A Pox Upon Their Houses!
about 6 years ago – Thu, Nov 01, 2018 at 11:02:35 PM

Good morning everyone! I hope you’ve had your flu shots, because we’re going to talk about a spirit of disease, death, and retribution!  

Story

The Dahan suspect that Vengeance is a Spirit of many forms, just as vengeance itself can run hot, or cold, instinctive or premeditated. There are certainly multiple Spirits that seem to fit the bill, and certain events from past generations suggest they are at the very least related or interlinked somehow, if not actually a single Spirit with unusually disparate manifestations. Showing a prudent caution, the Dahan call these Spirits by names that would not give offense should they be single or multiple.

(The name you see on the Spirit panel is a shortened version of what the Dahan usually call it, but “Vengeance as a Burning Plague that Scours All Those Who Remain Before It” doesn’t fit in the layout. In the Dahan language, monikers given to Spirits are titles, with longer names being more formal. While this displays a certain form of respect, it is also distancing, a politeness which either acknowledges a Spirit who is powerful but has little to do with the Dahan, or implies a desire that the Spirit and Dahan keep separate both socially and physically. Shorter name-titles usually convey a different sort of respect, implying some sort of connection or closeness which merits the familiarity… though there are exceptions.) 

After the diseases brought by the Invaders started to sweep through the Dahan population (5 or so years prior to the game’s start), many Dahan leapt to the thought that someone had awoken Vengeance as a Burning Plague. There was a great deal of bitterness and cursing whomever had been so foolish - painful history has led them to view the Spirit a little bit like modern civilized nations view chemical warfare: everyone leaves it alone because it’s so terrible, and unleashing it just results in more pain all around.

Thankfully for the Dahan, Vengeance as a Burning Plague is currently venting its wrath on the Invaders, so its diseases are tailored towards them. The Dahan are not entirely safe - but when Vengeance is making the rounds, who is? 

Design

The Kickstarter for the base game of Spirit Island did well enough to publish 12 of the 14 Spirits designed at the time. The remaining two, as many have guessed, played with Disease and Strife tokens. I was a little disappointed that they didn’t get printed then, since I had no idea at the time whether Spirit Island would do well enough to get more spirits out there at a later date. In hindsight, however, I’m actually quite glad how things turned out: those two Spirits got a bunch of extra development time that has been a real boon. 

The Spirit which used Disease tokens was not the one you’re reading about now; it was a spirit of mists and disease. With the opportunity to reflect on its design, I concluded that Ted (lead designer) had been spot-on when he suggested that it was trying to do too many things at once, so I split its mechanical portfolio. The mists portion turned into Shroud of Silent Mist, and the Disease portion became Vengeance as a Burning Plague. As it turns out, each of those concepts has more than enough to occupy it!

One perennial problem with the original Disease-spirit was that the Disease-centric minor powers didn’t match up especially well with its elements (water, air, moon) - Infested Aquifers was good, but that was about it. For Vengeance as a Burning Plague, I chose its elements based on its overarching domains - in the minor/major decks, vengeance-y powers are strongly associated with Fire, and disease is strongly associated with Animal. On the Spirit panel, you’ll see two innates, one fueled by Fire and focused on vengeance, the other fueled by Animal and focused on disease; the Spirit can go in either direction in its Power Card picks - or try for both, though hitting both innates in a single turn (beyond lvl 1) is hard, you’ll usually need to trade off the two barring perfect cards or elemental assistance of some form.

This Spirit has a lot of moving parts - it’s High complexity, partly for that reason and partly because it changes the game dynamics: it doesn’t try to prevent Blight so much as get even for Blight, and often prefers leaving Disease to linger, causing Fear and enabling Epidemics Run Rampant… but letting the board get more out of control. As the Spirits grow closer and closer to losing the game by Blight, It grows more and more powerful, in large part because of one Special Rule: Your Powers treat Blight on the island as also being Badlands.

When Invaders are damaged in a land with Badlands, they also take 1 Damage per Badlands. So in a land with 2 Blight, this Spirit can destroy a City by dealing 1 Damage - like, say, with Savage Revenge, its first Innate Power. Of course, Badlands also do bonus Damage to Dahan, and Savage Revenge damages Dahan: Vengeance tends to spill over even to those not deserving, so be careful with that.

Normally, stacking up multiple Disease in a single land tends to be weaker than spreading it out, but Vengeance as a Burning Plague benefits from disease-heavy lands in a variety of ways: it gets Power Cards when creating them, it does more damage there when Reclaiming, and they boost Epidemics Run Rampant. One of its Unique Power cards gives it some ability to move Disease, so after obliterating the Invaders in a land with 4 Disease it can spread some of those plagues to less controlled lands.

It shares territory poorly with Spirits who don’t handle Blight well (such as Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves or Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds), but can still cooperate with them fairly effectively if each carves out a separate turf, working together along shared borders. With Spirits who can’t keep much of a lid on the Invaders during early-game, it may need to use its Disease for early board control more than Fear generation and other benefits; the hit in long-term power level is entirely worth it if it prevents an early loss! 

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That’s it for today’s spirit preview, but later this week we’ll be taking a look at some of the new mechanics and aspects… but wait, there’s more! 

Eric is in the midst of scheduling an AMA on Reddit's /r/boardgames community. It's looking like it'll be at 12 noon Eastern time this Thursday, 10/25; we'll mention on Wednesday's update if that changes. Additionally, if you ever wanted to find out about the design process and inspiration behind Spirit Island, we’ve got an interview with Eric on the GtG Podcast up right now! 

Check back for more on Wednesday! 

A Very Mechanical Update
about 6 years ago – Thu, Nov 01, 2018 at 11:02:27 PM

Now that we’ve seen a few of the new spirits, it’s time to go into more depth about some of the new mechanics that are being introduced in this expansion!  

Jagged Earth is primarily a "more content" expansion: more Spirits, Adversaries, Power Cards, etc. These mostly use the rules laid down in the base game and Branch & Claw. However, there are a few new game components, a few rules updates, and a wide variety of small "here's how this thing a Power Card does works" clarifications. 

New item: Badlands tokens 

Branch & Claw added four types of tokens, for land-based effects that can persist over multiple turns. Beasts are aggressive and dangerous animals; Disease keeps the Invader population in check; Strife marks Invader pieces experiencing strong internal turmoil (or madness); and Wilds represents barriers or avoidable dangers. Disease, Strife, and Wilds stay in play until they have an effect, while Beasts persist unless remove somehow.

Badlands are a 5th token type, for lands hostile to human life in a way that's not easily avoidable. Like Beasts, they stick around permanently unless something explicitly removes them, though unlike Beasts they're not strongly tied to the Event deck. Their effect is static and ongoing: after Invaders are damaged, each Badlands token in the land deals 1 Damage to Invaders; they also damage Dahan likewise. Thematically, the hostility of the land means that adverse circumstances result in more casualties, making it much easier for the vagaries of nature to deal a fatal blow to human settlements. (Early versions of Badlands lowered the Health of everything in the land, but this didn't work well; it was too powerful against built-up lands, but did nothing to Explorers. It also had odd stacking dynamics - generally, the first one in a given land was phenomenal, the second was good if-and-only-if there were Cities, and the third was completely irrelevant.) 

New item: Still-Healthy Island cards

Many of the decks in the game are built to have certain proportions: the Minor Power deck has similar percentages of each element and each pair of elements, for instance, and the Event deck has a certain percentage of "Beasts hurt Invaders" events. However, the selection of Healthy/Blighted Island cards is there primarily for uncertainty - it has been a very long time since the island's ecosystem was that badly damaged (though it came close in the Years of the Relentless Sun), and the Spirits don't know exactly what will happen. Jagged Earth will include additional Blighted Island cards, offering more variety. At least 2 of the cards will be a little different, though - the reverse will look something like this:

Sill-Healthy cards represent the island being more robust than the Spirits anticipated, granting an additional pool of Blight before tipping over into a Blighted Island. However, that strength inevitably comes with some drawback (for both narrative and game-balance reasons, not due to metaphysics) - in this case, the Invaders think the island is just fantastic, and frightening them away becomes harder. Because you might go through more than one Blight Card, instead of taking one during Setup and returning the rest to the box, you just put the shuffled stack on the Invader Board. If you go through one card and need another, it's right there. The Jagged Earth rules also make clear that it's fine to customize which Blight Cards you use - so long as there's some uncertainty about how deep your Blight pool will be and what consequences will happen when it flips, it's totally fine to, e.g., omit cards if there are a few your playgroup dislikes. 

New item: Ongoing effect cards

A small handful of things in Jagged Earth - Scenarios, Choice Events, Play Options, and a Power Card or two - result in enduring modifiers to a Spirit or the game in general. In some cases, you can place the card next to the table as a reminder, but in other cases, having a small (Invader-Card-sized) reminder to put next to the island can be helpful. For instance, this reminder:

can be used if you take the third path on this Choice Event (one of the only ones to have 3 choices):

Speaking of Events: many Events - especially Choice Events - are badly swingy on Turn 1, before you’ve had any real opportunity to develop your power or affect the island. Jagged Earth will amend the Event rules to either resolve no Event on Turn 1 (you put one into the discard pile in order to, e.g., keep timing for France’s special Event correct) or resolve only the bottom-most portion of the Event card (usually a Dahan event). 

New item: Elemental markers 

Mentioned in a previous update, these are simply markers to help remember elements you’ve gained from a source that doesn’t show you an icon (e.g., Elemental Boon, or some Unique Power Cards for Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island). However, there are a couple of Spirits that also use them in their own ways. We'll talk more about that in some of the later Spirit updates!

Some New Things Powers Do

Several of the new powers Isolate a land, representing widespread difficulty in traveling: boggy mud, space-warped trails that twist back upon themselves, or lethargy that afflicts not merely those working (which tends to be represented as Defend) but those trying to get from place to place. Mechanically, this does two things:

1. Invaders skip Explore actions in target land.

2. Invaders consider the land to be adjacent to nothing… unless you want. (This affects only Invaders, not, e.g, Blight cascade.) 

In normal circumstances, Isolate is not an especially strong effect; both halves work against Explore actions, and you have limited information about what the upcoming Explore card might be. It takes some finesse to use well. However, when playing against Adversaries or Scenarios where Invaders care about adjacency - e.g., the Kingdom of England’s special Build rule - Isolate can be much more valuable. It also becomes more powerful when you have a fair amount of it, as it gives the option of hedging bets or blocking off multiple Explore sources.

We’re including 3 additional reminder markers for each player color (for a total of 6 each). Much like the current 3 Reminders have a generic “spirit effect” icon on one side and a “defend” icon on the other, the new 3 will have a generic “spirit effect” icon and an “isolate” icon. 

 A handful of things (like the Event Card shown earlier) specify that some Dahan or Invaders Do not participate in Ravage. This means that during Ravage actions, they do nothing: deal no damage, take no damage.

A few Powers reference their "origin" - the land you targeted that Power from. Often, this is in the context of doing something in each land from origin to target - for a Range 2 power you could affect 3 lands: one with your Presence, another adjacent to that, and a third adjacent to the second. It can never affect the same land twice, though. Needless to say, these Powers combo well with Range boosters like Reaching Grasp!

While the above list isn’t exhaustive, it’s pretty representative, and most of the other details / clarifications are even more minor or specific. E.g.., “target board” means “the board containing target land”, and is used entirely for brevity. Or clarification on how an effect like “the next time a Dahan would be destroyed, it isn’t” works. (Any Damage it had clears, and further Damage/Destroy effects from the same Power can’t hurt it.) 

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That's everything for this update! We’ll be back on Friday talking about Aspects, but before then there is one last thing to talk about. Last update, we mentioned that Eric would be running an AMA on r/Boardgames! We can confirm that it is happening on Thursday at noon (Eastern time). Get your questions ready!

The Aspects of Spirits
about 6 years ago – Thu, Nov 01, 2018 at 11:02:18 PM

Good morning, everyone!

Before we dive into the update, I just wanted to take a second to answer one of the questions that keeps popping up in the comments, namely:  

• Can I pledge $1 now, then increase my pledge after the campaign end through the pledge manager? 

The answer is: 

• Yes. Yes you can.

We are also updating the number of tokens in the premium wooden token pack to reflect the number of additional tokens in Jagged Earth, so that you have enough of all of them for new scenarios, events, adversaries, and the spirits that heavily use those tokens in up to 6 player games.

Specifically, we've added: 1 badlands, 2 beasts, 6 disease, and removed 2 Wilds and Strife tokens, bringing the count from 213 to 218 tokens total.

Below is a picture of our first token samples from the factory. We have some work to do with colors, but we think they're looking awesome!

Now, on to the update!

What are Aspects?  

As we head into the weekend, it’s time to talk about Aspects.

The main Kickstarter page gives the best quick overview of Aspects I could write, so I’ll quote it here before diving into more detail: 

Aspects are new ways to play the existing four low-complexity Spirits. They swap in a new Special Rule or Innate Power, replacing one of the standard Special Rules or Innate Powers for that Spirit. You’re still playing the same Spirit - you use its Spirit Panel and Unique Power Cards - but you’re exploring a different aspect of its nature, which changes up its dynamics… sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Some Aspects are direct replacements (e.g., swap one Innate Power for another), while others replace a Special Rule with an Innate Power or vice versa. 

 Actually, I lied a little there in the name of brevity: a few of the Aspects don’t replace a Special Rule or Innate Power at all. However, they all have feature some change to the Spirit to keep them balanced. Aspects aren’t generally meant to change the power-level of a Spirit… though Shadows Flicker Like Flame gets some leeway, as it ended up a touch on the less-strong side of the pack. 

Let’s take a look at one now!

This is a modest change to River Surges in Sunlight: you no longer get free Sacred Sites in Wetlands, but you can Push Explorers/Dahan during Growth by placing Presence. Both halves of this change how you spread: you no longer care about getting into Wetlands, you need to occasionally make Sacred Sites in order to use your innate power, and you may want to spread from/to certain lands for short-term tactical effect rather than basing it off of the best site from which to originate Powers. 

Can you combine multiple Aspects on one Spirit at once? 

If you’re looking for a balanced play experience, no. They’re not designed with combination in mind, so you might get weird interactions, or things that make a Spirit overpowered or underpowered - e.g., there’s an Aspect for Shadows Flicker Like Flame which (at the moment - usual caveats about playtesting) has as one of its thresholds “You may use your Shadows of the Dahan special rule on this Power for free”. That stops being useful if Shadows of the Dahan is swapped out for something else. That being said, there’s totally a place for “less balanced but still fun” - that’s what the thematic maps are, after all - and it’s your game! Should you find the variety from combining Aspects is a positive outweighing the occasional weird interaction and variance in difficulty level (or, perhaps, are experienced enough to look at a pair of Aspects and suss out whether they’re likely to synergize or anti-synergize), then sure, go for it! Adversaries weren’t originally designed to be combined either, but combining them has worked out startlingly well in most cases.

Why are Aspects only for the Low-complexity Spirits?

There are a few reasons for this.  

• They want the love more. In some playgroups, Low-complexity Spirits get played a lot during the learning period, and are then left to languish a bit. Other playgroups perceive them as somehow lesser and gravitate to higher-complexity Spirits. And, well, the low-complexity Spirits are simpler: they may have oddball lines of play or interesting nuances concealed within (I’m still learning things about Lightning’s Swift Strike, which I’ve played I don’t know how many times), but so can the more complex Spirits, so if one has a favorite Low-complexity Spirit, one might welcome options that offer new exploration of an old favorite. 
• It’s easier to make Aspects for them. Moderate and (especially) High-complexity Spirits tend to have more intertwining between their Special Rules, Innate Powers, and Unique Power Cards (and sometimes even Growth) - changing out just one of those things can be trickier. If Ocean can’t place its Presence in the Ocean, how does its Growth work? If it can’t Drown, what do its two Powers which Drown things do? And because Low-complexity Spirits on average have more of both “feel” and “power budget” concentrated in any one innate/rule (because they have fewer of them), the impact of swapping out a single thing tends to be larger. (There are exceptions, of course.)
• Jagged Earth doesn’t have any Low-complexity Spirits, either in the box or among the promo Spirits. Given that, I wanted to include something that would provide new variety for players who prefer Low-complexity Spirits. 

Wait, why doesn’t Jagged Earth have any Low-complexity Spirits? 

Here’s the story: I originally assumed the Spirits in Jagged Earth should lean towards more complexity than the existing 12 (which are split evenly: 4 Low, 4 Moderate, 4 High), but that at least 2 of them should be Low complexity. Now, making good Low-complexity Spirits is much harder than High-complexity, perhaps in the same way it’s harder to create a good sketch with just four brush-strokes than if you’re permitted a couple dozen. Still, I designed a few… but one never worked quite right; one wanted to be in a future expansion more than the current one; one really wanted to be Moderate complexity (this is a ubiquitous problem); and a fourth ended up not working right AND relying on a token-type that didn’t pan out AND wanting to be in a future expansion. This left just one. But… around the same time I was realizing this, Greater Than Games told me that they’d like me to lean even harder away from Low-complexity Spirits and towards more advanced ones; both their experience and distributors’ data indicated that’s what the vast majority of people buying an expansion tended to want. They said it was OK if I had no Low-complexity Spirits at all. This was something of a relief, both because I didn’t want to come up with another one at that time, and because it meant the remaining Low-complexity Spirit could get a little more complex - and it really wanted to, as there was a thematic part of its nature that could be nicely represented with a great mechanic that was totally inappropriate for a Low-complexity Spirit (I’ll talk more about that when I preview Shifting Memory of Ages).

 Do Aspects change the complexity of playing the Spirit?

Sometimes they make it more complex, though they don’t generally bump a Spirit all the way up to Moderate. They’re not something to include on a player’s first play of the game, for instance, and it’s probably best to play the base version of a Spirit before throwing in Aspects. But let’s look at an example: 

This replaces the Innate Power of Lightning’s Swift Strike. It’s more complex in that it uses Strife, a token introduced in Branch & Claw; simply including those tokens makes the game more complex, so this isn’t an Aspect I’d recommend in a game with a new player. And it’s more complex in that it doesn’t blow up Towns/Cities - instead, you’re terrifying and distracting the Invaders, which is a less obvious/simple path to victory than “Kaboom!” (You still have Shatter Homesteads, though, so you’re still blowing up Towns. Just not as many Towns.)

Pandemonium changes up Lightning a bit more than Torrent changes up River: it makes Harbingers of the Lightning much more useful, since you can set up Dahan counterattacks with the Strife from it. It also incentivizes big burst turns even more than base lightning; it can sometimes be hard to find target lands within range that fully use the highest levels of Thundering Destruction, but 11 Fear is always fantastic, and even if there’s only a single City in a land you can always pile 4 Strife onto it. Hitting those higher levels requires heading towards Moon, which is not normally in Lightning’s bailiwick, and that changes what Power draws are best - Steam Vents drops a bit, Land of Haunts and Embers or Lure of the Unknown rise a bit. (It also makes Elemental Boon in a game with Shadows Flicker Like Flame awesome.) 

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We’ve made a short video that goes into more detail, (with some previews of other Aspects in testing for all of those enterprising people who are enthusiastically making proxies)! 

That’s it for aspects for now! Have a great weekend, everyone, and we’ll be back on Monday to talk more about about the new promo spirit, Finder of Paths Unseen!

There and Back Again
about 6 years ago – Thu, Nov 01, 2018 at 11:02:11 PM

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend!

We’ve talked about some pretty violent spirits so far. We’ve talked about how Volcano explosively interacts with the world and how Burning Plague punishes everything it comes across. Let’s take a break, chill out, and talk about a spirit that is all about the journey!  

Story  

Finder of Paths Unseen is a Spirit of ways and paths, travelers and journeys, places and boundaries. The paths they travel seem to exist in another realm that weaves through and around our world - or perhaps this is just a trick of perspective, and it’s simply our world interacted with in a different way. Regardless, Finder of Paths Unseen interacts with place and way and journey in ways even most Spirits cannot.  

They have good relations with the Dahan, some of whom are close enough to them to simply call them Pathmaker, rather than their more formal title-name. (Whether they “make” or “find” paths - or “uncover”, “open”, “enable”, or “empower” them - is something nobody can quite say; all those words are in good measure correct, but none of them exactly right.) Some older spirit-speakers acting as mentors or teachers will walk its paths with their students, reaching places on the far side of the island for an afternoon’s studies or conversation rather than having to make a trip of months or longer. This isn’t done trivially: the patterns that best please Pathmaker tend to be intricate and (from a human perspective) spread out piecemeal over miles, rather than a simple sketch scribed in beach-sand or ash. But given an excuse, they’re happy to help individuals and small groups; they may be enigmatic in some ways, but their nature is clearly not merely of paths, but of those paths’ travel (or forbiddance).  

Finder of Paths Unseen is also an occasional psychopomp, helping Dahan soulforms move on promptly to wherever / whatever happens next. (The Dahan have been told by Spirits that yes, when a human dies, a non-physical portion of them continues to exist, at least for a little while. Then it becomes absent - not destroyed, simply “no longer there” - which the Dahan interpret as something roughly like “go somewhere else”. A handful of Spirits can - and occasionally do - prey on those soulforms, should they encounter them, and a number of Dahan death customs originate from the desire to misdirect or deceive these Spirits, just in case.) The Dahan consider hummingbirds in general as potential helpers of Pathmaker: some spirits associated with them and their realm appear as such, and even the physical birds may have some connection.  

Design

The description on the back of Bringer of Dreams & Nightmares references, “…perhaps it’s a reflection of a self somewhere else entirely; the realm of the Pathmaker, or some strange road that borders it.” When I wrote that, I knew a little bit more than is explicitly mentioned in the text - Pathmaker was a Spirit with close ties to at least some Dahan (thus the shorter title, like Thunderspeaker), that walked some sort of otherspace - perhaps a place between dreams and reality, perhaps an interstitial place-between-places, perhaps an alternate realm where distance or geography or geometry worked differently. While it was friendly to humans, it had both a some amount of gravitas/seriousness and a certain air of mystery about it - or at least, about the otherspace through which it moved and brought others.  

The very first version of it had a wonderfully thematic but nearly-unplayable representation of its interstitial nature: its Presence didn’t go in lands, it went on a border between two lands. It could act as if it were in either, and things moved across its borders could come out of its other borders. While awesome, this really didn’t work well in practical play: Presence on land boundaries doesn’t look like it’s in a distinct place, it looks like it’s been jostled from one of the two adjacent lands. When it was on board boundaries tends to fall in if the boards shifted. And it was, in general, extremely hard to track.

It didn’t take many iterations to find some new things that worked really well thematically, and which in many ways are very close to how it ended up. However, it was ridiculously overpowered, to a degree that wasn’t evident at first because it didn’t tend to hurt the Invaders until late-game, if at all. Its journey has been one of repeated toning-down while trying not to eliminate the things that made it cool and interestingly distinctive.

Spirit Panel sneak peek

The Presence track is what grabs most people’s eye right off - what is that? Hitherto, most of the Presence tracks in Spirit Island have been two simple, separate lines, with the single exception of Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island. But there’s no reason they have to work that way: a Spirit could have 3 Presence tracks, or just 1, or two with interdependencies, or branches, or other arrangements. It’s not something every Spirit wants, of course; only 2 of the 12 in this Kickstarter have non-standard Presence layouts. (Though Stone’s Unyielding Defiance used to, long ago, and you’ll see echoes of that in how it turned out.) 

What are the rules for traversing more complex shapes? It depends on the Spirit. Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island’s panel tells you you need both preceding spaces clear to place from its joined-tracks central space. Finder of Paths Unseen, however, lets you place from spaces where any preceding space is empty. (And we’re playtesting to see if “go backwards” might be viable as well. If full freedom of transition is apropos for any Spirit, it’s Pathmaker.)

The rest of the panel isn’t as eye-catching, but does contain some important things. Not only can Finder of Paths Unseen place Presence at any range, it can - if needed - ignore Range altogether for an entire turn. (Whenever it would need to check a Range, it just doesn’t bother.) It can also make its lands adjacent, which is rarely useful for its own Powers, but can improve the reach - or Presence placement - of other Spirits immensely.

On the flip side, though, it is a significant thing for Finder of Paths Unseen to actually kill humans - each time it does, it destroys one of its own Presence. (Irrespective of whether it destroyed a single Explorer or an entire board; it’s the occurrence itself, not the number who die.) Having that happen a handful of times in a game certainly isn’t catastrophic, but it does mean “lots of small damaging Powers” is not usually a good course. 

One of its innate Powers lets it move beings between its lands; its other allows it to Isolate pairs of lands (put the player-reminder marker on the border between the two; thankfully, this works far better than putting Presence there). The former lets it clear out lands, the latter lets it keep them clear; Pathmaker’s game-plan nearly always involves concentrating the Invaders and/or setting up a “safe zone” where Explore actions miss lands. 

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It's been a long and winding trail, but we've reached the end of the update. Have a great day!