone else is going to settle most of the time. It's a crapshoot because it's based on what they've drawn, which you have no information over. Maybe they've been settling a lot because they have replicant robots, but they just got the perfect 6-cost development. Roll gives you that information in the form of what things people have queued up (to see if they might develop/settle), how many dice they have in their citizenry and whether they're low on things to develop/settle (to see if they might explore), and what planets they've settled/what goods are on those (to see if they might produce/ship).

I have more to say about this than I thought I would tbh

I still play race for the galaxy a fair bit with one friend online since it's on BGA, but I only own roll. A friend had race in college but somehow that copy was lost to the ages some time senior year.

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Yeah I've heard very good things about magic maze and was gonna mention it. Ordered a copy along with my pandemic legacy s2 preorder.

It does have some ways to communicate, but avoids wuarrrrbacking (I refuse to retype that) by having the main way that you communicate being a placard that just says "do something!" That you can put in front of someone.

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Got magic maze and pandemic legacy season 2 yesterday! Played both today.

No real spoilers, there is a prologue in PL2 that you can play as many times as you like to get familiar (similar to how the original fresh out of the box could be played as vanilla pandemic as much as you wanted before starting the campaign). We played it twice and are itching to get to January probably in a week. Glad to finally have a game that my roommates are excited to play again after season 1 ended.

I think the most accurate way to describe magic maze is "amusing." It's just inherently funny having three people (we played with 3) nudging a pawn along a path from one spot to another, repeatedly internally going "is it my turn again? shit." And having situations like me pushing a pawn to what looked like the best path in the moment but was actually blocked by a false door, realizing my mistake, and internally being like dammit i have to wait to be bailed out of this and i'm going to look dumb. I also really love the piecemeal rule introduction. It works very very well for learning it.

Best moment though was a game where me and one other person were nagging at the third to do something, because he had the easiest way to flip the timer and we were about to run out. Instead he didn't notice it and explored, then noticed it. Unfortunately, the tile he explored had a timer symbol that the other player happily saw as the opportunity to take matters into her own hands, and so they both moved on to their respective spaces at the same time without realizing what the other was doing, summarily flipping our timer twice and screwing us.

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Finished our first play-thru of Pandemic Legacy season one. Late to the party but hot damn was that good; and we can't wait to go again.

Spoiler: End of May Spoiler

Our CODA was red... We're probably going to do a just-us play-thru with Black Coda for the additional challenge, Red felt rather easy to contain (Only 6 roadblocks).

Spoiler: nothing additional

Roadblocks are still one of the most interesting things to me about season 1, in that it seems completely reasonable to me to either see roadblocks get introduced and say "oh my god, those are so strong, let's permaroadblock every faded city" or to go "oh my god, those are so useless." And I've heard of success with both.

We beat March a few weeks ago in season 2. Still going pretty strong. No idea what twists it's gonna take. I think others in my group have had a similar reaction but not as strongly as I have: season 2 feels so much more stressful than season 1, mostly (maybe entirely) because of some of the high-level mechanic reworks. Enjoying it so far but I don't have any impetus like I did with season 1 to ever play a second game of it in a day because of the stress.

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Fun board game-filled day. In terms of raw amusing-ness the highlight has to be the realization that I was playing a game as a dragon bartering with the cave I was in (game was Vast: The Crystal Caverns).

Favorite game I played today though was Alchemists. Really interesting game and it felt more than I expected like I was really making interesting deductions; I got a hand with three of one ingredient and three other ingredients and mixed them all together, and was able to use that information to narrow four separate ingredients to 50/50s, and it came down to the wire with the last turn requiring me to sell a potion to the adventurer with no discount to get all the gold I needed to buy an artifact + publish, and it was clear that the player before me was going to give a discount of some kind and sell the potion that I had made before and had ingredients for, but I had two ingredients (the only two in fact) that I had believed I had narrowed down 100% in my hand that combined to a different one of the potions that they wanted, which just made for a tense moment of asking myself if I trusted my deductions enough to basically weigh the entire game on them, and I ultimately won by 1 point. Really interesting game that I imagine plays out very significantly differently each time depending on the kinds of reactions you get in early turns.

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Spirit island arrived yesterday. I somehow convinced my roommates to play it today, and they SOMEHOW were willing to play it a second time (with pandemic legacy season 2 and some breaks in between).

But good god is it everything I'd hoped. I was honestly expecting at least one of my roommates to just find it too heavy and not enjoy it, and he was definitely like, stressed out and drained, but clearly enjoyed it enough to want to play it a second time (which I wasn't even pushing for).

First game played rampant green + river + earth vs brandenberg-prussia level 0 (I was rampant green, they were the minor spirits playing with power progressions) pretty straightforwardly won, with rampant green ramping out more presence from vital strength being hilarious as expected. The second game though, was just fucking awesome. First game was a straightforward win so we upped it by a few steps but not too steeply, played against Sweden level 3. I was thunderspeaker, roommates were lightning and ocean, and we got some pretty absurd synergy going. I got gift of constancy which I used to constantly feed energy to lightning and let him either keep playing shattered homesteads (which is a stupidly strong cheap town destruction and fear engine, especially since being playable at slow or fast speed means you can use it either before a ravage or after a build), or keep letting ocean constantly drown cities at fast speed to stop Sweden's high-damage ravages.

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I could possibly be intrigued. Haven't been to a board game convention before.

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So apparently this is an idea that someone had that seems worth mentioning the existence of in this particular thread among all threads on the internet.

Immediate gut reaction is "yeah, that seems like a really fascinating and certainly bad idea."

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Also I feel like I'm not doing Ocean's Hungry Grasp mechanics right. Is it all you have to do is push/gather stuff into the Ocean tile then they are dead, fear is generated and can be exchanged for energy?

Games are so easy when using them, that this doesn't seem right.

This is correct, with the amount of stuff you need to exchange for energy depending on the number of players in the game. And the Ocean player must have at least one presence somewhere on the board of the ocean that you're drowning in (not necessarily in the ocean itself).

Ocean is definitely strong, but it starts out nearly powerless in the (5 * number of players) inland lands, so it's heavily reliant on other people dealing with them or with quickly getting new powers that let it. It also has really bad base energy income so it's reliant on drowning frequently and has a tough time getting energy for major powers. But it's definitely very strong.

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So speaking of spirit island, I got Branch & Claw yesterday and hooooo boy is it fantastic.

I played a two-player game as the two new spirits (I played Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds) vs level 4 France (new adversary). The new spirits are quite neat, and the event deck makes things WAY more interesting. And way better. They make me a lot less inclined to just try to minimax everything and take 3 hours per turn because there's so much less predictability. And everything still thematically works ridiculously well. And the power decks being so much thicker is really, really good, because it makes it feel less like you can rely on finding a particular power if you search deep enough and adds a LOT more variety. I'm excited to try out the new scenarios as well, especially the treasure hunt one.

A lot of the new powers are also just flatly really freaking cool. My friend got a power that worked perfectly with his spirit that let him remove any number of tokens from a land to deal 3 damage per token removed, with a threshold that he could barely reach to get to re-place two of the removed tokens, and his spirit can generate beast tokens and move them really easily so he had a flexible clear. I got a major power with a threshold effect that let me redirect damage from a ravage away from the dahan and toward invaders in neighboring lands.

Also the new blight cards are really really good. Having that additional layer of unpredictability is awesome since the base blight cards are pretty similar to each other. We got one of the positive ones (aid from lesser spirits) and got really lucky with it and both got free defensive abilities that we could use for the rest of the game (lucky since we both sort of lacked defense by and large).

Would recommend highly.

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I'm an advocate of resistance.

One more is Mafia de Cuba.

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Today in a game of spirit island I got to play Cast Down into the Briny Deep as Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island, destroying 1/3 of the board and doing 30 fear because we were playing against level 5 england so of course there was shit everywhere that we were never going to kill.

God this game.

Also played with a scenario but we slightly cheated at it. Though we determined in postgame it

probably

wouldn't have changed things too much.

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So if anyone here knows decrypto I played an absurd game of it today (won't mention any specific words except for a couple non-useful hints that were given so as to avoid potential spoiling)

2 vs 2, mostly smooth sailing, they got a miscommunication ~round 3, we got one ~round 5, no interceptions on either side heading into... round 8. So if nothing changes this round, we're headed to tiebreakers. We go first, and my teammate is giving clues, and gives some clues, and I'm pretty shaky on them. I think I eventually guess 1 3 4, but am very unconfident on the 1. The other team guesses 1 2 4... and the code is 1 2 4. So we get a miscommunication AND they get an interception, and literally the only way we can win now is to have the same thing happen in reverse on their turn. And lo and behold it fucking does despite us having at least one ~50/50 guess. So after a mostly banal 7 rounds, the last round ends with literally every possible token being given out.

And this means that it's going to come down to guessing words, since we both have the exact same set of tokens. We're pretty confident in 2 of their words, and we're pretty confident 2 of ours are obvious. I haven't gotten to this point so wasn't sure what protocol to follow so we just guessed words one at a time with ~30 seconds to think between guesses. They guess our first obvious one and get it right, we guess their first extremely obvious one and get it right. They guess our second obvious word and actually get it wrong (significantly different word from the correct word though almost right) and we guess our second one we have confidence in (though not nearly as much as the first) and we get it right, so we're at 2-1 in guesses. We bs an obviously wrong guess for one of theirs (it was way way off) and they actually figure out a second one due to some inane rule-skirting silly bullshit that happened (all in good jest, it kind of gave us an unfair advantage but limited communication awkward etc and it let them figure out the word). So it all comes down to the last two guesses. We aren't confident at all but I have something that fits decently well... it winds up being wrong, but it was very close. They guess at our fourth word and aren't close at all (and they were gonna have a damn hard time guessing it, given hints of "toothbrush" and "tombstone" along with some others :p).

So the game ends in a spectacular fucking draw, maximum game length with the game ending anyway because we both miscommunicated for the second time simultaneously with intercepting for the first time and both of us getting two of the other team's words right, one close but wrong, and one completely horribly incorrect.

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Oh also we finished october for pandemic legacy season 2 yesterday. Still yet to lose. Though we actually got to 6 incidents (could have been 7 with some bad luck) through some carelessness/trying to do like 4 things at once.

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hilarious is an apt descriptor.

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My group finished pandemic legacy season 2 on Sunday!

We managed to win every game. we thought it was overall easier than season 1 for ~reasons~.

Spoiler: Literally spoilers for everything

tl;dr innoculation is overpowered as fuck. We spent most of the months innoculating exactly as many city cards as we added to maintain the maximum deck size for 6 epidemic cards every game, making epidemics about as sparse in the deck as possible. Stronger of course is the ability to effectively treat a city in zero actions spending zero cubes, and the ability to focus doing that to cities that are out-of-the-way so as to avoid ever having to go to them. Most of south america (at least, what we connected) and western north america were fully innoculated, for instance.

The december gimmick was really cool. Much more interesting than season 1's, where you just had this arbitrary sequence of cards you needed, where we were incentivized to really think about what the most efficient way to do things was. Managed to use a companion to remove a plague cube in the most convenient spot for the carrier to stop over at, letting them get there in just 2 turns with some good coordination from satellite towers and them having the upgrade that gives them a free drive/ferry action each turn.

We got a final score of exactly 900 (best ending is 851+, we won every game first try, got all labs, delivered sample, and exactly 100 points from population, with 0 fallen cities because we bumped up the ones that fell). We actually never had any cities fall at all (and so didn't open the turning point card) until like November. We learned how overpowered Eleanor (our scientist from season 1) was, and so the equivalent character here (Caleb, the builder or whatever it is) + the upgrade that makes you need one fewer card = 3 cards per supply center, sometimes fewer because we had a bunch of upgraded cards with the upgrades that count as double or triple for building.

We did very few searches. Generally had to go out of the way to do them and they didn't advance the objectives. Whenever possible our secondary/tertiary objectives were generally to recon 1 unknown region and connect 2 cities to the grid. Had a standard network of permanent supply centers for transportation. Used basically the same 4 characters every single month, and buffed them up massively, with only a couple exceptions where we took the newer character that lets you discard 2 cards to pick 1 up because red cards were so necessary and in such short supply. It was all of the starting characters except for the one that lets you give a card away (the one that was similar to the researcher). After a little tinkering in the early months we realized that the cube redistributor is super convenient because it lets you give spare cubes to anyone who needs them constantly, both for defending against infection cards and for actions like building towers and drawing lines and using the ability of the character who needs 1 less card to build a supply center by spending 2 cubes.

The hollow men gather cards are also an interesting choice; I saw it mostly as the game's way of making things tractable as you run lower and lower on cubes, but it still gives you enough ways to avoid exposure between shelters and sending radio signals that we never got exposed a single time on any character until December when we had to expose our cure carrier.

It also helped a lot that we found both of the +15 cube stickers relatively early. Of all of the progress report-y cards in the legacy deck that you get if you don't recon a region in time, we only had one of them with the negative effect of destroying one of the unrationed events (idr which one).

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Wildly unbalanced isn't necessarily bad with a game like betrayal. I view it as a very casual game.

One of my fondest memories of betrayal is a traitor hitting me for, iirc, 17 damage in one attack, rolling 12 dice. I would have died to 1 damage.

That said, I've also had a haunt where we won as the heroes before the traitor got to take a single turn...

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game room sounds like chess and billards, yeah. Also still sounds like a boring as shit theme. I hope they just bring you into a room with a plastic table and give you one of those escape room board games.

Hey man, some of those things are goddamn amazing. We played the wizard of oz exit game at Toronto meet and I still remember basically the entire sequence of puzzles because it was so well designed. I’ve also generally enjoyed the destructive ones I’ve done.

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i got close to impulse buying wingspan and then didn't!

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i still might though....

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Forbidden desert is pleasant. Haven't played the other forbidden series games. Played forbidden desert twice, once ~5 years ago, and once last sunday.

I'd also recommend pandemic legacy with caveats that (1) it gets moderately complex by the end, though the complexity is introduced very slowly game by game and (2) only recommend if you have a group you can play the whole campaign with.

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Fun thing: i've decided to start tracking my board game plays this year. Bought a random app that seems to do the job nicely.

So far I've only played one game... five times... and it's terraforming mars . Enjoying it more than I feel I ought to. The first time I played it, my reaction was more or less "this game seems somewhat fun but also probably really poorly designed??" and now i have the more nuanced opinion of thinking that No Pun Included's review of saying it's "fun, but not for the right reasons" is kind of right. But also it's really fun so. Got several expansions as well (prelude, alternate boards, colonies) which are all quite solid.

I did play a ton of different games the couple of weeks before the turn of the decade, though. Probably like 10-15 different games over those weeks, since friends and I were off school and I opted to have a rule for a while that we couldn't play any game twice.

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Strongly second chamber's suggestion of Just One for 6-8 players. Great casual party game.

Letter Jam seems really good though I've only played it ~3 times and it only goes up to exactly 6, but it is best at 5-6. Not really the strongest recommendation, just a game that's on my mind since I got it recently.

No Pun Included

this seems like the worst name for a commentator

The two main reviewers I'm a fan of atm are them and shut up & sit down, and I've found that they in particular tend to often say things that I really agree with. Specifically, in their review of letter jam they gave an imo very eloquent explanation of why Hanabi sucks that I haven't really been able to articulate to anyone. Along with the aforementioned terraforming mars review.

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oh another really cool party game recommendation I got to play at one point a few weeks ago that BGG says is good with 6-8 is wavelength. It was a lot cooler than I thought it'd be, we played it cooperatively with just four (i think, might have been five) of us and we hit like three out of the first four hints we gave exactly on the nose and it was just really hilarious.

As an example, I had the astronomical task of having to come up with something on the scale of "unsexy animal" to "sexy animal" that was ever so slightly closer to the side of sexy. I went with "owl" and after some absurd debate they got it exactly. One of the more ridiculous moments in any game I've played.

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imo 2 rooms and a boom is not fun at all until ~10 players, mediocre until maybe ~14, and really shines when you get to ~20. Which is great because there aren't many games that do that, but it is so optimized for big groups that playing it with fewer than that many people usually just doesn't have enough chaos in it to be all that interesting ime.

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Assuming you have table space, 11 can be two 4-player games and a 3-player game. Like two games of catan and something else for the people who want to play something else (or would be willing to play something else, if you're the only one who's getting tired of it).

You could bring out something more medium-weight, maybe something that's alluring (just, that looks nice) to those newbies who might want to try more things, if you want to try to convert them to the dark side. Something like Everdell (which, by the way, I need to write some kind of large post praising, this game is REALLY good). Or Wingspan. Or even something that isn't even heavier like Azul, or 7 wonders (which notably plays well up to 7 players), or something. But if there are other people who want to play heavier games you could try to suss out exactly who those people are and bring something to teach.

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7 wonders is a better intro to the hobby of tabletop games than catan imo.

i'd guess that a very solid majority of people in the hobby who have played both would agree with this statement. It makes you despise your friends less, has less frustrating randomness and mechanics in general, and is just generally smooth because of simultaneous play. Only real downside I can think of in terms of introduction to the hobby is having to deal with iconography but it's not too bad.

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Definitely the most egregious rules misunderstanding I've done is when I was being taught Android: Netrunner. We thought whenever you broke all subroutines on a piece of ICE, that you trashed it. Kind of horrifically gamebreaking. We figured it out after not too long though I think.

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I did 1 and 2 with the same group and don't think there's any way I'll be able to do 0 with them. Tis sad.

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I've been playing on boardgamearena with friends, usually once per week. Race for the Galaxy works really well there, we also play a lot of Hanabi.

I have played... 81 games of Race for the Galaxy on BGA since August.

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I've played probably a 2-3 dozen games. What are you usually losing to and what difficulty numbers are you playing at? The biggest trap in the game is probably what shaft.ed said; a lot of early interesting decisions in the game amount to "can I grow, or am I obligated to deal with this thing".

There are a lot of useful heuristics. For instance, unless you're playing against an adversary that has a particular reason not to (Sweden if it'd cause double blight, england if you're close to losing to their alternate win condition), you should group up enemies whenever possible and prioritize handling the smaller fires (e.g., if one of the starting cities is drawn on one of the first couple invader cards, it's often best to just let it blight). The only general downside to this is blight cascade but there's blight removal/defense/etc. If you're deciding between, say, a growth option that lets you get more energy to play a card to defend against a blight or a growth option that lets you put down an extra presence, the presence is almost always gonna be better early in the game. Blight on the board usually does nothing early (it kills dahan which is annoying but not usually that harmful, if you're placing presence in safe places it shouldn't usually kill any) until it flips the card. So you can think of it as a resource.

Another example of a good heuristic is that if you draw two cards in a row referring to the same area (e.g., if two cards both have wetlands on them, or you draw jungle followed by the coastal card so both refer to coastal jungles) every place where you can deal with the ravage completely (e.g., killing the invaders and not just defending) is really killing two birds with one stone because you're also dealing with the build (unless you're playing against england but england is evil).

There are others; a lot of the game is sort of developing these heuristics and balancing when they are more or less important. There's also of course the tactics of what cards to play where/how best to coordinate with other spirits etc.

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Regarding the specific things you asked about there are spirits I like playing more (my current favorite is Shifting Memory of Ages) but I generally play different spirits game to game. The game is harder at 2 than at 3 or 4 (interestingly there was recently errata dealing with this!) The main thing is that with 3 players the number of ways to cooperate grows very fast. The number of ways to put out any given fire is bigger. If you really need to do X this turn, or if you spent your one big defense card last turn and can't reclaim this turn, it's more likely another player can handle it.

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Blight on the board usually does nothing early (it kills dahan which is annoying but not usually that harmful, if you're placing presence in safe places it shouldn't usually kill any) until it flips the card.

So are you stacking presence on the same lands early rather than trying to spread on the board for card reach?

Primary goal is to maximize areas you can reach, secondarily to place presence in areas that can be defended if needed (i.e., preferably empty lands, or possibly lands with other spirits' presence so you have more incentive to stop a ravage there). "Safe places" mostly just meant places without a bunch of invaders. Of course it also depends on the spirit (river wants to get to as many wetlands as possible, rampant spread wants to put it in jungles/wetlands where it wants to immediately stop a build/ravage, etc).

I think a common antipattern I've seen a lot of times, especially when I/others am playing spirits we haven't played before, is doing not enough/the wrong kind of growth early and then feeling trapped in a "reclaim cycle" - you think, oh, I have to reclaim this turn or I can't do anything. And then you use your only good cards and you have to reclaim again next turn. And you wind up in a cycle where you can barely grow at all in the midgame. Usually this is a sign that you didn't grow enough early, or with some spirits (e.g. lightning, though the spirit that comes to mind when I think of having fallen into this trap the most is sharp fangs behind the leaves) possibly a sign that you invested too heavily into card plays without gaining enough minor powers/energy/something.

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I've only played it three times and I've won every time so either I'm very good (unlikely) or we're fucking up rules (pretty likely).

There are lots of other explanations! (I like to talk about this game so I'm just going to keep talking about it!) If you were playing on at least medium-ish difficulty then you probably are at least pretty good though.

There are a few rules that are easy to mess up (the most common one i believe being that blight cascade only cascades to one adjacent land, which people only mess up because pandemic has trained them otherwise). But there's also a lot of variance from game to game, especially if playing with the event deck from Branch & Claw (which I recommend for various reasons if you do have the expansion, though some people I've played with were initially offput by it).

There's variance from the spirits you're playing; there are certain combos that are just plain

good

even in the base game, like Bringer + Ocean shoving every coastal town they can into the sea and getting bonus fear. There are card combos that can just win the game on their own situationally; I remember a 4 player game I played like 3-4 years ago had one player playing Bringer who played powerstorm + tsunami after amassing a ton of energy against level 5 England to fake-kill 8 cities and do... i guess 48 fear in one turn if my math is right.

There are stronger and weaker spirits in isolation; in the base game in my personal opinion, A Spread of Rampant Green is just the strongest spirit in the game straight-up, doubly so if paired with any spirit that (1) can only place one presence/turn and (2) has particularly good growth (the obvious choice if you have the promo spirits being Serpent). Shadows Flicker Like Flame is notably weak. The rest of base game spirits are probably roughly balanced; Thunderspeaker can definitely shine in some cases and like, Bringer can definitely be especially weak if you don't know what you're doing with it. But the other 6 I think are all pretty good but not too strong.

And of course there's card luck. Sometimes you'll never draw two in a row of the same terrain and that can be problematic in some games. Sometimes you just won't find enough of your elements to get your innates online. Sometimes the event deck will throw something amazing at you, or sometimes you'll get the card that says all ravages do +1 damage and oops, that's 3 blight.

There are a number of things that I think Spirit Island does better than any other game I know; first and foremost is how seamlessly it integrates theme with mechanics, but also the way difficulty works is really good. I think at the highest difficulty levels even really good players will have to play fairly slowly to make sure they're not missing anything crucial. If you want to sort of play casually and expect to win every game you can get reasonably good and then play at difficulty 0-2; if you're reasonably good and want a challenge but still want to likely win, you can play at like anywhere from 3-7 depending on how good you think you are and how much synergy you pick in spirits and so on. And if you want to lose and have it hurt as the knife is twisted, you can play against England level 6 (note: i actually still have never done this).

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I've found over the pandemic that TTS has a very steep learning curve, but generally knowledge of how to interact with any one mod will mostly transfer over to how to interact with others.