Spirit Island

Each round you fan out your spirit's hand of power cards (typically 4 in hand drawn from a personal deck of ~7-13, expanding via Growth), choose which to play this turn, and pay their energy cost from a small pool (starting around 1-2 energy/turn, scaling up). The repeated physical action is reading icon-dense cards, picking elemental combinations to trigger innate threshold powers, then placing presence discs onto contested island regions on a modular four-board map. The cadence is deliberate and conferring: Spirit Island is a co-op, so the table talks through plays before commitment, and the tactile feedback is watching invader pieces (explorers, towns, cities) get pushed, damaged, or destroyed by your slow- and fast-resolving powers.

A turn proceeds: Spirit Phase (each spirit picks one Growth option — reclaim cards, gain power, place presence — then collects energy and pays to play power cards face-up), Fast Power Phase (resolve fast-speed powers and innate thresholds before invaders act), Invader Phase (Ravage in lands flagged from last turn — invaders deal damage, blight is added, dahan fight back; Build in lands flagged this turn — towns/cities are added; Explore in lands matching the freshly drawn invader card — explorers seed new lands), Slow Power Phase (resolve slow-speed effects after damage), then Time Passes (cleanup). Three escalating blight pools, an advancing fear track, and a depleting invader deck (~12 cards) drive the clock. You win immediately by clearing all invader pieces from the island, or sooner once the fear track unlocks softer victory conditions (terrify them off even from cities). You lose if any spirit is destroyed, the blight pool empties, or the invader deck runs out before victory.

The interlocking choices each turn are which 2-3 power cards to play (each card has a speed, energy cost, range, target restriction, and elemental tags), which Growth option to take (broader board presence vs. more cards in deck vs. card recovery), and crucially how to coordinate with co-op partners since your reach is geographically limited and invader pressure compounds. Tradeoffs are short-term board-saves vs. long-term engine growth; spending energy now vs. saving for big late-game cards; and feeding your innate elemental thresholds (e.g., needing 3 fire + 2 air to trigger a free major effect) vs. just playing the most useful raw ability. The option space at a typical mid-game turn is large — perhaps 20-50 reasonable card-and-target combinations — and what makes a 'good move' hard is that the invader card flip determines which lands ravage and explore, so plays must hedge across two or three threatened regions simultaneously.

The dominant skill is multi-turn forecasting under semi-predictable threat: you must read the invader board (build lands → ravage next turn) and plan two turns ahead because slow powers don't fire until after damage. Second is co-op coordination and negotiation — Spirit Island lives or dies on table talk, with strong players allocating geography and elemental support roles. Third is opportunity-cost reading on power cards: knowing which card is worth its energy this turn vs. cycling for a better hand via Growth. Memory and arithmetic are light; pattern recognition (which adversary archetype, which spirit synergies) is heavy. Strong players don't tunnel-vision their own spirit — they sculpt the global board state with everyone's powers as a single instrument.

Be a primal nature spirit defending your island home from European colonizers — you are the storm, the swamp, the river. Push back the invaders before they ravage your land and break your kin.

Lush, painterly nature-fantasy by a team led by Jason Behnke with Loïc Berger, Cari Corene, Adam Rebottaro, Joshua Wright and others. Each spirit gets a distinct illustration vocabulary (e.g., River Surges in Sunlight is luminous gold-green; Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares is unsettling indigo). Designer R. Eric Reuss deliberately made invader pieces white to subvert color-coded morality; the overall direction reads as folk-mythic rather than tolkienesque, with a global indigenous-cosmology palette.