What I Learned Clearing Plates During Someone Else's Turn

I got Spirit Island because a dishwasher who moonlights as a serious gamer wouldn’t shut up about it, and I put off learning it for months because the rulebook looked like homework. That was a mistake. You play as spirits of the island, and your goal is to crush the invaders, or scare them away, which flips the usual settlers-and-frontier setup on its head, you’re the ones defending, not the ones arriving.

First game we ran the low complexity spirits with the prebuilt starter decks, which made it much nicer to teach, because loading a new player up on card symbols and a full character personality at the same time would’ve wrecked us. Even with that concession, teaching ran close to half an hour, and one of my line cooks, sharp guy, good hands, sat there so long on his first turn deciding between two cards that I started clearing plates just to have something to do. That’s my AP radar going off early with this one. It doesn’t wreck the game, but it compounds at three or four players, everybody’s turn takes longer once everybody actually understands their options.

Setup takes a little bit, sorting the invader deck, laying out the island boards, dealing spirit panels, call it fifteen or twenty minutes before anyone plays a card, longer once you’re running an expansion’s worth of extra tokens. This is not a weeknight game for me, not with a four AM alarm hanging over my head. I keep it for slower nights off.

The insert is a genuine letdown for a game built this well otherwise. Sleeve the cards and they no longer fit back in the box, so half my group tossed it and ordered a third-party organizer. Small thing, but it tells you where the budget went.

What sold me is that nobody can quarterback it. Everybody has so much to think about on their own board that it’s next to impossible for one person to dictate the whole table, and I’ve had games end in a scramble and games end with us mopping the floor with an empire, and both felt earned.