Hello again all 10,196 of you for bringing us to one million dollars! All ten thousand one hundred and ninety-six of you brought us to one million dollars! So incredible that we had to say it twice! Mostly in disbelief! Thank you all again so much for backing and making all of this possible. We would be here without each and every one of you. Welcome to those of us who have just joined. You might want to go back and look at the Spirits for this pack before facing… the foe. Yes, Nature Incarnate comes with one new adversary: The Habsburg Mining Expedition. R. Eric Reuss, creator of Spirit Island, and Nick Reale, dev team member, tell us all you need to know about the story, design, and development. We finish off with our bonus card — an Event card this time! Gentlemen, please take it away.

Emperor Joseph inherited the Hapsburg monarchy upon the death of his father, Leopold I, shortly after the conclusion of the War of Spanish Succession, a short-lived attempt by Emperor Leopold to put Joseph’s younger brother Charles on the Spanish throne. Secure in his alliance with Sweden and Prussia, Emperor Joseph stepped back from territorial conflicts in western Europe and focused on growing the wealth of the empire for his son and heir Leopold Joseph. 

Joseph I chartered the Ostend Company in 1697 to bring trade from the East and West indies through his Belgian provinces, setting up overseas colonies and beginning a program of  resettlement of Hungarian peasantry.

Alongside the mixed successes of their nomadic herding livestock colonial efforts, the Habsburg dynasty also reached across the seas with an eye towards gathering a key resource: salt. The salt mining colonies were outfitted to be self-sufficient, able to send the vast majority of their efforts back home to Austria. What the miners and their overseers did to the lands from which they extracted the precious mineral was of no consequence to Emperor Joseph.

I handed off several Adversaries to the devs, and this was the one that seemed to show most promise after some testing, so they went with it - though it’s undergone a long, long journey from its initial form, exploring to find out what worked and was fun.

The handoff version had a very simple conceit: lands with lots of Invaders were entrenched: they cared about those places, and their numbers let them support each other.

Mechanically, this was “in lands with 4+ Invaders, all Invaders are Durable (have double Health)”. A higher level lowered the requirement to 3+ Invaders, and made Ravage cards match all lands with 6+ Invaders (so you couldn’t just shovel all the Invaders into a single stronghold and deal with it in endgame). There were a few other supporting bits (starting a land with 3 Explorers, messing with Remove effects), but that was the heart of it. Outside of these strongpoints, it changed the game very little, but you either had to break up these clumps of Invaders or use a lot of overkill damage to power through the extra Health.

It had some really interesting dynamics, and was really conceptually straightforward, but unfortunately it also proved both sloggy and had a tendency to snowball. There was a lot of exploration of different paths to mitigate both of these problems - I’ll let the devs talk about the journey - but ultimately, Durable got altogether dropped from the Adversary. I honestly feel some relief at this: Durable is a hack that’s necessary to make Health buffs work reasonably (otherwise “destroy” effects become too good, see England 5) but it carries an annoying amount of rules load for what should be a simple concept. And since health buffs really want to be conditional in some way (again, see England 5), Durable invariably ends up layered on top of some conditional checks, which boosts complexity.

The concept of some high-importance, high-threat lands remains, however. We’re not going to post the entire Adversary here, but the rules for Level 1 include:

So once a land accumulates 3 Invaders, instead of adding more Invaders, they Ravage. Then they Ravage again the following turn. This might seem like it’s going to cause cascades all over the place, but here’s the other part of Level 1:

So you don’t take as much Blight, but the Invaders fortify and become harder to destroy (but without needing Durable).

For the journey from the initial version to this one, I’ll hand it over to the devs!

PS: As a quick aside, one of those other handed-off Adversaries actually turned into a Scenario that will also be in Nature Incarnate! It worked really well, but could be swingy, and had a hard time breaking up what it did into 6 different levels. So instead, it’s a Scenario with an easier mode (+2 Difficulty) and a harder mode (+7 Difficulty) - and once you understand what it’s doing, it’s extremely rules-light.

This Adversary changed more than anything else in Nature Incarnate. We completely rebuilt it not once, not twice, but thrice! Playtesters tried over 50 different variations. It was even originally themed as a completely different country. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first version released to playtesters was similar to Eric’s, but we started Durable at 3+ Invaders as its signature Level 1 effect. We fiddled with this version for a while, but the Adversary just didn’t have enough pressure towards ending the game -- at least not in a fun way.

The first major rework gave this Adversary a small army of (Durable) Explorers that would march into lands that had just Explored. Moving all of the Explorers around felt too fiddly and was too hard to overcome at lower Difficulties, so that idea didn’t last long. The second major rework switched the Adversary to Ravaging in empty lands adjacent to big (Durable) stacks of Invaders. This too did not last, but it brought the Adversary to its current mining theme and association with the Habsburg Monarchy.

With three all three versions, having Durable at Level 1 was the underlying problem. It was pretty easy for players to get into a position where the game was effectively over aside from dealing with one stronghold per board. Low-Difficulty players wouldn’t even try to get at the Durable Cities; they’d spend about an hour keeping the other seven lands clear, realize that they were running out of turns, and then rush Fear to win.

And so we made the most critical change to this Adversary: switching Level 1 to be essentially what Eric shared in his preview. Durable stuck around a little in the middle Levels, moved up to Level 6 to make space for a more interesting mechanic, and then got cut entirely late in development. Ultimately, we learned that most players only like breaking Durable when it’s a bonus on top of something that’s already worth doing; the average player will never tactically use a Power just to break Durable.

So what was the mechanic that replaced Durable in the middle Levels? A new Invader Card that’s specially-positioned in the deck.

With some Adversaries (most notably Sweden and France), the game feels decided around Turn 3 or 4, when the Spirits survive their initial push towards one of the loss conditions. To avoid that problem, we tried multiple mechanics representing a gold rush; this one played the best. (At the time, we hadn’t decided which substance they were mining.)

With this card, the Habsburg Mining Expedition tries to make as many new Mining lands as possible before Ravaging in every Mining land on the island. But the miners don’t stop there; they keep Ravaging in all Mining lands for the rest of the game. Hurry up and scare the mining expedition off the island before it strips the land bare!

Before I go, we have one additional preview: another Choice Event! Like all Choice Events in this expansion, this one doesn’t require the entire team to agree.

Here, each Spirit has a choice between paying a small cost to weather the storm and paying a higher cost to seize the initiative. Choosing which Power Card (if any) to use and lose can be a surprisingly hard decision – stronger effects help you more this turn, but hurt more to miss out on for the rest of the game.

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Thank you both again for your excellent details for this foe! Everyone, we’ve got updates every day this week! One tomorrow, one on Wednesday, and one on Thursday. I know, I can’t believe it either that the campaign is so close to finished! Tomorrow, we'll have a quick update about the premium token pack #2 AND Aspects. Wednesday, we have our final spirit to show you all and it is definitely worth the wait. We’ll finish off the campaign with a final thank you and letting you know the plan moving forward on bringing this game to you! See you then!

Whoa, whoa, whoa... ten THOUSAND people?! That's so many!

We are genuinely thrilled by the turnout for this campaign! What a ride it's been, and we're going into the last week with a few more reveals still yet to come!

With passing the 10k backer mark, it's time to check out TWO Unique Power cards, the first from Wandering Voice Keens Delirium:

Wandering Voice loves throwing Strife around, and that Strife is incredibly effective at making Invaders terrible at Ravage. However! When it's used that way, it gets used up and goes away, and Wandering Voice really likes it if the Strife sticks around (that second Innate Power that happens in the slow phase... it's not as good if there's no Strife anymore). Fortunately, it's got Exhale Confusion and Delirium:  



Seems like there's upsides and downsides, right? Invaders with Strife not participating in Ravage means that they're not part of ANY of the Ravage, including damage from Dahan counterattacks. But, with Wandering Voice's Incarna nearby, the Dahan weren't participating in the Ravage anyway, so might as well have the Invaders sit out, thus keeping their Strife tokens. Plus, there are other clever ways you can use this effect in conjunction with Wandering Voice's other tools... but I don't want to spoil EVERYTHING here.

On to a power card for Towering Roots of the Jungle!

Towering Roots's unique token "Vitality" is powerful stuff. It prevents Blight from being added to a land, which in of itself is incredibly strong. However, once you have three Vitality in the same land as your Incarna, your Incarna gets Empowered, which means that Invaders can no longer take any Build actions in the land with your Incarna. Because of those inherent strengths, adding Vitality tokens takes a while. Towering Root's Spirit Panel only has one way of adding a Vitality token, and that's through its second Growth option. However, it also has the unique card Blooming of the Rocks and Trees:



Early game, you're going to have to decide between using it in lands where you can take advantage of the Vitality OR the Wilds, and both are incredibly useful! However, it doesn't take terribly long for Towering Roots to make its way to 3 Plant elemental icons in play, and then this card really takes off. Nope, no Explorers OR Blight in this land, thank you very much.

We've got exciting updates coming this week, and then we'll wrap up the campaign on Thursday! Thanks for being part of this wild ride!

Hello all 9741 of you and welcome to the penultimate Spirit reveal! Thank you to the 212 of you who joined and welcome back to those of us who have been here from the beginning! We’re closer and closer to the end of the campaign, but it’s not over yet! Creator of Spirit Island R. Eric Reuss and dev team member Ted Vessenes are here again to tell us about this spine chilling and madness inducing spirit. With, of course, a bonus blight card at the end to tell you a little bit more. Here is R. Eric Reuss to start us off!

Many Spirits break bodies. This one breaks minds.

Whether it really intends harm to humans is a hard question to answer, as it itself is also somewhat broken: it is a great Spirit’s voice, torn away but not destroyed, erratically roaming the island. It can be heard from a far distance, and its sound is many things: sometimes an eerie keening, sometimes a direly fascinating song, sometimes a brain-numbing resonance more felt than heard - most often all of these at once, forming strange and perilous harmonies.

(It may be argued that its song is entirely in the minds of those who hear it, for it does not ripple water nor shake trees. But this is hard to prove; it may simply be that Spirits of water and plant have learned not to heed it.)

Over its long existence, Wandering Voice Keens Delirium has gathered up moonlight and sunlight, twining them together with strands of breath and mind to create a sometimes-visible form for its voice: its Incarna - while it leaves faint echoes of itself hither and yon across the island, that voice is always the primary locus of its existence, its primary tangle of power and reality.

Fortunately for the Dahan, that voice is much less deadly than it was before it was separated from its owner. They have figured out a number of ways to avoid the worst of its effects; while individuals may sometimes be caught unawares, it is quite rare for communities to be. Stopping one’s ears helps a bit, as do certain line-patterns, but neither is generally sufficient on its own. Small Spirits with affinity for air, sounds, thought, or journeys can assist a fair bit, however; there are stories of long-ago days when someone might sacrifice themself to try and attract the attention of Finder of Paths Unseen or its assistants in hopes they might help, though thankfully such drastic measures are no longer needed. Also more reliable is singing certain types of songs together while working on cord-making, hair-braiding, sewing, and weaving; retreating to a fastness covered with vines or living earth; or both together.

Perhaps the biggest mystery around Wandering Voice Keens Delirium is that it has chosen to focus on the Invaders. Perhaps it has been convinced by other Spirits - it can be communicated with, by some - or perhaps the Invaders simply call to its nature in some fashion.

I designed Wandering Voice Keens Delirium right after Breath of Darkness Down Your Spine, as another Incarna Spirit. Some discussion on the Kindred Spirits podcast had highlighted that there were notably fewer control Spirits (counter Invaders by moving them) compared to direct-offense Spirits (counter Invaders by destroying them), and at the time this expansion was heavy on direct-offense Spirits, so “more control Spirits would be nice” was on my mind, and Ted had mentioned there was room for a High-complexity one. I couldn’t tell you exactly where the concept of a disembodied voice singing a mind-shattering song across the land came from, but once the idea got in my head it felt pretty compelling.

 

Just as there are a variety of ways to do direct offense, there are different ways to do control. Wandering Voice does it by not by physically moving the Invaders against their will, but by messing with their minds - adding Strife:

Its Incarna is moderately mobile - not quite as much as Breath of Darkness’, but definitely more so than the other two Incarna Spirits. Moving its Incarna lets it add a Strife - and if that’s added to a Town/Explorer, to Push that piece - so Incarna movement is really really good, and especially during early-game can be extremely helpful in preventing Builds or creating safe zones. You can see how the Presence tracks carefully make getting a consistent 3 Air/turn tricky (if you power straight to 3 Plays, your Energy income isn’t likely to support actually playing 3 cards every turn): you can take Growth 3 for a one-turn boost to 3 Air, but then you only get 1 Presence down.

Also worth noting is that its Incarna always counts as a Sacred Site, which means you can always target Mind-Shattering Song (its second Innate) from it, as well as any Sacred Site-requiring Power Cards you happen to pick up. 

(Several of the Strife-adding Minors require a Sacred Site. Over half of them grant Air, its primary element, and all the rest except Gold’s Allure grant Sun or Moon, its secondary elements. They’re not necessarily instant picks - sometimes the board state really wants something else - but they’re extremely compelling since they stack bonus control atop the Strife and enable targeting for Mind-Shattering Song to boot.)

Some early versions of the Spirit also added Strife to Dahan, which seemed like it ought to be conceptually simple - it would prevent them doing Damage in a single counterattack - except there were some thematically odd and rules-complicating cases: what about Dahan-requiring Powers or Dahan Events which did Damage? What about Dahan-requiring Powers or Dahan Events which did useful non-Damage things like Defend or Pushing Invaders? The rules overhead was more than would be worthwhile for a single Spirit, so it metamorphosed into a static rule that required the Incarna not be nearby for Dahan to counterattack.  (During handoff it was “Dahan don’t fight back”, but in development it changed to the much kinder “Dahan don’t participate in Ravage”.) The Dahan should be generally better at coping with hostile Spirits than the Invaders are - even Dahan-hostile Spirits tend to have more ways of Damaging Invaders than Dahan - so this worked thematically. 

At handoff, Wandering Voice’s second innate was an “even more control” innate with a mere side order of damage at higher levels - it let you Gather with Moon+Air and Push with Sun+Air. This proved both to be too much control and not enough ability to close out a game, as well as kind of brain-breaking: it was often targeted from the Incarna, which was mobile, and trying to figure out where to move it in order to use the Gather+Push effectively while also considering the benefits of adding Strife (and Pushing) where it moved to was a bit much.

Back when we still thought this would be a four spirit expansion, I told Eric we had room for a high complexity control spirit. The plan was to get Relentless Gaze of the Sun and Hearth-Vigil to Medium complexity (though Gaze actually landed at High), and print Dances Up Earthquakes as a Very High complexity spirit. None of those spirits have a control focused gameplan, so a high complexity control spirit was a good way to round out the set. Eric used the Incarna idea from Breath of Darkness to make Wandering Voice.

Wandering Voice’s core gameplay is the same as the first design: Push your Incarna around, adding Strife to Invaders and incapacitating them. This is Strife-based control. The only major change was that the original version let you push Cities when they were Strifed! In retrospect that’s clearly overpowered, but it survived several months of testing until we finally decided it needed to go. We made sure that one of its Uniques, Twist Perceptions, could still Push a City when adding Strife, as this is an effect the Spirit thematically is allowed to do.

A major development challenge for Wandering Voice was not about adding strategies but removing one of them. When a Spirit is built around Strife, the gameplay focus quickly becomes about setting up Dahan counter-attacks. However, this is thematically out-of-character for the spirit. Dahan avoid Wandering Voice when possible. Additionally, we wanted this spirit to spit out a lot of Strife. By making counter-attacks worse, that lets us increase how much Strife the spirit can generate and still be balanced. This is also why the Spirit has no way to move Dahan in its starting kit. We didn’t want players even thinking about positioning the Dahan. Wandering Voice is not the sort of Spirit that thinks about that, and we wanted players to think about the island the way the Spirit would, focusing primarily on Invaders.

Another challenge we had to handle was finding the right amount of early game invader control. Like Breath of Darkness, if this Spirit can contain the Invaders too much in the first two turns, the remainder of the game becomes both easy (because the Invaders aren’t doing things) and boring (because the Invaders aren’t doing things). But too little control makes the Spirit feel overwhelmed almost immediately. In this expansion, we learned that there’s a very small range for how much early control a Spirit can safely have, and that range is significantly more narrow  than the amount of early offense, defense, or Fear that a Spirit can have.

This is why the bonus Air element is relatively late on the Energy track: it unlocks more Incarna movement, which is a big source of Invader control. This track is also a good example of another development lesson we learned: Spirits tend to play better when they unlock secondary elements before primary elements, because it still encourages drafting primary element cards. This same pattern shows up on most Horizons of Spirit Island and Nature Incarnate Spirits. And contrast with Sharp Fangs and Wildfire, both of which end up encouraging players to focus on Plant over Animal and Fire, respectively.

Nature Incarnate includes some new takes on Blight Cards, including Still-Healthy Island cards. Here, the island is on a thin line between health and Blight: there’s more Blight to work with, but the Spirits are strained to maintain this balance, as badly as they would be under some Blighted Island cards! Sometimes, maintaining this careful balance is more trouble than it’s worth.  

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A big thank you to Eric and Ted! We appreciate your insight into these Spirits so much! 

We’re gearing up for the end, with lots more information to come. We’ve got an adversary, a few bonus cards, and one more spirit before we’re through! We’ll see you all on Monday!

Welcome back, our wonderful backers! All 9,529 of you! Incredible as always, and thank you for helping us reach yet another achievement. Today we bring you even more Aspects. These Aspects are for Spirits from the expansions of both Jagged Earth and Branch and Claw. The development team again provided us with excellent write ups on each of these aspects. Here is Ted, Nick, and Emilia  with our new Aspects.

Besides Thunderspeaker, Lure of the Deep Wilderness is the Spirit that most has a sense of “singular presence”, meaning an Incarna Aspect makes a lot of sense for it as well. The original plan was that Lure’s Incarna marked a spot where it could slowly draw all Invaders on the island towards it, but all of Lure’s power had to use the Incarna as the origin land.

There were several problems with this, but the biggest ones were that the Incarna land didn’t feel special enough, and it felt primarily like a downside. We went back to the drawing board and redesigned it with the following objectives:

We ended up with this version, which lets Lure build its own collection of explorers and Dahan. The Lure Incarna makes the land so enticing that (almost) nothing can escape it. And the more explorers and Dahan you can recruit to your collection, the greater your strength over the island at large. Just be sure to use “Never Heard From Again” to cull a few explorers from your collection if they start to get out of control. Not that Lure would ever collect too many explorers…

Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves has the Aspect I like the best, even though I’ll likely never play it again now that development is done. To explain, Fangs is my favorite Spirit in the original wave of 12. But a lot of players bounce off the Spirit for two reasons: the no-Blight restriction on Ranging Hunt punishes early mistakes, and getting enough Beasts to feel powerful requires sacrificing your own Presence. The Unconstrained Aspect exists to remove those barriers to entry and make Fangs easier to play in the hands of someone new to the Spirit.

The only major change from Eric’s design was to how and how quickly it added its “free” Beasts. The original mechanism added 1 Beasts almost every turn, while testing showed that 1 Beasts every 2 Turns was a more reasonable rate. To add some interesting strategic choices, we brought back the Prepare mechanic from Shifting Memory of Ages, allowing players to get more Beasts over the course of the game if they’re willing to delay when those Beasts arrive.

Unlike basically everything else in this expansion, Mentor was created by the devs with relatively little guidance from Eric. While we were brainstorming, I had the idea that a Shifting Memory of Ages Aspect that could hand out its power cards would be thematically neat, but also Memory didn’t really have enough Power Card gain for it to be something it could regularly do. At the same time, Ted thought that a Shifting Memory Aspect that gained bonus Power Cards, but without being able to pick what they were, would be mechanically interesting. However, on its own this concept would be too high-variance with respect to how in-element your Power Card draws were. Eventually we decided to combine these two ideas together, and it was a big hit in testing. 

The only major change that came about was switching which Innate Power the new power-giving Innate replaced. Initially, it replaced the Defend, but this left Shifting Memory a little less able to affect the board than we wanted, so we switched it to replacing Observe. This meant it had to Prepare Element Markers, so we took the opportunity to give you Markers based on the elements of the card you gave, so it wouldn’t feel as bad giving away in-element cards.  

Another card we're retiring with Nature Incarnate is the polarizing event "War Touches the Island's Shore". Far-Off Wars is designed as the variant of this effect with better dynamics. Players can make different choices for different parts of the island, letting them decide exactly how much to lean into destruction versus protection.

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Thank you again to our dev team for their insight into these Aspects that they’ve worked so hard on. We’ll be back again on Friday with an update on the penultimate spirit! What do you think the name is? Tell us below, and we’ll see you soon for the answer!

Good morning, everyone!

Last night, we reached another tremendous achievement! Over 9500?! Amazing. Thank you all for being such a key part of bringing Nature Incarnate to life!

So, without further ado, here's one of the many Unique Power cards for Dances Up Earthquakes!



As you've seen in the update all about Dances Up Earthquakes, this Spirit has quite a lot of destructive potential. They also have a lot of utility, given their flexible options on when and how they play and pay for power cards. But don't forget the Dances part of their name! They're also all about moving stuff around, using this power card Exaltation of Echoed Steps, or dancing to inspire others to gain energy, using their card Gift of Seismic Energy. When Dances Up Earthquakes dances, you can't help but be moved by it, one way or another!

The next Achievement we reach will be a whopping 10,000 backers! That would be stunning, and it seems entirely likely, at this rate! If/when we do reach that achievement, I'll post TWO Unique power cards from two different Spirits. Celebration! 

See you in a few hours for another Spirit update!