Check out what new threats the adversaries of Spirit Island: Jagged Earth hold in store for you!
over 5 years ago – Sat, Nov 03, 2018 at 12:42:42 AM

Happy Friday! We are now nearly halfway through the Kickstarter and are still full of lore about all of the awesome Spirits that have been unlocked and your new adversaries! Below is more details about the three new adversaries you will be facing in Spirit Island: Jagged Earth!

Tsardom of Russia  
Ruler: Peter I Romanov 

The Tsardom of Russia has long been an agricultural and technologically backward state, but all that has begun to change with the rule of Peter I. Desperate for an ice-free port in the north to supplement the frequently frozen harbor of Arkhangelsk and hemmed in to the west by the powerful Kingdoms of Sweden and Prussia, Peter I committed aggressively to the northern alliance begun by his grandfather Michael I, sending poorly trained but massive armies to assist in the continental wars against France and Spain. In exchange, Sweden ceded Russia a portion of the Murman Coast, and Peter built a new northern capital and seaport at St. Petersburg at the ice-free Kola Bay on the Arctic ocean. This gave Russia free access to the North Sea throughout the year, and lead to a substantial increase in Russian shipping and shipbuilding. 

At the same time, Peter expanded Russia eastward. Cossack explorers had already reached the Pacific coast by year of Peter’s birth in 1672, and Peter sent new, larger waves of settlers along the arctic coast to swell the populations of these eastern lands. 

The Tsardom of Russia is the newest colonial power in Europe, having recently emerged as a fledgling naval power. Given their control of a massive population as well as the vast lands of Siberia, Russia has no need for additional population or land. Instead, the early Russian colonies have focused on the rapid exploitation of natural resources that require minimal infrastructure to extract, notably furs and ivory. 

Hapsburg dynasty  
Ruler: Emperor Joseph I (Habsburg dynasty) 

Emperor Joseph inherited the Hapsburg monarchy upon the death of his father, Leopold I, shortly after the conclusion of the War of Spanish Succession, a short-lived attempt Emperor Leopold to put Joseph’s younger brother Charles on the Spanish throne. Secure in his alliance with Sweden and Prussia, Emperor Joseph stepped back from territorial conflicts in western Europe and focused on growing the wealth of the empire for his son and heir Leopold Joseph. 

Joseph I chartered the Ostend Company in 1697 to bring trade from the East and West Indies through his Belgian provinces, setting up overseas colonies and beginning a program of resettlement of Hungarian peasantry. 

Hapsburg colonies are newer than those of any European power save Russia but have grown quickly due to their focus on nomadic herding rather than farming and infrastructure. Hapsburg control of Belgium allowed easy access to Atlantic trading routes but put the Hapsburg fleets in direct competition with those of England, Scotland, and France. 

 
Kingdom of Scotland
Ruler: King James VII, son of King Charles II (House of Stewart)

Scotland’s position in northern Britain has always been a balancing act. King James VII plays this role well, playing the larger and more populous Kingdom of England to the south against the Kingdom of Sweden across the North Sea and the powerful Kingdom of France on the European mainland. His efforts are aided by the recent success of the Darien colony on the Isthmus of Panama. Thanks to distrust and rivalry among the major naval powers of England, Sweden, Spain, and France, Scotland has emerged as the primary broker of international trade.  

The Kingdom of Scotland is currently in a tenuous alliance with Spain, France, and England against the northern European alliance of the Sweden, Hapsburg, and Prussian Kingdoms. However, Scottish merchants frequently carry Swedish goods on the side, rendering any attempt to blockade the North Atlantic largely moot.  

Scotland controls the key colony of Darien, allowing Scottish merchants to transfer goods from the Atlantic to the Pacific without traveling thousands of miles out of their way around South America. With the unique ability to rapidly ship goods to the Pacific, Scotland has begun to quickly settle the Pacific Rim, establishing colonies in other key trading locations throughout the region.

These three very different adversaries add multiple layers of difficulty and replayability! 

In Monday's update, we touched briefly on the new playmat, below is an image that more clearly outlines what updates have been made! 

That's all for this week, but be sure to check back on Monday for more Spirit lore! 

Discover the mysteries of the new island boards and setup!
over 5 years ago – Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 10:30:12 AM

Happy Halloween! We hope you have a spooktacular day! Now, let’s talk about all of the mysteries of the new island boards and setups!  

Adding a fifth board to the island provides a unique challenge in that (for the first time), the island can’t be fully symmetrical. This adds a layer of complexity to the game in that you’ll have areas of the island that are that are harder to reach (particularly for spirits with restrictive growth options like Keeper, Ocean, and Volcano), and you’ll have to coordinate with your fellow spirits to make sure that you are able to cover all the different pockets of the island. It also gives more potential for fast presence placement spirits (like Rampant Green) to reach a burnout stage, where they have cleared out their board (or have their area under control)… and can’t contribute in farther areas that may be getting really bad!  

While this does provide more complexity, it really allows a lot of spirits to shine in new and interesting ways. Spirits that can move about or provide range extension get to step into the light, and some underused special abilities (like Shadows Flicker’s ability to target from Dahan) get to rise to prominence as you can jump too far away portions of the island. Coordinate your presence placement carefully, or you’ll find that you’ve created an ever-expanding pocket of invaders that no one can address!  

Welcome to Crab Island!  

This is the “standard” 5 player island arrangement (though you can, of course, arrange it any way you want), and it has an excellent balance of interior lands vs. remote corners. You’ll have to coordinate to make sure that the “claws” stay clean, as it can be really easy for spirits starting on those boards to either dive for the center to try and help keep the interior clean, or to focus too heavily on their own lands to the detriment of elsewhere on the island (Wildfire is particularly susceptible to this). One thing you will HAVE to acknowledge is that no one spirit can take care of everything. Spirit Island has never been a game where a single player can run around doing all the things that need doing, and now there is even more territory to cover. Even Spirits that can place presence at long range, like Lightning, will have to make difficult choices about what they can cover, and you’ll have to rely on each other. Even Ocean will have to change tactics somewhat, in that there are too many coastlines to keep them all clear at once!  

Island Design

Let’s leave Crab Island behind us. It’s time to move on to the massive 6 player islands. As you can see, there are a LOT of different island configurations with 6 boards to use! We went through a bunch of ideas before coming up with the one below, but before diving into that, let’s take a second to talk about general tips for when you are making a large island map.  

• In general, the more compact you make your island, the easier it is going to be to coordinate and cover all the different areas. The more strung out bits it has, the harder it is going to be, and the more you are going to have to rely on a single given spirit to keep a specific board clean! 
• Depending on the level of challenge you are looking for, you can arrange the island in such a way that you can create safe zones in the interior that are going to be REALLY hard for the invaders to reach. The Star formation is especially good at showing this, in that if you can clear out the starting town and push out early explorers, you can make it VERY difficult for the invaders to reach the center of the island on some (if not all) of the boards. 
•  Be VERY careful about corners (Star Island, again, is very good at showing this), in that corners far from the center of the board are prime candidates for the invaders to create horrifying pockets of blight and dense urban areas that can be extremely difficult to crack, particularly if one of your heavier hitters is on the opposite side of the island and can’t reach you. People who like to play support/fear spirits are going to have to be VERY careful about making sure that their allies can reach them in times of crisis! 

A Tale of Two Centers

This is the “Two Centers” island, the standard formation for 6 players, though the usual caveat about you being able to arrange it to your liking applies. While it appears more controllable at first glance, the fact that you have two central interiors means that you’ll have to be VERY careful to keep the invaders from getting too strong a hold on any one section of the island. Focus too carefully on one half of the island, and you’ll find that the invaders have established a foothold on the interior that will be difficult to eradicate. If they manage to blight the central bottleneck, you might even find yourself in a desperate rush to keep cascades from building up! Some spirits may find themselves cut off from the other half of the island because of incompatible land types, or may find that they’ve stretched themselves too thin to create sacred sites… especially once blight gets involved and Spirits start losing presence. 

Much like Crab Island, you’ll have to rely on each other to keep everything under control. With this much land to cover, rushing to “clear” a given part of the island isn’t nearly as useful since there are so many places for invaders to come from! Above all else, you’ll need to keep each other covered, keep each other’s strengths in mind, and (if you can’t take them out) keep the invaders clustered in manageable pockets. Keeping the central bottleneck clear will go a LONG way to keeping blight manageable (though you’ll have quite a bit to work with, with 6 players), but be prepared to temporarily sacrifice portions of the island if needed until you can come back to them. Or just shove all the bad things onto one board, then Cast It Down into the Briny. You’ve got plenty to work with. 

The Thematic Map

Finally, let’s talk about the Thematic Map. The new island boards will have the missing bits, so you’ll be able to make this thematic island by adding them onto the core game boards. The neoprene version has been updated from its former incarnation to be a bit lighter and easier to read, but the main thing to note about this map is that it is inherently unbalanced. 

All of the issues mentioned for 5 and 6 players are dialed up to 11 on this map! You’ve got clusters of the same land types, which can lead to invader growth explosions and restricted presence placement. You’ve got more lands, which can lead to spirits stalling out and being unable to reach or influence areas outside of their sphere of influence. You’ve got asymmetrical Dahan and Invader placement, so you can’t easily rely on Dahan counterattacks and predictable invader growth. Basically, you’ve got an island that will challenge you and your friends to pull out every trick, make some really hard choices, and maybe some desperate sacrifices! Have fun! 

Be sure to check in this Friday to learn all about the new adversaries of Jagged Earth!

An explosive start!
over 5 years ago – Thu, Nov 01, 2018 at 11:03:22 PM

Hello all of you fabulous humans and welcome to the first of many Spirit Island: Jagged Earth Kickstarter updates! There's a ton to cover since you unlocked all of the Stretch Goals in less than four hours and there are over 4,000 of you with tons of excellent questions!  

First, let's take a look at the new components that you have unlocked! Please note that some of the images are placeholders only and do not necessarily reflect final layout or game text.

We plan to post Kickstarter updates Monday, Wednesday, and Friday throughout the campaign with previews of various stuff! Our update on Friday will give you a closer look at the 3 Spirits that you have unlocked, but for now let's learn a little about Scotland.

Scotland is a coastal themed adversary that is all about creating trade hubs. They aren’t quite as focused on the inland lands (though they’ll still try to set up there), but you’ll need to keep a very close eye on the coastlines to make sure that they don’t get a city in every coastal land! Now, you might think that Ocean would be the best way to counter them… and it is a strong choice, but unlike anyone else, Scotland can blight the ocean lands directly, making Ocean’s normally safe haven decidedly dangerous.  

Now to answer a handful of questions we have seen pop up frequently! We will be adding these into the FAQ of the campaign as well so we all have an easy way to look over them in the future! If you don't see your question below, don't worry we are working through questions and you will receive a response in the very near future!

Q: Will there be more stretch goals now that all of the ones on this campaign are unlocked?

A: We have a lot of cool ideas for other expansions and accessories for Spirit Island, and given the fantastic response to this Kickstarter, it is very likely that we’ll release a lot of them in the future! However, we are reluctant to add anything else to this Kickstarter that isn’t already in late development; we’ve fallen into the trap of over-promising on stretch goals before, and it just leads to a delayed Kickstarter delivery and sad backers down the road. Right now, we are going to stick to the plan of releasing all of the unlocked content from this Kickstarter, which is already a ton! We’ll have updates throughout and after the campaign talking about all of the new spirits, adversaries, and other components, so look forward to more info on everything soon!!

Q: Could you explain the pricing of things on this campaign / why is Spirit Island so expensive?

A: Back when we ran the original Spirit Island campaign in 2015, the core game pledge was only $49. When we finally went to production, the manufacturing cost was dramatically higher than we’d originally been quoted for two main reasons. First, the price of paper in China increased significantly between 2015 and 2017. Second, the cost of the custom explorer, town, city, and blight pieces (which were all unlocked as a stretch goal on the original campaign) turned out to be much higher than anticipated. As a result, when Spirit Island released into retail in August of 2017, the MSRP was $79.95, and the original backers inadvertently got an amazing deal (the core game for $30 off MSRP, PLUS the $10 promo pack for free) and we lost money with each shipment. We don’t regret it - Spirit Island wouldn’t have been possible without that original campaign and the support of those backers! However, in retrospect, it is really lucky for Greater Than Games that we got under 1200 backers for that campaign - if it had gotten 2-3 times the backers, we would have been in serious financial trouble. Fortunately, at this point, we have a really good handle on the production costs and the like for Spirit Island, so we know that a $59.95 MSRP is doable for Jagged Earth.

Q: Will I be able to get the new Promo Spirit Pack after the campaign?

A: Yes, we will sell it from our web store just like we have periodically sold the first promo spirit pack. Now that all of the stretch goals have been unlocked (and so quickly!), this new promo spirit pack will contain two spirits with their unique power cards, as well as a new adversary, new fear cards, new scenarios, and more aspects! After the campaign has been fully fulfilled to all of our backers, we will sell this promo pack for $19.95 (plus shipping) on our web store.

Q: Will the core game and other items ship before Jagged Earth?

A: No, unfortunately, they will not, as that would double the shipping cost for each of those orders. If you would like to get any of those items earlier, I definitely recommend picking them up from a retailer!

Q: Will the Broken Token insert fit the sleeved cards and the premium wooden tokens?

A: Yes! We will send the tokens as well as all of the sleeved cards to Broken Token for them to measure and make sure that everything fits. However, it is not likely to fit the premium tokens as well as the cardboard tokens that they replace; it will be one or the other.

Q: Can you do anything to lower shipping and VAT charges to Europe?

A: No, unfortunately. I know a lot of people are concerned by how much shipping and VAT costs, and we are too! In the past, we’ve tried a ton of different methods to lower shipping costs to Europe, and we’ve lost money every single time. From a purely financial perspective, we would be better off limiting all of our Kickstarter campaigns to the US and Canada. We’ve had a spirited debate here at GTG HQ about whether or not we should go that route, but we really don’t want to cut off our non-North American fans who are OK with paying close to the actual shipping charges. That said, if the shipping charges are too high for you, we definitely understand if you choose not to back! However, no matter how much people dislike it, there is nothing we can do to change it. (Although, if you live in Europe, definitely feel free to vote for politicians that want to change the VAT laws for imports! For what it is worth, moving the VAT threshold up to 100 Euros would mean that most KS pledges would be able to be imported VAT-free.)

There will likely be more FAQs that pop up throughout the campaign, and we will keep that section as up to date as possible, as well as addressing them in our updates.

For those of you that have more story and narrative based questions, check out our Designer Diary with R. Eric Reuss!

The full interview will be hitting the Greater Than Games Podcast shortly and we will share a link in the comments below when it does!  

Thanks for supporting our campaign, everyone! We’re already off to a great start, and it’s all because of you!

Elemental Tokens and Inserts!
over 5 years ago – Thu, Nov 01, 2018 at 11:02:45 PM

Hey everyone!

We wanted to post a quick update today with a closer look at some of the cool stuff coming with this Kickstarter! But first, Eric Reuss, the designer of Spirit Island, wanted me to share with you his thanks and excitement!

“Hi! I can't post full updates, and I'm guessing everyone at >G is in bed by now, so I'll just make a comment instead: EGADS! HOLY ****! WOW!

I had my kids for most of today, so have only been able to sneak occasional peeks at how the KS was doing, but it's been exhilarating. I'm immensely pleased (and honored) that folks enjoy Spirit Island so, and hope y'all love Jagged Earth just as much.

In short: Thank You.”

~Eric

Second, some people were curious about the element tokens that will be included with Jagged Earth! 

They are basically just punch board versions of the various element icons that appear on the power cards. We are including them in Jagged Earth because they are useful when a power grants you an extra element of some kind, or when you use an Any Element icon. They are also important for some of the new spirits in Jagged Earth!

Finally, we wanted to give you a closer look at the Broken Token insert! Below are some images of the prototype from The Broken Token.

This is just a prototype, so the final version will have a few changes (notably, the trays for the tokens will have to be slightly deeper to accommodate the premium wooden tokens). Here's a video we created to show you a more in-depth look at just how cool it is!

Anyway, that’s all for now! Tomorrow, we’ll post an update summarizing all of the various stretch goals that you all unlocked on Tuesday (wow, it is so cool that happened btw - we’re still pretty shocked, to be honest). Then, next week, we’ll go to a Monday, Wednesday, Friday update schedule until the final 48 hours of the campaign, and will give you updates with detailed write-ups of various spirits and other aspects of the campaign.

Stay tuned, and thank you so much for supporting this game! We are incredibly excited to be making it!

Let's fire up your Friday with a Spirit preview!
over 5 years ago – Thu, Nov 01, 2018 at 11:02:40 PM

Hello folks! 

Happy Friday! The first week of this campaign is nearly over with and we cannot express how excited we are and how awesome all of you are for making this happen! To build off of that excitement let’s take a look at one of our fiery new Jagged Earth Spirits, Volcano Looming High!  

There is more than one Volcano Spirit, and many others partake of volcanism in some manner or other, but Volcano Looming High may be the most prominent of them all: while its core essence is born from the deep fires of the earth, it exists where that molten stone reaches high into the sky, peaks looming overhead and explosions blotting out the sun. It is extremely visible, and the Dahan take care not to live too close: it’s not hostile, but nor is it a friend. Sooner or later its power will rise, the stone of the mountain will swell upwards, and an explosion - perhaps large, perhaps small - will follow.  

It’s a mostly felsic volcano, so it doesn’t burble highly-liquid lava the way Hawaiian volcanoes do - its lava is thick and viscous, sometimes visually indistinguishable from stone save for a red glow visible only at night. As a result, pressure builds up in the earth over time, and the mountain grows larger as a lava dome rises upwards. This may subside naturally or be alleviated by smaller blasts of pyroclastic activity here and there, but can also culminate in an explosive collapse of the built-up lava dome, like the eruptions of the Soufriere Hills or Mt. St. Helens.  

Volcano Looming High is tall, and proud, and rejoices in its strength. It’s aloof from most Spirits more due to location than any desire for isolation, though it’s also entirely unbothered by its relative paucity of visitors - it has a magnificent view, after all, can see what transpires virtually everywhere, and is grounded by a pillar of molten stone coming straight out of the earth’s heart. Maybe it has a hard time perceiving down to the scale of individual humans, but it doesn’t see that as particularly important.  

Design  

I’ve wanted to do a volcano spirit since the very early days of Spirit Island, but held off for a long time due to underlying mechanics: I felt lava flows should be represented by Barrier tokens, cutting off the Invaders. As it turns out, there are no Barrier tokens (that’s a story for another day), but the decision to hold off still worked out well, as Badlands tokens are also thematically useful for it. (Wilds, too, which is now the game’s representation of a barrier-to-exploration that endures until a way is found around it.) But I put a shout-out to it on the panel lore for Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island so folks would at least know that yes, there’s volcanic activity on the island, and a Spirit of that sort might come along someday.  

(This is one of two Spirits in Jagged Earth that a very early playtester has been hoping for / looking forward to for a very long time. The wait is over, Ricky!)  

Every iteration of Volcano has centered around an eruption mechanic in which you build up Presence, then remove it in a blast (big or small, your choice). Early versions did some damage, but were more an explosion of Powers - Volcano had phenomenal energy income, but not very good plays, so when it's explosions let it play an extra Power Card per Presence destroyed it could blast out some phenomenal turns. But testers said this didn’t feel thematic enough, and indeed - if the power cards you drew weren’t very Volcano-y, you’d erupt for a huge blast of Open Blossoms and Accelerated Rot, which kind of funny the first time, but not very volcano-y. Successive versions have shifted further and further from that, so now it just does Damage and Fear - and possibly Blight.  

Early versions also returned some or all of the Presence to your Spirit panel, both so that erupting carried a cost to your infrastructure, and so that you didn’t run out of Presence to erupt with if the game went long! That proved not super-fun, though, as well as really making small explosions a bad choice even when they were tactically useful, so it slowly got revised into a system where Volcano can renew from its self-destruction with the right elements.  

One question that’s come up is how Blight - usually indicative of farming/colonization - can destroy a volcano. The answer is: it doesn’t! It wrecks the connection between the physical feature of the land and the Spirit, destroying the Spirit, whereupon the physical volcano has no volition and subsides into quiescence. For a Spirit like Volcano Looming High, it might yet survive by retreating to the cradle of the deep earth’s fire - but it’s knocked out of the fight with the Invaders, which means that they will eventually triumph.  

Volcano Looming High has one huge restriction: it can only place/move Presence into Mountain. This creates a variety of positional challenges - especially if you’re playing a Scenario like Rituals of Terror where all Spirits need to get Presence into the same land! (Be aware of Spirits’ land-type restrictions when choosing boards in such cases.)  

However, with great limitation comes great power. Its Growth is phenomenal, with “Reclaim and gain 6 Energy” being the weakest of the three. “Add 2 Presence” might not seem as good as the 3rd option, but Volcano benefits from Presence in a way above and beyond most Spirits.  

Its first Innate Power is the key: each turn, it may optionally erupt, destroying 1 or more of its own Presence in the target land. This damages the Invaders there (due to its Special Rule), and, if it reaches certain thresholds - both of elements and of how many Presence it just destroyed - it can deal ever-increasing amounts of Damage and Fear.  

Once it’s blown its top, it can recover with the aid of the earth’s fires deep below: its second innate lets it return Presence to the board, relocate from one Mountain to another if the board situation has shifted, or return even more destroyed Presence to its tracks - crucial in late-game if it’s losing Presence to Blighted Island card / Events.  

When playing Volcano, the longer you can hold off blowing up the bigger boom you’ll get out of it, but the more the board situation will tend to get out of control. If your fellow players can handle matters well enough for you to build up (or if you’re playing at a difficulty that’s easy for you), you can carry the endgame big-time. If the other Spirits aren’t so good at short-term control, you’ll need to adopt a different strategy, exploding more frequently and more tactically in order to buy time. Patience is also required for the big payoff… or accelerating combos with other Spirits.  

That’s all, for now, check back next week for more Spirits, a closer look at the new mechanics of Jagged Earth and the new Aspect cards.