And I have yet to even play it! Really kicking myself for not backing the KS now. (It's just money, who needs it?)
Last night, I dreamed I was playing Vital Strength of the Earth. My friend was playing... the Aztec Cave Demon. <.< I wasn't doing too well, aside from having a lovely time building sacred sites in the southwest beach areas.
And then, as I woke up, I started designing my own spirit. c.c I think I have a problem.
We’re all here with you, friend. I’m four hours away from my copy, and having withdrawal symptoms. (If anyone in Preston has a copy and wants to play…)
I'm just over here playing every chance I get and running simulations to find more effective ways to run spirits.
I'm not an addict. No sir. I can stop anytime I want.
I've got a corner of my room devoted to playing, been doing a game log of two spirit games (turns out it is so hard for me to do that, it turned a single game into 4 hours of playing) so I've got it constantly playing in the background
No addiction here, no sir
Just because I'm up until 2 am playing additional solo games after playing 2 player with my wife every night and skipping sleep doesn't mean I'm addicted. Nope. Not at all.
@TakeWalker
Welcome to the club :)
If you want to pick up a copy of the game, do so quickly! We just sold out here in our warehouse, which means that any copies you find at retail won't start being replaced until the next print run arrives in December.
Wow, that was quick. Did you save some copies for Gen Con?
Per twitter they have hundreds saved up for Gencon
Yeah, I need a job first. -.-
Played again last night with 2 people who played twice and 2 new people ( I really need a 5-6 player map). And after the first game it was 10:45, bed time their kids will be up at 6 - 7 am. So what did they do as I was packing up? "Let's play another one!" Was up till 1am, sleep grumpy and made a load of mistakes but fun was had.
The guy playing Serpent put the played minor powers in the minor discard pile instead of his own and as furious at his mistake at the end of the game, he had 18 energy and nothing to spend it on. And we have another THunderSpeaker lover, She played it 3 times out of the 4 games she played.
I can't wait to add difficulty, but seeing that just playing the bare bones version is complex enough I will just wait. Going to put in branch and claw people next.
Something that may surprise you, as it did me, was that added difficulty does not actually add more complexity by and large.
Adversary: Just playing with a baseline adversary adds an additional check during invader stage II. The reminder is easy to see on the invader cards with the fort/flag. While this adds some extra difficulty, it's not really added complexity.
As you move down the level list of adversaries, a large number of changes are set-up related and don't pile up things to remember or check in-game. Some things like extra health/damage on buildings (england/sweeden), extra blight (sweeden), exploration sources (england) might need to be remembered, but it is not a lot of extra information per adversary, and is more in the fiddly catagory than complexity.
Branch and Claw: The event deck can be considered added complexity since a significant portion of those events direct players to make sometimes difficult choices.
The 4 extra tokens are nice because no single game will blast you into reams of needing all 4 and dealing with them all. For instance, outside of a very few power cards or playing as Keeper, you might never see or deal with a Growth token in a game. Beast and Disease tokens start on the board since some event deck cards directly interact with them, but unless you are playing as Fang, the Beast tokens do nothing without Event direction. Strife tokens will need to come from the Fear deck or from a limited number of powers. You could argue that these tokens add complexity, and they do to a certain extent, but within a practical scope of any given game they really are easily managable and are sparcely seen (outside of Keeper or Fang who are centered around their respective tokens).
TL:DR - Don't be scared of the expansion. It may look overwhelming, but it does not add the "complexity" you might think. Where it does add complexity, it adds it in small bits in different phases of the game making the transition very easy.
In my personal experience, I was pretty scared to add the expansion in too quickly as I was floored by just the base game alone. But once I added it in, I was shocked at how such a large expansion just slid in seemlessly into the base game. It looked so overwhelming from a distance, but in practice the game does a great job of incorporating small bits of these new things at any given time, allowing you to parse the new information easily. The expansion really makes Spirit Island a "full game", and I suspect that once you play a game or two with it you will see what I mean.
I actually disagree with Foote. I think that the Event deck adds far more difficulty than adversaries, so I would up your difficulty first before using the expansion. The Event deck adds a lot of uncertainty and randomness, whereas the adversaries act in predictable ways. Not being able to plan makes things harder, in my opinion.
Randomness =/= complexity
Uncertainty =/= complexity
Difficulty =/= complexity
That's right. If you're looking for more difficulty and not more complexity, add in an Adversary. Especially Brandenburg-Prussia: that Adversary adds in only a very tiny amount of complexity (with the flag effect).
On the other hand, if you find that over-analysis is a problem in your group, the event deck is good for that: it adds enough uncertainty that it discourages excessive analysis.