Spirit Island Review
In almost every euro-game produced in the last twenty years, you play a polite, sensibly dressed European person who arrives in a new land to build houses and trade cubes of spices. Spirit Island, designed by R. Eric Reuss and published by Greater Than Games, looks at that premise and says, “Absolutely not.”
You are an incredibly angry, heavily armed elemental god. Your sole, aggressive objective is to completely obliterate those little wooden colonists before they build too many towns on your pristine beaches. It is arguably the greatest thematic subversion in modern board gaming, and it is a brain-meltingly brilliant cooperative puzzle. It’s like being the CEO of a tropical paradise and discovering a group of uninvited tourists is trying to build a shopping mall in your sacred grove.
The Elemental Vengeance
The sense of progression is staggering. You start as a relatively weak, highly specialized entity. Perhaps you are the Shadows Flicker Like Flame, capable of making the invaders slightly nervous. Or maybe you are the River Surges in Sunlight, capable of aggressively splashing people into the next territory. You feel inherently overwhelmed by the sheer, terrifying wave of plastic invaders.
The tension is incredibly high! You are constantly holding off absolute catastrophe by a single elemental symbol. And then, roughly two hours in, you inevitably hit the turning point. You unlock a major power card. The board starts to synergize. You stop being a mild inconvenience and transform into an actual physical nightmare. You play a card that literally rips the earth apart, drowning enemy cities and scattering their pathetic plastic explorers into the sea.
Suitability: Family vs. Friends
Family Sessions
Is this a calm cooperative experience for the whole family? No! It is practically impenetrable for a casual audience. The cognitive load required to calculate invader ravage phases while simultaneously planning exactly how many fast and slow powers you need three turns in advance will cause Auntie Susan’s actual head to explode. It’s as suitable for a lighthearted Sunday afternoon as a lecture on advanced calculus.
Hardcore Gamers
This is for the hardcore cooperative enthusiasts. It completely eradicates the 'alpha gamer' problem simply by being so mathematically complex that no single human being can possibly dictate everyone else's turns. Incredibly deep, hyper-asymmetric spirits play completely differently every time. Tracking invader phases correctly requires intense concentration, but the payoff of orchestrating a late-game power scaling is single-handedly the most satisfying experience in a cardboard box.
Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Ultimate antidote to quarterbacking/alpha-gamers in cooperative games. | Explaining Fast vs Slow powers breaks most people's brains. |
Incredibly deep, hyper-asymmetric spirits with endless replayability. | The first few rounds feel overwhelmingly, depressingly punishing. |
Thematically dripping with aggressive environmental vengeance. | Tracking invader phases requires intense, error-prone concentration. |
Final Thoughts
Spirit Island is quite simply the pinnacle of heavy cooperative gaming. It is brain-burning, utterly unique, and provides single-handedly the most satisfying late-game power scaling you will ever experience.
Final Verdict: Buy it yourself. It is quite simply the pinnacle of heavy cooperative gaming. It is brain-burning, utterly unique, and provides single-handedly the most satisfying late-game power scaling you will ever experience in a cardboard box.
