How to get started?

[Mr W]

I really want to like this game since it seems like something I'd love, but every time I start a new game I just draw a blank as to what to do. Can someone give me some tips as to what I should be doing.

[Treyell]

look at what the invaders are doing and try to interact with that. you want to stop builds and ravages by moving, destroying and defending

[Songbird]

The game requires you to balance solving problems now and scaling to solve bigger problems later.

Small problems are things like single explorers who are about to build in lands with no other pieces. Let's look at the ways to deal with this. Note that the tutorial takes you through several of these.

1) Right after the invader phase where the explorer appeared, use a slow power to destroy the explorer (i.e. you played the power not knowing where the explore would be, then pick this as the best use of that power.)
2) Right after the invader phase where the explorer appeared, use a slow power to push or gather it out of the land, so the land does not build next turn.
3) Use a fast power to destroy the explorer before it builds.
4) Use a fast power to push or gather the explorer out of the land before it builds.
5) Use a fast power that prevents invaders from building in the target land before the town is built.
6) Use a slow power to destroy the town the explorer builds after it is built, since the explorer alone will not blight the land or kill Dahan (or just destroy the explorer along with the town).
7) Use a slow power to push or gather the town the explorer builds after it is built.
8) Before the land ravages, destroy the town with a fast power.
9) Before the land ravages, push or gather out the town with a fast power.
10) Before the land ravages, use a Defend power on the land (at least Defend 2 would be needed here).
11) Before (or when) the land ravages, use a ravage skip on the land.
12) Do not deal with it.
13) Play a slow power to remove the blight after it comes down.

All of these are valid, but different options are available to different spirits and have different costs associated with them and different outcomes. For example, 7, 9, and 11 will leave the board with one additional town on it. 10 and 12 do as well unless Dahan are present in the land (and at least one survives, in the case of 12). 8 tends to be a difficult effect to access. 11 is generally only available for a high cost, as is 5 (in the base game, at least). Note that 12 produces a blight as an outcome, but also requires exactly zero player actions to achieve and thus may still be valid in some situations. 13 makes no forward progress in the game at all, but also stalls the main loss condition even if the invaders ravage for infinity damage. In general, there is a trend: the earlier you interrupt this explore > build > ravage chain, the more accessible or cheaper the effect. (Defend is a bit of an exception: it's quite cheap and accessible in the minor power deck. But unless Dahan destroy buildings in a counterattack, the invaders will gain more of a foothold until this defense stops working.) In fact, the best option of all is option 0: the explorer never exists, because the invaders tried to explore a terrain with no adjacent buildings or ocean, in which case exactly zero action is required to solve the nonexistent problem. But this isn't easily achieved early on.

The other half is scaling so that you can solve larger problems. For example, cities cannot be pushed or gathered by any effects in the base game, so you generally must muster up three damage or a counterattack from at least two Dahan to destroy them. This is not particularly difficult, but it's not trivial, either. But it is likely that you will not be able to stop every city from being built all game, especially at higher difficulties, and thus you will eventually need ways to deal with lands with several towns and/or cities. Spirit Island is a game that intentionally starts the player off too weak to keep up, so you must place presence and get stronger until you outscale the game. For most spirits, this means trying to delay the "reclaim all" growth option, since it massively reduces your scaling for that turn.

There are, broadly speaking, two styles of scaling that allow you to deal with these larger problems. The first style is to unlock as many card plays as possible and the minimum energy needed to play them, draft several minor powers with the elements necessary to achieve the highest thresholds of your spirit's innate power(s), and use those to clean up the board. Not every spirit can do this: River, Lightning, and Thunderspeaker can, but the other spirits either cannot actually destroy buildings effectively with their innate powers, or have limitations that prevent them from doing it well enough (e.g. Shadows' innate is too hard to max out enough times during the game to win, Ocean's cannot affect inland lands, Green's doesn't do enough damage to make forward progress.) Spirits from outside of the base game tend to be better at this style of play, though.

The other style of scaling is by acquiring major powers and enough energy to play them. This does not mean only growing for energy, but getting more energy than you would otherwise. Because major powers do not increase your total number of cards when you draft them, you need to be careful with your hand management and finding turns when you don't play the same major so you can still place presence (or draft more cards, in the case of Vital Strength of the Earth), or you can get stuck in a loop where you are not growing stronger. It is more important to scale and reach your lategame power than it is to prevent taking any blight early on, because it's the difference between the lategame being trivial or impossible; however, you are intended to at least slow the invaders early so you are not required to clean up the entire island at once later on.

Your strategy should include a mix of using your unique powers, special rule(s), weaker tiers of your innate power(s), and minor powers to address small problems in the early game in a way that is suited to your spirit and drafted powers, while growing strategically to achieve your late-game scaling goals.

For example, River Surges in Sunlight generally uses a mix of options 2 (Wash Away, first tier of Massive Flooding), 3 (Flash Floods), 7 (Wash Away, first tier of Massive Flooding), and 12, while it grows as quickly as possible to reach 4 or 5 card plays, since it needs a minimum of 4 plays to achieve the highest threshold of Massive Flooding. It can then use Massive Flooding to destroy all Invaders in a single land each turn (or leave cities 1 damage short of destruction, which can be supplied by another power.) This means that it can play the whole game by pushing as many towns as possible into one or two lands, with the knowledge that they will not take additional effort to destroy later. River's Bounty is used to generate enough energy for itself, so it does not need to rely on the energy track, and Boon of Vigor supports other spirits with vast amounts of energy, allowing them to also grow for more plays and less energy.

On the other hand, Vital Strength of the Earth cannot use its innate power to win the game on its own, and it has a very good energy track, so it is likely to try to draft major powers fairly often. However, because it does not draft a card when it reclaims, it may also wish to draft some minor powers so that it gets a larger, cheaper hand and can be more flexible during the game. Earth can solve smaller problems early on with options 2 (Draw of the Fruitful Earth), 6 (Rituals of Destruction), 10 (special rule, Guard the Healing Land), 5 and 11 (A Year of Perfect Stillness). Because A Year of Perfect Stillness and Guard the Healing Land cost 3 energy (as much as a major power that can cause vast amounts of destruction) but generally do a very poor job of moving towards clearing the invaders from the island or generating the fear needed to win, Earth would prefer to reserve them for when it will get more value out of them than preventing one blight, and may choose to forget them for major powers early on if it is unlikely to desperately need them.

Every spirit plays differently and requires reading through all their powers and special rules to understand their game plan. When you introduce adversaries (which I personally recommend doing as soon as you feel like you understand the game mechanics), they will change the effectiveness of different strategies and require you to counterplay the specific ways they will try to win.

If you really get stuck, there are lots of guides and discussions on BoardGameGeek, Youtube, and the Spirit Island Second Wave Discord.

[Mr W]

Thank you

[Ryptahi]

Kalen Noreth in youtube made very very good videos that got me started even when i felt frustrated at the game. His basic strategy videos are really good. Here is one. You will learn a lot what to look for and how to think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW3LV-fp16g

[ulzgoroth]

The digital game has a helpful button in the middle of the right side which shows you what the invaders are going to do in their phase of the current turn. Simply preparing for or countering all of those things makes for an elementary strategy that will probably work well enough for you to get more feel for things. And win low-difficulty games if you pick easy-to-handle spirits.