A major expansion to the award-winning cooperative settler-destruction strategy game!
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Take a look at one of Jagged Earth's most powerful Spirits!
about 6 years ago
– Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 12:54:23 AM
Good evening folks! We are just a few short days from this campaign coming to a close and we want to let you all know how much we appreciate your support!
Let’s kick this update off with something beautiful. Below is a video showing off the Broken Token Crate that was announced as an add-on item in Monday’s update.
We received a lot of comments and questions about the Crate and here are a few answers.
Is the Broken Token Crate future proofed?
No, the Crate is not future proofed because we do not know what items will be in future expansions.
Why should I get the Broken Token Crate?
The Crate allows you to hold the Box Insert without any lid lift issues. If you are concerned about lid lift but would like to store all of your current Spirit Island items together this is a good solution for you.
Does the Broken Token Box Insert still fit in the base game or Jagged Earth box?
Yes, the Box Insert will fit in either with lid lift.
Why is the Broken Token Crate price point $60?
The Broken Token uses a specific formula based on manufacturing time and material cost to determine the necessary price. Each lid contains 8 different colors of acrylics and it takes a significant amount of time to cut and assemble.
Is the Broken Token Crate different than the Broken Token Box Insert?
Yes, these are two separate products.
If you have any further questions please ask them in the comments below and we will respond as quickly as possible.
Now, to learn about a truly unique Spirit...
Starlight Seeks Its Form
Starlight Seeks Its Form
The natural world is not static, and neither are the Spirits. Individuals among them grow and change, both reflective-of and reflecting-into the parts of the world that they embody. Spirits can cease to exist, either slowly fading away, being severed from the vital life of nature, or through the cessation of portions of the world they cannot do without. They can transform, their nature fundamentally shifting. And new Spirits can come into being, either coalescing around the existing, or via the genesis of the new.
Usually, when Spirits arise, they embody or represent something right from the get-go. There is, however, something different and unusual about the light of stars. While there do certainly exist Spirits of the night and nighttime sky, when starlight itself falls to earth (common) and brings a Spirit (much rarer), that Spirit arises unattached to any facet of nature, other than a lingering and fading connection to the stars above. Over its first hours, months, years of its existence, it transforms, forming connections to local places and aspects of nature, becoming something altogether new.
Are the stars themselves immense Spirits, slower-moving than any on the island, but so powerful they create children from across the vast reach of sky? By the time starlight-Spirits understand this question being posed to them, they no longer remember whether it is true.
Starlight Seeks Its Form- back of Spirit Panel
Design
Back when I first made Spirit Island, the very first time I showed it to anyone, I simulated unique Spirits by grabbing a couple of Minor Powers from the deck for each player at game start. (I was working on more fundamental systems like “how do Powers work?” and “how do the Invaders act?”, and didn’t want to spend time on detailing unique Spirits until the mechanical ground they’d rest upon was a bit more solid.)
One of the players really liked this mix-and-match approach, and occasionally waxed hopeful about a build-your-own Spirit variant over the years. I poked at it as a Scenario, and as some rules variants, but it never really clicked.
But something I’ve always wanted to do is lean harder into Spirits that could choose their own future elemental course - you get a bit of this with Spirits that are low or entirely lacking in some element key to one of their innates, like Air for Ocean’s Hungry Grasp and Plant for Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island. Many more Spirits have had that sort of thing during early design, but such "potential futures" often get trimmed for complexity during development.
However, a Spirit specifically about that choice, which had one innate for each of the 8 elements? That could work. It just needed to be something that, while natural, wasn’t strongly tied to any specific elemental facet of the island. Starlight fit the bill well, while it’s a little bit pro-Moon and anti-Sun, some details of the innates let even that tile shine through.
Mechanically, I ended up pulling in various other ideas I’d had - other things one might do with Presence tracks, and what sort of Spirit might conceivably want to have more than 3 Growth choices - but those came on the scene after core seed of the idea.
(This is the second of two Spirits in Jagged Earth that a very early playtester has been hoping for for a very long time. Thanks, Jesse!)
The update for Fractured Days Split the Sky mentioned it was one of the most complex Spirits in this expansion; here's the Spirit panel for the other one. Don’t be intimidated!
Spirit Panel sneak peek
The usual caveat: Spirits are still in testing and may change before final printing
Starlight Seeks Its Form has a very high presentation-complexity due to its many choices, unfamiliar layout, and rules for Growth - but the Spirit’s actual play dynamics aren’t super-complex.
In addition to the usual 2 Energy/Plays tracks, it has 4 ultra-short Presence tracks (1 or 2 long) that open up new Growth choices. When you reach the end of such a track, you choose one of those two Growth choices to be available for the rest of the game, so you customize your Growth as you go.
There are also stars on your Presence tracks; each time you uncover one of them, you immediately set it to be an Element of your choice, using one of the new element markers - so you customize your elements as you go.
There’s one innate power per element - most of them fairly straightforward, and all of them requiring only that element. Your permanent elements and Power Card selections will determine which you can hit regularly. (Your starting Power Cards all grant Moon only, provide basic utility effects, and can turn themselves into new Power Cards in one way or another.)
These are balanced so there are a bunch of good paths - while it’s possible to make mistakes (choosing permanent elements that don’t synergize with your Power Cards, for instance), you’re not looking for a single right path, but to become something that will work in this game, in these circumstances. You don’t have total control - if you try and push in a direction that your Power Card draws don’t support, you’ll have a hard time - but there’s a lot of flexibility, narrowing further and further as the game goes on.
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An interesting and powerful Spirit indeed... Check back Friday for your next Spirit Island: Jagged Earth update!
A token of our appreciation!
about 6 years ago
– Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 12:53:31 AM
Good evening fellow humans! We apologize for our update being a bit later than usual, but we had a great reason!
As we near the end of our campaign, we want you to know that we heard you in the comments and messages asking for a container to hold all of your Spirit Island content and now thanks to The Broken Token we can present to you the Broken Token Crate!
Broken Token Crate
Broken Token Crate
This crate is made of ¼” birch wood and fits the Broken Token Box Insert inside of it! The lid is a unique acrylic element design and the engraved Spirit Island logo. It can contain everything that exists in the world of Spirit Island so far AND everything that is being added in this campaign!
Spirit Island: Branch & Claw
First Promo Spirit Pack
Spirit Island: Jagged Earth
Spirit Island (core game)
Premium Wooden Token Pack
Second Promo Spirit Pack
Revised Broken Token Box Insert
In addition to this awesome crate, The Broken Token has revised their box insert!
Broken Token Box Insert (revised)
Changes include:
Reworking the Invader tray, Dahan tray, and Energy Token tray into more trays to allow for spreading pieces across both ends of the table
Moving the blight into the set-up tray with the Invader Deck and other set up cards
An added Fear tray that includes Phase Order so that it can be set directly on the Invader Board for ease of organizing fear tokens and generated fear tokens.
Premium Token Pack
Premium Token Pack
Please note: the purple of the fear tokens will be changing to better match the print tokens and the Badlands tokens are not shown in this picture as we're updating them to reflect the newest iteration of the iconography.
This pack includes:
36 1-Energy Tokens
18 3-Energy Tokens
30 Fear Tokens
35 Beast Tokens
30 Disease Tokens
22 Strife Tokens
22 Wilds Tokens
25 Badlands Tokens
These token packs contain the correct number of tokens to play a 6 player game of Spirit Island and also allow you to integrate with both Jagged Earth and Branch & Claw.
How do I add these items to my pledge?
If you would like to add any of the items mentioned above (Broken Token Crate, Broken Token Box Insert or Premium Token Pack) to your order, simply log into Kickstarter and adjust your pledge according to the amounts below, which can also be found in the add-on section of the campaign. You will be able to indicate which items you would like on BackerKit after the campaign.
Add-On Items
If you have not pledged yet, you might also choose to back at the new highest pledge level “Protector of the Island”. It includes:
A Timely Update
about 6 years ago
– Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 12:12:49 AM
Good morning everyone! We're heading into the weekend, so let's spend some time talking about Fractured Days Split the Sky, one of the most complex spirits in Jagged Earth!
Fractured Days Split the Sky
Story
Spirits do not perceive time as humans do - see the recent update about Shifting Memory of Ages for one example - but there is still a certain orderliness to it. Days follow nights follow days, seasons follow seasons, years follow years, and if some events are unmoored in exactly when they happened, it is more that the structure is looser than human minds conceive, not that it lacks structure at all.
Fractured Days Split the Sky is a hammerblow to that structure, the periodic collision of sun and moon overhead. Or it might be the edges of Time, where the usual order cracks and splinters into pieces hanging out over the void. Or perhaps it is simply the eclipse itself, which by virtue of its nature wears Time around itself like a jagged cloak - few Spirits and no humans have the discernment to distinguish between these stories, and in the nature of Spirits and stories, they may all be true and untrue at the same time.
What is certain is that on Spirit Island, when a solar eclipse darkens the sky, fragmentary visions of past and future and present may appear in the air, ghostly but clear. Frequently, the visions are not of the past or future or present that those witnessing it know.
(Fractured Days Split the Sky is not, for the most part, a spirit of visions - these sights that swirl around it carry no unusual wisdom or import, and may be irrelevant - or outright deceptive - to the past-present-future in which the observer exists. If it focuses, it can feel out which fragments of future correspond to a particular present, but the very act of doing so tends to jostle the future about and make it less certain.)
It is a celestial Spirit, somewhat remote and not especially accessible the way that, say, a river-spirit or earth-spirit can be. It's capable of piecing together a humanoid puppet-form if it wishes to communicate with the strange scurrying upright-animal-things far below, but even this form made expressly for contact with humans is difficult for spirit-speakers to interact with; it conveys jumbles of sensory impressions from moments that never actually happened, or haven’t happened yet, a little bit like a modern human might piece together a paragraph by cutting out words from newspaper articles.
But celestial or not, it is connected to Spirit Island by ancient ties between land and sky. Both the island and this connection are threatened by the Invaders, so if an eclipse has happened recently enough for it to be present in strength, it will resist.
Design
Fractured Days Split the Sky was the first entirely new Spirit (i.e., not a follow-on to an unpublished one from Branch & Claw) that I started working on for Jagged Earth - before I had any idea I’d be able to publish more Spirits, before even production of the base game!
As many of you know, the original Spirit Island Kickstarter took rather longer than anticipated to fulfill. Around February of 2017 - when it was already 6 months late, and hadn’t been sent to the printer yet - I noodled around with the idea of making a time-based Spirit. My thought was that if it happened to come together super-quickly, maybe Adam could slam out some art for it and we could make it a PnP as an apology for the delay, or something.
As things turned out, the Spirit didn’t come together quickly at all - by the time Spirit Island was shipping to backers, it was still pretty broken - so the matter was kind of moot. But the concept had proven to be really fun for those who enjoyed that sort of thing, so rather than dropping the idea I just kept working on it for Jagged Earth.
(I should note that I have a soft spot for temporal shenanigans. Happily, I am apparently not alone in this.)
Spirit Panel sneak peek
(The usual caveat: Spirits are still in testing and may change before final printing.)
Fractured Days Split the Sky can gain Time through any of its 3 Growth choices. (Which very loosely represent it drawing upon its Past to reclaim, its Alternate-Present to be elsewhere / acquire untaken Powers, and its Future to access size and unoccupied attention.) Each Time gained pulls a Presence off the tracks; while it is flush with Time, it can access the Energy and Card Plays of a near-future self. If all it did was hoard Time, though, it wouldn't be terribly interesting. 3 of its 4 Unique Powers require 1 or more Time to use; the remaining card and its first Innate Power can be Repeated to some degree by spending Time. It has more ways to spend Time than to gain it, forcing strategic decisions of what to spend it on - or whether to save it for a future turn and reap the Presence-track benefits in the meantime.
Slip the Flow of time - its first innate - is a good example of this. If you hit just one level (pretty easy), the target Spirit gets one of the following benefits: use a Slow power now, reclaim 1 card from play or discard, play a power card by paying its cost. These are all nice effects, but will need to be situationally good in order to justify spending Time on Repeating the innate power. However, if you can hit all three levels - not easy, but not impossible - the target Spirit gets to use all 3 benefits in order, which can allow, e.g.: use a Slow power, Reclaim it, then play it again - getting a bonus Fast use out of a Power Card by paying its Energy cost. That's worth spending Time to Repeat a lot more often.
(The pieces of Slip the Flow of Time can be used in other ways, too. It's versatile, and extremely potent when wielded well.)
As the conflict opens, Fractured Days Split the Sky is quite powerful within its bailiwick (time), but useless at destroying Invaders or pushing them around. (It doesn't have the precision-control to do something like "make all the Invaders grow old and die where they stand"; its touch on the world comes in broader strokes than that.) It falls most easily into a support role, helping keep the Invaders in check while amping up other Spirits' more pinpoint abilities. However, it's entirely capable of branching out into devastation or defense of its own; two of its three Growth choices give it a Power Card, and while it doesn't get a whole lot of Energy or Card Plays from its Presence tracks, its Growth gives it a lot of flexibility. Setting up a turn where you clobber the board with a single Major Power 2-4 times can be tricky, but the payoff is worthwhile.
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Finally, I wanted to talk a bit about avatars! I know that some of you have been asking about Spirit Island avatars, so here you go! Now you can represent any of the spirits!
We’ll be back on Monday!
Explore the knowledge that lives within Shifting Memory of Ages
about 6 years ago
– Thu, Nov 08, 2018 at 12:50:17 AM
Hello humans!
Below we have a very detailed summary of Shifting Memory of Ages crafted with love and care by Eric, but before we get into that I would like to welcome you to the last 10 days of the Spirit Island: Jagged Earth campaign!
Shifting Memory of Ages
Shifting Memory of Ages
Shifting Memory of Ages
Shifting Memory of Ages has been a Spirit of many things over the eons: they are both a Spirit of self-change and of self-memory. To understand the source of this tension within them, you must understand something of the nature of Spirits.
The larger and more powerful a Spirit is, the slower the timeframe in which they act: the tiny Spirits of leaf and dewdrop are nearly impossible to communicate with, as a single day for a human is a long eternity to them. (And their knowledge of the world is extremely localized, though still intricate within its bounds.) Most Spirits the Dahan deal with regularly are a touch larger: the Spirit of a single path, of a small glade, of a riverside pool. Not all such places have/are Spirits, but neither are they are especially rare. These Spirits are still fast-minded enough that they may seem somewhat flighty or forgetful to humans, but they will respond to a call, a dance, a pattern, a song.
Spirits who perceive the world on a timescale similar to humans are a bit larger, a bit less common, stay a bit more removed from humanity on average - and the correlation continues, all the way up to Spirits so vast that they could make the Invaders vanish with a thought… but might erase the island in the process, and in any event by the time they acted, they would be far, far too late, as they measure millennia with their breath.
(The Spirits you play start the game in a sweet-spot of “small enough to act on human timescales, large enough to impact the Invasion”. The slowdown that comes with growth is not instantaneous - more like an accumulation of drag over time - so you’re able to ramp up to a combination of speed and potency that Spirits don’t normally exhibit except during the process of such a change.)
Shifting Memory of Ages is an ancient Spirit that has always loved learning, and growing, and understanding. Long eons before humans, they grew to a great ascendancy of power and knowledge. With that greatness, they stopped perceiving the world on the scale of sunrise and sunset, instead of resonating to the deeper rhythms of seasons, of years, of weather-cycles and climate and tectonics…
…and they found that they missed what they had been. Not that they desired ignorance, but they wanted to be able to bask in the slow and perfect glory of a sunset; to hear how the river sounds during different types of rainfall; to watch the antics of this animal or that growing up as an individual rather than perceiving a new generation every time they blinked. They wanted a certain experience of the world that was incompatible with what they had become.
So they changed. They carefully identified, located and protected those parts of themselves that were most core to their being, then slowly let go of everything else: ties to the land, modes of thinking and being, a billion treasured memories, and more. They made themselves small so that they might see the world with young eyes once again.
(This is not a usual thing. Spirits may become diffuse or fade or may shrink as the thing-they-are diminishes in some way, but those which grow-and-diminish cyclically generally do so on a much smaller scale.)
Shifting Memory of Ages found existence different the second time around: they retained aspects of understanding they hadn’t had during their first nascency, learned new things, and grew in different directions (despite the occasional feeling of strange familiarity and ease when they re-discovered something that resonated with their prior self). But their core aims were realized, and they rejoiced in seeing the world with fresh eyes! Since then, they have risen to ascendancy over and over, followed each time by this deliberate forgetting-of-self, a return to beginnings with a mostly - but not entirely - blank slate.
The threat posed by the Invaders has caused Shifting Memory of Ages to accelerate their cycle, progressing along half-familiar paths of power more quickly than they otherwise would. If victory is achieved, they can pause and diminish once more, after making sure that the lessons of the conflict are remembered by some on the island.
Design
Shifting Memory of Ages sprang from the question, “What Spirit could gain Major Powers without Forgetting?”, though along the way it acquired a life of its own; its personality and view of the world arose organically (and slightly unexpectedly) during design, which was a pleasant surprise-of-discovery.
It was originally designed as a Low complexity Spirit, extremely straightforward, though for a brief time it was the only Low-complexity spirit with two innate powers (both very simple). However, there were places where portions of its theme - in particular, its observation of the world - had trouble coming through. I’d tried out an idea for it that worked great but definitely pushed the Spirit up into Moderate complexity.
Then it arose that having no Low-complexity Spirits would be AOK (see Update #6 - for more on this), and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Let’s take a look:
Spirit Panel sneak peek
The usual caveat: Spirits are still in testing and may change before final printing.
Shifting Memory of Ages is a bit slower (fewer Plays) than most other Spirits of its size; a mild legacy of its repeated rise to great power. Of course, it gets that +9 Energy growth choice for similar reasons, so it’s not all downside.
Even better, that legacy gives it a certain affinity for great power, and it’s practiced at changing and remembering and forgetting in a very deliberate sort of way: when it would Forget a Power Card from its hand, it can instead discard it. Shifting Memory of Ages is perhaps the one Spirit out there for whom taking a Major Power on Turn 1 isn’t an aggressive play! It has to wait a bit to accumulate the Energy necessary to play anything costly, but just knowing what elements it might be looking for is tremendously helpful.
This is in large part due to its second Innate Power, Observe the Ever-Changing World, which lets it store element tokens; each token grants 1 of that element for a single use of a Power (and is then discarded). The structure of this innate represents Shifting Memory of Age’s propensity to watch the world, and the stored elements represent the insights it gains from those observations (some directly, some flashes from its past cycles). They let it hit Major Thresholds despite having few card plays, and possibly without even having any other Power Cards with the needed elements at all! (Though this tends to take a fair bit of preparation.)
The rest of its Spirit Panel is pretty straightforward; it’s towards the lower end of Moderate complexity. I’ve seen some speculation online that it might mess with the Invaders’ memory, but that’s not really within its bailiwick - its Unique Power cards are a modest spread of utility effects that don’t interact with the board much (at this moment, two of them target Spirits). At the start of play, Shifting Memory of Ages is a Spirit that watches and discusses the world far more than one which acts upon it… but that changes swiftly, and powerfully.
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What a gentle giant! Check back on Friday to learn about another awesome Spirit!
A Very Tricky Update
about 6 years ago
– Mon, Nov 05, 2018 at 11:51:26 PM
Everyone loves a trickster! Especially one that won't stop smiling!
Grinning Trickster Stirs Up Trouble
Story
Trickery, misdirection, and curiosity are all common in nature, and so there are Spirits which partake of those things to a greater or lesser extent. The urge to try things for onesself and a “let’s poke the anthill and see what will happen!” attitude also exist in nature... and are particularly prevalent among humans. The being now known as Grinning Trickster Stirs Up Trouble was one of those Spirits who found the arrival of the Dahan fascinating, and over many centuries its nature has shifted somewhat in response.
It’s generally friendly, and fairly congenial - but even in the days before it became infamous, the Dahan learned that “friendly” was no guarantee that it wouldn’t, say, hide a tiger inside your house. Not out of any malice, but because it would be fun to see how the whole ridiculous (and incidentally deadly) situation would unfold.
It became infamous by touching off the Second Reckoning, the second great clash between Dahan and Spirits. It did this by telling the absolute truth in the worst manner possible, throwing the (admittedly already tense) situation straight into outright conflict. Nobody is quite sure whether it intended such a huge blow-up; it claims not to remember.)
It’s been involved in all sorts of adventures and misadventures since - its life is nothing if not eventful - but nothing quite so large-scale as the arrival of the Invaders! (Well, except for that time with the cave? And maybe that other thing with the Sky Serpent. Or…)
Design
In the original Kickstarter for Spirit Island, there were two stretch-goal Spirits that didn’t get reached; one of them was Trickster - or rather, an earlier version of Trickster. This earlier iteration involved a bit of Strife, but was even more of a jack-of-all-trades; it Forgot a Power Card every time it Reclaimed, which gave it a huge incentive to put off Reclaiming for as long as possible and amass an immense hand of Minor Powers. It also had some other dynamics, all of which combined to make a Spirit with a huge skill-level gap: most testers found it woefully underpowered, while those few most practiced with it were, by mid-game, nearly as effective as 2 full other Spirits.
I found a few ways to tone that skill-gap down, and the Spirit worked, but wasn’t quite what I was looking for. So Trickster’s gone through some changes, though if you compared a 2015 version and a 2018 version side-by-side you’d probably see as much similar as different.
Spirit Panel sneak peek
The usual caveat: Spirits are still in testing and may change before final printing. Those of you who saw the GenCon preview may note differences!
Grinning Trickster Stirs Up Trouble excels at using Strife, but won’t be able to do so with much regularity at first - its early turns can be a bit constrained, but by the time it gets 5-6 Presence on the board it turns into a force to be reckoned with. During the early game, it ideally wants those middle two Growth options every turn, but it will need to take the +Energy or Reclaim from time to time.
It benefits greatly from a “well, let’s see what we can do” mindset, both in some obvious ways and in some less obvious ones: keeping a Power Card from the 2nd level of Let’s See What Will Happen staves off its need to reclaim (if it Forgets from discard/play) and gives it an Energy (which tends to be tight in early game). However, this means some of its Power Card gains are essentially random, and it’s up to the player to figure out how to use them effectively... once, at least, as they can always be Forgotten themselves in turn.
Players who want perfect control aren’t likely to to gravitate to Trickster. However, while the Spirit can make long-term planning tricky in its own distinctive ways, it still offers plenty of opportunities for thoughtful and clever play!
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That’s quite enough about the Trickster. That smile is really starting to creep me out. We’ll be back Wednesday to talk about a much different spirit!
