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Spirit Island

(Cooperative, board game, settler destruction, single player)

BUY NOW || BRANCH & CLAW || HORIZONS OF SPIRIT ISLAND|| JAGGED EARTH ||EXTRAS ||

 
 
 
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In the most distant reaches of the world, magic still exists, embodied by spirits of the land, of the sky, and of every natural thing. As the great powers of Europe stretch their colonial empires further and further, they will inevitably lay claim to a place where spirits still hold power - and when they do, the land itself will fight back alongside the islanders who live there.

Spirit Island is a cooperative settler-destruction strategy game designed by R. Eric Reuss and set in an alternate-history world around A.D. 1700. Players become different Spirits of the land, each with their own unique elemental powers, forced to defend their island home from colonizing Invaders spreading blight and destruction. Your Spirits work with the native Dahan to increase your power and drive the invading colonists from your island in this strategic area-control game.

 
 


Branch & Claw brings the Island back to life with new Spirits, new ways to fight Invaders, new Adversaries & Scenarios, and more Powers! This adds a judicious spice of uncertainty for experienced players as well as creating both opportunities and hard choices for the Spirits!

 

More Spirits answer the call to drive invaders off the island, but the invaders redouble their efforts. Can you stop them in time?

Branch and Claw includes:

  • Spirit - Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds: Spread throughout Spirit Island are pockets of deep wilderness, untouched by human hands. A few have a spirit of sanctity about them. The leaves there whisper words of forbiddance, of warnings, of wrath for those who trespass. The Dahan know how to listen, and stay well away. A few spirit-speakers claim that these wild-spirits (powerful as they are) are merely custodians and wardens for others more powerful, spirits of ancient trees and deep roots who wake neither frequently nor easily. Nobody much cares to test the truth of the matter.

  • Spirit - Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves: A predator-spirit of the jungles, a stalker and hunter of animal and human alike. Wherever it lives, savage beasts emerge to hunt, and the jungle grows dark and ominous. Sharp Fangs doesn’t bother talking with the Dahan. Sometimes it will hunt them, or run them off, but for the most part it ignores them. The Dahan’s legends tell of a time when Sharp Fangs hunted them more actively, until a pair of warriors — twins, sister and brother — drove it off with traps and guile, then turned the tables and hunted it down. Since then, it has seen the Dahan as not-entirely-prey, which, for it, is something akin to respect.

  • Adversary - the French Plantation colony: King Louis XIV, the longest ruling monarch in Europe, rules France with an iron fist but requires a constant stream of revenue to finance his wars on the continent. This Adversary combines the dynamics of rapid plantation (Town) development and 18th century French frontier exploration.

  • 52 new Major and Minor Power Cards, doing things no Powers have done before

  • New Powers and Spirits use four types of tokens to represent perils and hazards which hinder the Invaders. Beasts, Wilds, and Disease tokens are added to lands, and Strife is added to specific Invaders.

  • 15 new Fear Cards and 7 new Blight cards for added game-to-game variety

  • Four additional Scenarios offering new play experiences

  • A deck of Event Cards which bring the island to life, with Invaders, Dahan, and beasts acting on their own

 

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Horizons of Spirit Island expands the hit tabletop game with more Spirits and island boards to increase replayability and improve accessibility for newer players. It features all the content from the tabletop game of the same name, designed by R. Eric Reuss. The five new Spirits are designed to be ideal for those playing a Spirit Island game for the first time, and three new island boards allow for even more island combinations!

 

Horizons of Spirit Island includes:

  • Spirit - Devouring Teeth Lurk Underfoot: Long ago, the being which would become this Spirit was a small, territorial Spirit of the sand-by-water. It waited patiently for small prey to approach, then frightened them towards its waiting maw; when fresh prey was scarce it would scavenge. Most such Spirits stay tiny, but this one happened to take a bite out of Ember-Eyed Behemoth..

  • Spirit - Eyes Watch From the Trees: Even after centuries, the Dahan find many things about this Spirit somewhat enigmatic. It warns of danger, helps those lost or injured in the forest, and only works mischief on aggressors and the arrogant. Back in the days of the First Reckoning, its faint whispers were a source of dread, but to current generations they're a familiar and expected part of the island.

  • Spirit - Fathomless Mud of the Swamp: The Island has many swampy deltas along its coasts. Some are fairly navigatable, while others are mazes of murky water, tangled trees, and land that isn't nearly so solid as it appears. This Spirit is one of these latter sorts, with a penchant for spreading - it likes getting everywhere, slowly turning solid ground into muck and mire.

  • Spirit - Rising Heat of Stone and Sand: Even after centuries, this Spirit remains a bit unclear on why living things get so unhappy about fatal dessication, but the Dahan make such pleasant patterns across its sands that it's happy to forbear.

  • Spirit - Sun-Bright Whirlwind: A Spirit of sun-warmed and gusting air. It spins leaves and dust into miniature cyclones, playfully snatches at small unsecured objects, and sometimes - when joyful, or upset, or full of the vigor of nature - howls across the island, bending trees and abrading the landscape with pebbles, twigs, shells, and the occasional bird nest.

  • Island Boards: F, G, and H

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Jagged Earth includes:

  • Spirit - Stone's Unyielding Defiance: Some things refuse to break. Underneath the soil and sand of the island lies rock, layer upon layer built up over the ages. Some stones weather quickly once exposed to the elements, while others are sterner and harder. This is a Spirit of that stone which resists being shattered, moved, or shaped to the will of another. It’s not unfriendly to other Spirits or the Dahan, but it works with them on its own terms.

  • Spirit - Vengeance as a Burning Plague: A Spirit of vengeance, anger, and retribution. It slumbers in a simmering volcanic pool, awakening at unpredictable intervals… or when roused through supplication by one wronged. Most Dahan consider this foolhardy, for it vents its wrath on entire communities, and its pestilence may spread anywhere. It is unclear whether its recent waking is due directly to the ravaging of the Invaders or to some Spirit’s pleas.

  • Adversary - The Habsburg Monarchy (Livestock Colony): Emperor Joseph I inherited The Habsburg Monarchy upon the death of his father, Leopold I, shortly after the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession. Habsburg 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.

  • 57 new Major and Minor Power Cards with new game mechanics: Badlands tokens, Isolate, and pieces counting as other pieces.

  • 30 new Event Cards that more than double the size of the Event deck.

  • 2 new double-sided Island Boards (E & F and their thematic sides).

  • 6 new Fear Cards and 7 new Blight cards for added game-to-game variety.

  • Much more content and features coming in phases to follow! (See below for details).

    Further content will be released in 8 phases (contents & order subject to change based on development). No additional purchases will be required; when the game is updated with each phase, you will gain access to the new content with your existing purchase of Jagged Earth.

    Click here to read more!

Peril racks Spirit Island. The invaders are more numerous and more capable than ever before. As hope begins to fade, defense of the island falls to those spirits more in tune with the danger and chaos of the natural world. Will you be able to harness their power to protect the island or will it fall to the persistence of the invaders? Whatever the outcome, Spirit Island will never be the same after the time of Jagged Earth!

 

Or download from within your app!

 
 

Additional Spirits

 

Heart of the Wildfire

Innate Power Cards:

  • Flame's Fury

  • Threatening Flames

  • Asphyxiating Smoke

  • Flash Fires

Burning, blazing, rising, consuming - Heart of the Wildfire is quite fond of humans, in a general sense: they keep hearths and use fire as a tool all the time, and those sparks give birth to so many lovely conflagrations! It is the nature of Spirits to be true to what they are, so even though Wildfire knows on some level that too much fire is bad for the land, it just doesn't think about that aspect of things very much. It is also, after all, a spirit of renewal after the blaze, so it implicitly assumes that everything will regrow eventually. (Its strong ties to A Spread of Rampant Green probably contribute to this point of view.)

It fights the Invaders partly due to the exhortations of other Spirits, but more for the sake of the Dahan, as it's become clear that the Invaders have no compunctions about putting them to the sword. (The Dahan and it have a long and storied history together, beginning with the very first Dahan settlements.) It is also, it should be said, somewhat gleeful over the chance to really cut loose without the other Spirits getting all riled up and putting out its firestorms.

 
 

Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island

 

Innate Power Cards:

  • Elemental Aegis

  • Gift of Flowing Power

  • Gift of Primordial Deeps

  • Absorb Essence

Let's shift our sight so we see only spirits. There are throngs of them visible across the surface of the island: spirits of tree and glade, of rushing river and entangling vines, of beast and butterfly and mists floating eerily over the marshes.

Turning our vision downward, we see nearly as many within the land itself: spirits of hard unyielding stone and of drifted sand dunes, of sinkhole and high peak. Vital Strength of the Earth is here.

As we look deeper, fewer spirits greet our eyes - some of volcano, some of dark and ancient caves, a handful of others. But like the earth itself, most of those we see are large, powerful, and slow.

Deeper and larger than all of those lies the Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island. It could be argued that it is the Island, or at least its roots. Like all spirits of such size and power, it is slow beyond human reckoning. Unlike many of them, it is also asleep.

Or, now, mostly asleep. The distant sting of the Invaders' blight has begun to rouse portions of its consciousness towards waking, those fragments aware of the land's surface far above. Even that small aspect of the Serpent is slow to act, slow to awaken... but contains the potential for power greater than most spirits could ever muster.

The Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island is a high-complexity spirit. If Ocean's big limitation is "coastal" and Wildfire's is "blight", Serpent's is "waking up": it's a very slow spirit, limited in its development, but with the prospect of great power if it wakes up fully.