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Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate

Created by Greater Than Games

The next expansion of the award winning settler destruction game, Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate brings the fight to the Invaders with new spirits, mechanics, and more.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Spirit Reveal: Ember-Eyed Behemoth
over 1 year ago – Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 08:16:46 AM

Good morning, everyone! You just keep on delivering and we can’t be more thankful for it! We’ve reached our first achievement of 5,300 backers to bring on the first update! You continue to shock and humble us and we cannot be more grateful. 

To answer some questions about how things are working with updates, Achievements, and more, here is some explanation.

Though BackerKit has been around in the world of crowdfunding for many years (Greater Than Games has been using them since 2016, in fact), they just got into the front-end business, with a select few campaigns going live on their platform this year. We have always been excited about innovation in this field, and we're eager to make Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate happen here rather than any other platform. BackerKit is hard at work extending and improving upon the framework they’ve set up here, and we’re excited to be a part of it! When they asked us if we’d be interested in helping them test out their new Achievements feature, we incorporated it into the scheduled update structure. So! We still have all the same updates planned and written; there will be a lot of exciting reveals over the course of this campaign, we promise!

Achievements are set by BackerKit, based on the rate of people backing this campaign. Achievements cannot automatically post updates, so our plan is to post an update between 10 and 10:30 AM Central time the weekday after an Achievement has been reached. Like this update, in fact!

Finally, as promised by the most recent Achievement, here are the details on the first Incarna Spirit: Ember-Eyed Behemoth. Most of this was written by our beloved R. Eric Reuss, but the development team has also provided great notes as well! You’ll see a team member credited with their section after Eric’s wonderful words. Oh, and stick around to the end to learn about an Event card, as well!

Story


Spirit Island has innumerable hills, crags, ridges, and mountains. A fair number of them have Spirits - or more precisely, are Spirits: the natural feature and the Spirit are the same thing. And over time, some of those Spirits have grown to encompass more places than the natural feature from which they first arose, just as the Spirits you play in Spirit Island spread Presence across the land, growing greater than they began.

However, most of those innumerable hills, crags, and mountains - even the ones with Spirits - don’t get up and walk around.

Ember-Eyed Behemoth is one of the exceptions, and one to be careful of. Most of the time, it chills out in the wetlands, letting the water wash over it and nourish the plants that grow upon it. But if it’s angered, it rouses and goes on a rampage across the land, smashing anything that annoys it.

(The Dahan term translated as “Behemoth” means something like “Moving-Mountain”, though with “Mountain” specifically referring to “verdant rise supporting plant life”, not “lifeless crag of rock”. While Dahan will often use longer names for dangerous Spirits in order to be more formal and avoid antagonizing them, they don’t bother here: when it’s relaxed, it doesn’t really care if you’re formal, and when it’s rampaging, it’s not even listening to you anyway.)

Devouring Teeth Lurk Underfoot (from Horizons of Spirit Island) is a partial child of Ember-Eyed Behemoth, as referenced in its lore - which may seem something of a trick, given that Devouring Teeth is on a different islet from where Behemoth’s Incarna currently resides! But any Spirit with long enough reach can usually find a way to cross such a stretch of distance, so long as there are no metaphysical obstacles, and Ember-Eyed Behemoth certainly isn’t one to be stopped by a bit of ocean. (In game terms, either Spirit could cross to another islet in an Archipelago, as all playable Spirits can.)

Incarna Spirits!


Ember-Eyed Behemoth is an Incarna Spirit - one of four in this expansion. What does that mean?

Thematically: While most Spirits have (or can manifest) physical forms, these are most often transient (existing only for as long as is convenient for the Spirit) or embodiments of nature (a physical feature of the land, such as a river, mountain, or leaf). Some Spirits, however, have an unusually tangled locus of attention and power called an Incarna. An Incarna Spirit may exist (i.e., have Presence) across a wide stretch of physical space, but it is more focused around a single fragment of itself than most Spirits of similar size and scope tend to be.

Mechanically: an Incarna is a new sort of piece, a punchboard piece specific to that Spirit. While on the island, it may always count as that Spirit’s Presence – though you may choose otherwise, for instance, to avoid being destroyed by added Blight (Incarna are very resilient). If your Incarna leaves the island, it is set to the side of your Spirit Panel and can only be re-added by something that specifically adds your Incarna back to the island. (This is easier for some Spirits than others.)

Some Incarna - including Behemoth’s - can be Empowered (made permanently more powerful), indicated by flipping the piece over. Exactly what this does will depend on the Spirit! Whether to aim for Empowering an Incarna is intended to be an interesting strategic choice: against some Adversaries and in some board situations it may be amazingly useful, but in others it may not be worth bothering with.


Design


Ember-Eyed Behemoth is a Spirit whose Incarna stomps across the land and smashes stuff - it can use all its Power Cards from any Presence, as usual, but its Innate Power is a big hammer that can only be targeted from its Incarna. It has one of the easiest-to-hit City-destroying thresholds in the game.

The limitation is that its Incarna isn’t highly mobile - normally it can only move once per turn, either to an adjacent land or to one of Behemoth’s Sacred Sites. If it stomps off into a corner land #8 to take out a bunch of Invaders, it may take it a few turns to get to another great target. It does have two ways of moving faster if it needs to, but it can’t overuse them:

  • If it doesn’t use its Innate Power, it can move a second time, sacrificing smashing stuff for getting to a new part of the island faster.
  • It has a once-per-game Growth option which Empowers and moves its Incarna, as well as granting a partial Reclaim - but like many Reclaim options, this comes at the cost of adding Presence.

Ember-Eyed Behemoth wasn’t the first Incarna Spirit to be designed, but it is the simplest of them: if it weren’t for its Incarna rules, it would almost be Low complexity; and while it has plenty of room for skillful play, the heart of its game plan is pretty straightforward.

Its Unique powers involve a variety of effects, all fairly simple, and elementally mostly match the elements needed for its innate: heavy fire, modest earth + plant, plus some splash elements. Thematically, Ember-Eyed Behemoth’s primary element is Fire but not because it’s made of fire or literally setting things on fire, but because Fire is an element of anger, strong passions, and spreading destruction, and when Behemoth rouses to anger, it becomes resonant with Fire. (This is also responsible for the embers kindled in its eyes.) While relaxed, it would retain its association with Earth and Plant but be more attuned to Water than Fire - however, in that state, it also wouldn’t do much to hinder the Invaders.

Dev Notes, by Ted Vessenes

The initial design hand-off for this expansion included six spirits, none of which were Incarna spirits. Of these, three appeared to be at the High complexity rating and three looked Very High. I immediately made the case to Eric that we needed two Moderate complexity spirits in a four spirit expansion, to make sure every fan had something they were excited about. A few weeks later, Eric came back with two new designs, one of which (not Behemoth) had this Incarna mechanic. The concept was great but the Spirit itself was still solidly High complexity.

I told Eric, “What I really want is a Moderate complexity Incarna spirit. Think Godzilla, the spirit! You push your Incarna all over the board, leaving a wake of destruction behind you.” Eric declined, because that wasn’t the vibe he wanted for that spirit, so we set it aside. Not three weeks later, Eric gives us the design for a different Incarna spirit, Ember-Eyed Behemoth, and says, “I kept thinking about this. Once I realized it was 80% done, I did the last 20% just to get it out of my head.”

And that was that! Ember-Eyed Behemoth changed shockingly little from the original design, and it was exactly what I had hoped for: a giant spirit monster that literally tramples over the invaders! The main dev challenge was figuring out how to best Empower the incarna. Originally the spirit Empowered through an innate threshold that also required some Energy. Energy strategies had to work to get enough Elements to trigger it while Plays strategies had more trouble paying the Energy cost. What we learned was that many players would focus their entire game on Empowering as soon as possible, even when it didn’t actually matter. For most Incarna spirits, we want Empowerment to be a strategic decision: it’s an option that matters sometimes, but it’s never mandatory. Yet for Behemoth, players would always try to Empower the incarna even when the strategic payoff wasn’t worth the resource cost to make it happen.

Eventually we solved this by switching Empowering to a one-use growth option that also reclaimed power cards. This strongly discourages players from taking it on the first turn, which is clearly a mistake, while guaranteeing every player will have it by the mid-game. Empowering earlier provides more early tempo by doubling the innate’s effect, but forgoes presence placement, which makes the spirit weaker later. The Behemoth Empowerment decision is no longer whether to do it, but instead about when.

As for that first Incarna spirit design, don’t worry; we made room for it later. You’ll hear more about that spirit in a future update.

Bonus Card — Influx of Settlers (Event)

Nature Incarnate includes a handful of events, with new takes on some familiar effects. Did you know the sands of Spirit Island are home to sandstalkers? The Dahan did, and the invaders are about to find out.


That is all for now! We look forward to sharing our next update with you!

We’ve funded! What a First Day!
over 1 year ago – Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 01:12:29 PM

Absolutely incredible! We funded in under 15 minutes! You thousands of day one backers are wonderful and we wouldn’t be here without your support and care. Thank you so much for making the first few hours (seriously just let that sink in how much has happened in such a short amount of time) absolutely mind-blowing.

You’re all probably ready and waiting to know what’s in store for the campaign. There wasn’t a lot of detail about the spirits, powers, or anything on that main page! While we would love to have all of that information for you up front (as it’s already in our pocket waiting), the main page would simply be too long with all the information we’re excited to tell you. Instead, we’re going to be bringing you a series of updates to this campaign, each going in depth on specific Spirits, interviews with the designer and the developers, and lots of information about Aspects, powers, and more!

However, we also have been in the comments and seen just how many questions you all have. We can’t possibly respond to each and every individual comment, especially at the rate they’re currently coming in, but know that we see them and that we hear you. We have answers to your questions, and we’ll be providing them in each update, this one included!

Answers To Questions


Our intention is that Nature Incarnate will be fully filled by the end of 2023. That’s not a blow-by-blow timeline, which we know! We can’t get more specific with deadlines, months, or quarters at this time as we need to allow room for production and shipping. As the project advances through production, we will have better estimates on delivery, but our goal is to give you realistic facts now instead of promising an unrealistic date and failing to meet it. So, for now, know that we should have it to you in about a year’s time, give or take a couple months, and we’ll keep you updated as to the production process with at the very least monthly updates after this first month of the campaign wraps up.

The Premium Foil Spirit Panels for Nature Incarnate are included as a bonus for every backer who pledges to support Nature Incarnate. Since we’re fulfilling individual pledge tiers as complete bundles, we won’t be separating the Nature Incarnate Premium Foil Spirit Panels out from pledges during this campaign. On that note, Nature Incarnate has standard punchboard style Spirit Panels, matching the published Spirit Panels from previous expansions. We have not changed the design or construction of the Spirit Panels included in the expansion.

The new Premium Token Pack #2 resembles Premium Token Pack #1 in terms of quality, but with completely different contents: quality silk-screened wood tokens for a variety of uses specific to Nature Incarnate, as well as reminder tokens. This set includes Incarna tokens for the Spirits and aspects that use the Incarna mechanic, as well as three kinds of tokens that are unique to three different spirits in this set — but you’ll learn more about those Spirits and their tokens in future updates.

How about the fabled Big Box storage solution for everything Spirit Island? Here’s the thing: we’re not done with Spirit Island yet, and there’s more on the horizon! R. Eric Reuss and the team have a gameplan on what expansions are yet to come, and there’s always the chance for more games like Horizons of Spirit Island, where we’re offered the opportunity to create even more Spirit Island! If we release a complete collection box, it’s entirely possible that by the time your collection is complete, it’ll have outgrown that box. So, we hope to create a storage solution for you one day that solves for all of those possibilities, but that is beyond the scope of the current campaign.

There have been a number of questions about the costs and differences in pledge levels, asking about MSRP and campaign discounts. Each pledge level (and related add-on bundle) is available with a notable discount vs the MSRP of each item in that bundle combined. Due to some last minute adjustments to the quantity of card sleeves in various bundles, the discount is not even across the board from level to level, but they each have a decent discount, with some ranging up to a very high discount — no one is getting short-changed, but some levels are getting even better rates. Our error, but in your favor! So, back at the level that contains the things you most want, rest assured in the knowledge that you’re getting a decent discount, no matter what. 

Why can’t previously purchased items be purchased individually through this campaign? The short answer is that we want to simplify the complexity of fulfillment. We handle our campaign fulfillment through our own warehouse and incredible logistics team based in St. Louis, Missouri! Each currently published product offered in this campaign — from the core game and previous expansions, to card sleeves, to foil Spirit Panels — are available through our site and are already (or soon will be) available to order through your friendly local gaming store. Adding individual items to each backer order would extend the length of fulfillment by quite a bit — we’re talking weeks or even months here. After working through all the details, we decided it was better to offer new content packaged together, and to also offer a number of choices for people who are getting into the game for the first time and want to collect everything we have to offer. Existing fans can find the items they haven’t collected yet through our online store or through local stores in the United States.

International Shipping and Add-On Options


Spirit Island fans outside of the United States have had to deal with increased costs of shipping, import fees, and increased charges for ages as the board game industry’s costs of shipping continue to rise. With that in mind, we have made a decision based on your feedback: post-campaign, the pledge levels that are being fulfilled by Board and Dice and Let’s Play Games will have the opportunity to pick and choose which items they want added-on, unlike domestic US pledges.

All of the products associated with this campaign will be manufactured in China and should leave China via the Port of Shanghai. Fulfillment for this campaign will happen from three locations. For all countries in Europe (Zone A or Zone B) whether or not they are in the EU, fulfillment will be handled by Board & Dice out of Poland. Thanks to our acquisition last year by Flat River Group, and Flat River Group's subsequent acquisition of Synapses Games, we now have access to a warehouse in Belgium as well as favorable import rates for Europe. We will be sending one (or more, if necessary) full cargo container of products from Shanghai to Belgium, where they will be unloaded. The product for Kickstarter fulfillment will then be shipped on to Board & Dice in Poland, while other items from the shipment will remain in Belgium for later distribution in Europe. For Australia and New Zealand (part of Zone B), fulfillment will be handled by Let's Play Games in Australia. Let's Play Games will arrange to pick up the goods that they need for fulfillment directly from Shanghai and transport them to their Australian fulfillment center. For all other orders, fulfillment will be handled by the Greater Than Games warehouse in St. Louis, MO, USA. We will ship all of the cargo containers necessary to St. Louis via whichever port is most efficient at the time.

After the campaign ends, backers whose orders will be fulfilled by Board & Dice or by Let's Play Games will have the ability to purchase individual products from the Spirit Island line individually at full MSRP and add them to their pledge. Because the fulfillment groups from these locations will be smaller than the US location, this should not slow down fulfillment too much. Additionally, Spirit Island fans in these locations have typically had a very hard time getting product without paying an exorbitant amount in shipping, so we hope that this helps you pick up anything that you're missing! For other backers, most of whom are in the US or Canada, please order any products you are missing from your Friendly Local Gaming Store, from our website, or from Amazon! The majority of these products are available right now, and the rest will be back in stock in 4-6 weeks. Shipping will be roughly similar to what it would be on this campaign but with the added benefit of getting you the products right away and not slowing down fulfillment in the future.

On the note of international backers, the localization of Nature Incarnate is not part of this campaign. We have many new options to make that happen due to our partnership with Synapses Games through Flat River Group, but we are still working out the details on translation. Rest assured that we’re working on it! It’s just not part of this campaign.

Thank you for backing!


We've got so much more to share with you! Our updates, as they come, will reveal details about the Spirits included in Nature Incarnate and are written by R. Eric Reuss, the Nature Incarnate dev team, and members of Greater Than Games. You can look forward to interviews, insights, mechanics, and more over the coming weeks.

Thank you for all of your questions, comments, and concerns. If you have more, please ask! We may not be able to answer each person individually, but we’ll respond as we see more questions come up in the coming weeks. As for the rest of the campaign, you can look forward to more updates soon! The BackerKit “Achievement” system is now up and running and will pave the way for more updates with both information and answers to questions! Thank you all, again!