We passed the 8500 mark last night, and that is amazing and fantastic! The fact that we keep hitting these at a regular rate is mind-boggling to us. Thank you all so much!

Since I've revealed one Unique Power card for each of the three announced-so-far Spirits, I was going to double-back with this reveal and show off another Unique Power card for our first Spirit: Behemoth. However! Today is, as noted, the spookiest of days! Thus, we must turn to the spookiest Spirit...


Fear and Strife, indeed! Note that you may choose for your Incarna to count as a Beast, so you almost always have a Beast in a useful position for making this most of this Power, but it's especially juicy if you have a Invaders and a Beast (who might just be your Incarna) in the Endless Dark.

Since you must let pieces Escape the Endless Dark with some regularity, many times, some Invaders Escape who you weren't quite done with yet. A little Terror of the Hunted makes sure that those Invaders are thoroughly Strifed, keeping them from returning to the island and dealing damage during Ravage. 

We'll have a regularly scheduled update in a couple hours here, featuring an intensely focused Spirit! See you then!

Good morning, to our 8,189 backers! Thank you again for helping us to reach such a wonderful number and bring us that much closer to our next achievement. Today, we bring you something a little different than everything we’ve done so far. You’ve gotten different card types. You’ve gotten Spirits, individual cards of various kinds, but nothing about Aspects! Those of you wondering about all the Aspects mentioned on the main page of the campaign — get excited! We’ve got three of them here for you, all Spirits from the core Spirit Island game, each one with a write-up from different members of the dev team! Let’s hear what they have to say about the Aspects for Ocean’s Hungry Grasp, River Surges in Sunlight, and Thunderspeaker (but with a few tasteful redactions to the cards, so as to not spoil everything).

Most of the time, we expect Spirits to be the most exciting parts of expansions. Aspects are nice, and offer some much-needed play variety, but it’s rare for an Aspect to be so splashy and novel that people will get excited about an expansion just for that Aspect. Deeps is a notable exception: from the first time we saw this Aspect, we knew it would be extremely exciting, and that we needed to get started with iterating on it immediately, since it was so radically different from what’s currently in the game. The core concept of Deeps was that, instead of drowning individual Invaders with its Innate, this aspect of Ocean would drown whole lands, gradually eroding them over time before collapsing them into the sea. If you got far enough into the game, you could sink a whole board, or even more. In return it was a little harder to deal with Invaders quickly popping up on the coast, since sinking a whole land takes time.  

Initially, that was all the Aspect did: you put down Deeps tokens, and any land with 3 or more Deeps tokens Drowned everything. The issue with this was that it was both too slow and too powerful: the first few turns, your Innate did nothing, but after that you had a huge spike in power that let you wipe out even the most entrenched lands. We experimented with a bunch of different ways to curb this, with Deeps tokens giving permanent Defends or Isolates, but ultimately settled on splitting the Innate into two different powers, one of which added Deeps, and one of which capitalized on Deeps (sometimes in ways other than just sinking the whole land). And at the same time, we made it replace both Innate Powers, to let us make the land-sinking more powerful and frequent. 

All-in-all, Deeps is a very different take on Ocean that’s a blast to play. If you’ve ever wanted to build your own Cast Down Into the Briny Deep, Deeps is the Aspect for you. 

When we make Spirits, we try to avoid giving them a hand of Unique Powers that is laser-focused on their core strategy. Unique Powers that aren’t perfect mechanical matches have a few benefits. From a theme perspective, they let us show off a different side of the Spirit. From a gameplay perspective, they serve as a bit of a break from performing the main strategy with every single action. And from a design perspective, they let us make Aspects that shine a spotlight on that card as part of a new core strategy.

So what if River’s Bounty were the most important card in River’s hand?

Haven presents a side of River Surges in Sunlight that is focused on protecting Dahan. Every version of this Aspect had some way to move Dahan and Defend multiple lands, most of them were way too strong. We tied the focus to a single haven each turn, with limited ability to protect other lands, and that brought strength down to a reasonable level.

Between Energy track scaling and low thresholds, this Aspect also gives River a lot more options for how to grow off its Presence tracks. Focusing on Energy lets River play a Major Power every turn and strengthens the haven, but you’ll usually only hit one or maybe two of the thresholds that require secondary Elements - you have to carefully plan around which one you want that turn. Focusing on Plays, on the other hand, lets you use most or all of the thresholds every turn, but the individual effects will be weaker. Which strategy suits Haven better will change from Adversary to Adversary, and sometimes even from turn to turn!

When it became clear that Incarna Spirits were a big part of this expansion, we decided to include Incarna aspects. Incarna is the kind of mechanic that could come back in the future, but definitely won’t be in every expansion. So we wanted to take advantage of that opportunity.

We reviewed each of the 24 published spirits (obviously excluding Horizons of Spirit Island) to decide which ones would be most likely to have an Incarna, thematically speaking. And Thunderspeaker was at the top of that list. Thunderspeaker literally manifests in a form that looks similar to individual people it has fought alongside or worked closely with in the past. The original idea was to mix up the standard Thunderspeaker gameplan of steamrolling invaders with a huge stack of Dahan and presence via Manifestation of Power and Glory. Instead, the Warrior aspect for Thunderspeaker focuses on the Incarna itself and powers up the Dahan in its land with quick tactical damage strikes.

There’s a lot going on here. First, because the focus is on the Warrior Incarna, this version of Thunderspeaker no longer gets the Unique Power card Manifestation of Power and Glory. Instead, it starts with the Call to Bloodshed minor power. Most importantly, it gets to deal 1 Damage each time it moves Dahan into its Incarna’s land. And this includes when using Ally of the Dahan to have a moving Dahan bring Thunderspeaker’s Incarna along with it. This means the Warrior provides a lot of broad tactical offense, as Thunderspeaker has multiple ways to move Dahan every turn.

To help you really lean into this, we gave an additional Dahan push every turn. That’s a lot of strength in this aspect, even when accounting for losing Manifestation of Power and Glory. So to compensate, the Aspect thematically has a bargain-like effect where the spirit has -1 energy and -1 card play per turn, meaning it technically starts at 0 Energy and 0 card plays. Viewed another way, you can think of the Energy and card play loss like this: every turn you get to play a 1 cost Minor Power that Pushes one Dahan.

If you enjoy Thunderspeaker but wish its early game was even more aggressive like Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves or Heart of the Wildfire, this is the Aspect for you.

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Thank you again, dev team, for your amazing work on this game and this update on Aspects! There are even more Aspects for both core game Spirits AND expansion Spirits, but we’ll get into those another day. To make today even more special, we bring to you not one but two bonus cards for the day.

We knew for Nature Incarnate that we wanted to retire exactly one Power Card, Growth Through Sacrifice, and print a replacement Minor. Eric designed this Minor Power with the same elements, cost, and speed, but totally different effects:

Eric also wanted to include a Major Power as an homage to Growth Through Sacrifice, with the same concept of destroying Presence to get a benefit. This turned into Transformative Sacrifice:

This Power lets a Spirit Destroy 3 of their Presence to grab and play the top 3 cards of the Minor Power Deck for free (as well as keeping the Powers). The threshold gives a fourth free Power in “exchange” for removing a Presence from their tracks, which strengthens the Spirit. Now everyone can pretend they’re Grinning Trickster!

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There you have it for today! We’ll see you on our next update on the spookiest day of the year for another spirit reveal! Bye for now!

Good morning, everyone!

We blew through the 8000 backers mark last night, so it's time to see a new card!



Breath of Darkness down the spines of your fellow spirits?! That's right, even your friends' presence can go on spooky trips to the Endless Dark. But this is not just for cool repositioning and also having pieces in the Endless Dark that you don't mind escaping! For the rest of this turn, every Spirit who has any presence in the Endless Dark gets +1 Range with all their powers! Reach from the Infinite Darkness, indeed!

See you tomorrow morning for some more delightful content! What could it be? Time will tell!

Welcome back, everyone! To continue our regularly scheduled updates, we’re going to talk about our next Incarna Spirit: Breath of Darkness Down your Spine. This spirit really lives up to a name so impactful. We’ve got creator R. Eric Reuss giving you everything you need to know about this unnerving spirit, featuring notes by development team member Emilia Katari. 

Fear of the dark - and of being alone in the dark - is something really primal. On Spirit Island, it’s also really sensible: not just because there are things in the dark that might hurt you, but because the dark itself might swallow you, never to return. It is not a mere absence of light, but an actual thing unto itself.

Or, perhaps, multiple things, but here we’re discussing just one: Breath of Darkness Down Your Spine.

Breath of Darkness is an Incarna Spirit, its tangled locus a fearsome creature of living shadow that is not exactly physical, but not exactly intangible - it can rend and tear, but also slip through tiny openings, suddenly unfurl itself to a vaster shape, or evaporate away altogether. This may be because it is not entirely here - there is a realm of shadows that may exist inside of it, or on the other side of it, or which it partially exists in, or to which it is connected?… even the Dahan aren’t sure, and have little desire to try and find out.  What they do know is that some of those trapped by darkness return - eventually - while others never do.

(The Dahan have few troubles with Breath of Darkness these days. Perhaps this is because the Dahan are correct in their beliefs about certain patterns the Spirit is thought to dislike, allowing travelers caught out alone a much better chance of avoiding an encounter with it. Perhaps it is because the Dahan are correct in other beliefs about the nature of the island, and have resided there long enough to be better-anchored against being pulled into another realm against their will. Perhaps it is simply because Breath of Darkness has some agenda of its own, or because some other Spirit is intervening in one fashion or another, or because it is actually an alternate form of Shadows Flicker Like Flame. Regardless, most Dahan remain cautious - though if it started speaking to them, they’d hear what it had to say; part of their deep wariness is that it doesn’t communicate with them much.)

Breath of Darkness Down Your Spine was the very first Incarna Spirit, but its origins lie long before this expansion.

A tiny bit of its concept came about during the very very early designs of 2012-2013; there was a Major Power where some hard-to-perceive creature mysteriously destroyed/disappeared Invaders in two different lands. It was before Fear existed as a concept, but the card’s feel lingered with me, and since it hasn’t become a published Major Power I’ve always vaguely wanted something with that vibe.

The idea started more firmly during Jagged Earth design: there was a Spirit of Living Darkness which was really good at dealing with lightly populated lands, but couldn’t even target lands with too many Invaders. It didn’t work out well enough to include, largely because it had a very lopsided set of Growth choices that over-encouraged spamming Presence and gaining no Power Cards - when the time came to narrow down which Spirits were making the cut, it clearly wasn’t one of them, it was still way too wonky. (In hindsight, I suspect the weird Growth choices might have been workable, but would have required vastly more internal structural support to make the dynamic work - like how Lightning’s Plays track is counterbalanced by its poor access to Energy and Power Cards.)

Despite it having some really neat dynamics, I hadn’t originally planned on pulling it back in for this expansion, but when Ted asked for additional designs, I decided to revisit it. I overhauled its Growth to be more straightforward, tweaked a couple of its Power Cards, and gave it a special rule called Incarna Stalks the Land - it wasn’t just Living Darkness everywhere, but a creature of living darkness, with a unique piece that could count as Presence and/or a Beast token. It wasn’t really a Beasts-centered Spirit per se - only one of its Uniques cared about Beasts tokens at all, and it only checked “is a Beasts present?” - it’s more that it was a Beast. (And as a result could pivot to Beasts powers a little more easily than most, particularly since Animal was one of its elements.)

Ted thought the Incarna was a really neat concept (which could also work with other Spirits/Aspects) but that this Spirit wasn’t likely to make it to Moderate complexity without shaving off a lot of what made it interesting, and asked about a more straightforward stompy Incarna Spirit. That did get designed before too long (Ember-Eyed Behemoth), with a detour for a Control-focused Incarna first; we’ll talk about that more in a future update.

Unsurprisingly for a Spirit of Darkness that has a somewhat loose relationship with normal physical space, Breath of Darkness Down Your Spine has vastly more Incarna mobility than Behemoth does: one Growth choice lets its Incarna move to any land with Presence (or return to the board if it’s been destroyed), another lets its Incarna move anywhere, and every level of its first innate moves it (usually Pushing it). One of its Uniques lets its Incarna move, and since Incarna can count as Presence, the “move a Presence 1” on its Plays track can be used to move its Incara every Spirit phase. Lots of mobility.

Its core gameplay revolves around abducting Invaders into the Endless Dark - in initial handoff, this was something that just one of its Unique Powers did (moved one or more Invaders from the board onto the Power Card, they returned to the board when the Power Card left play), but players liked that so much that the developers decided to make it central to the Spirit, and it works great. It’s still a Spirit that cares a lot about catching people/pieces alone: when it would Damage/Destroy the only Invader in a land, it instead moves it to The Endless Dark:

…and the more Invaders it holds in the Endless Dark, the more Fear it can earn with its second innate, Lost in the Endless Dark:

Lost in the Endless Dark can also Downgrade pieces - some of the Invaders just never return at all. Others come back eventually: during Growth, 1, 2, or all pieces will escape, depending on your Growth choice. But when only 1 or 2 escape, you get to pick which ones, so if you have a non-Invader piece (say, a Beasts token), you can choose it and keep more Invaders wrapped up in your shadow-realm.

From handoff, this spirit had a mechanical focus similar to what it is now - it ran around the island with its extremely mobile Incarna, went after lone Invaders, and generated a ton of Fear while doing so - but a lot of its exact details changed. Initially, the Endless Dark was just a single power card called Swallowed By The Endless Dark, which took an Explorer or Town off the island, but brought them back at the end of the turn. Players loved using this card, and wanted more of this effect, so it eventually gained a threshold that let it grab Cities, too, but it still felt more infrequent than a lot of players wanted. At the same time, we were trying to figure out how to incentivize this Spirit to go after lone Invaders especially - we tried a bunch of different effects, and they all ended up being problematic for either power level or game feel reasons. Ultimately, we decided that leaning farther into the “Swallowed effect” - which became Abduct - would be a great way to kill two birds with one stone, and it wound up working great! 

Different iterations of the Endless Dark had different rules; sometimes it would just store Invaders and they would all be dumped out at the end of the turn, and sometimes it would generate Fear and Downgrade them. Still, we were trying to figure out how we could encourage people to Abduct Explorers instead of just killing them. Even if you were getting an extra Fear, why just move an Explorer instead of destroying it? From there, we came up with the idea of keeping pieces in the Endless Dark for multiple turns and having only a few escape - that way, an extra piece abducted can be Fear over multiple turns, plus letting an Explorer escape could stop a City from escaping. Shortly after then, we replaced Darkness’s second Innate Power - which let it split off lone pieces from large stacks - with something that interacted directly with the Endless Dark, and at that point, we started brainstorming all sorts of things the Endless Dark could do. Could you target it with Dire Metamorphosis, and let the Blight and Tokens out instead of Invaders? Could you Abduct Dahan to protect them from Ravages? What about Beasts, or Presence, or your own Incarna? Some of these ended up working out, and others didn’t (for instance, Dahan would not take kindly to being Abducted), but the end result is a Spirit where the idea of the Endless Dark is intricately linked with its core gameplan much in the same way that Drowning is linked to Ocean. 

Once the core idea of all the Powers and Special Rules were solidified, this Spirit took an above-average amount of time to tune for balance. Because of Darkness’s Reclaim releasing all Abducted invaders, it naturally has somewhat cyclic strength: you Abduct a ton of pieces and can make the island almost empty - way more effectively than usual for Spirits that make this much Fear, but once you Reclaim you have to find somewhere to put them all, and lose some progress. Thus, it was really important to strike a very careful balance about how much you could Abduct in the early game. Too much Abduct and canny players could clear their entire board extremely early; too little Abduct and players would feel like everything they Abducted would just immediately be released. All the exact details of Innate thresholds and Presence track positioning are based on a lot of iteration and feedback from a wide variety of playtesters. Ultimately, I feel it ended up in a great place, with a unique feel and play style that fits well with the thematic idea of this shadow beast.

Terror Spikes Upwards will be welcome to Spirits that focus on Fear, giving the opportunity to resolve a powerful Terror Level 2 or 3 effect very early, and Final Harvest can help remove the last few Cities from the board in Terror Level 3. But be careful - unlike most events, the Beast and Dahan Events won’t necessarily help you here.

We’re aware that there’s a minority of players - from what we’ve seen, we estimate around 5-15% - who associate “abduct” almost entirely with UFOs, rather than the broader meaning of the word.

Please don’t comment about this. We’re aware of this viewpoint, and tried out other terms during playtesting, but none had the right resonance or really described what was happening.  For those of you who have that super-strong association: we realize the term will seem incongruous - at least at first - but we have faith that you’ll find the Spirit fun nonetheless.

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Thank you to Eric and Emilia! We’ll be back on Friday with an update all about aspects for core game spirits! See you then. 

Hello to all 7599 of you!

Thank you again so much for all of you who keep coming in to back our project. You’ve gotten a little bit of a taste of Incarna and how it works from last weeks' updates, so now we bring you more details on the creation and development of Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate! Our Customer Service & Community Manager Bailey was lucky enough to sit down with Spirit Island designer R. Eric Reuss to ask for more details. Here is their interview!

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Eric: Sure! My name is Eric Reuss. I’m a father of two, I love games, and I designed Spirit Island. I also enjoy reading, RPGs, Dance Dance Revolution, LARPing, and a whole bunch of other stuff, though between the pandemic, parenting, and Spirit Island work, many of them have fallen off. For the moment.

B: What was the inspiration specifically for Nature Incarnate? How did you get the idea for Incarna?

E: For Incarna spirits in particular? The concept of “a Spirit that’s incarnated in a single form in one place” is a thing a fair number of folks come into Spirit Island expecting. The idea of “this Spirit is spread through the land existing simultaneously in many places at once” may be the less intuitive one of the two, really. But that spread-out nature is how most Spirits work, though exactly what it represents in-game can vary. Say River Surges in Sunlight adds presence to a Sands: that might represent that the river which River Surges in Sunlight is is now also flowing through that Sands; or it might represent a growth in scope to include sunlight and/or water that was already there in that Sands; or it might represent something else altogether if River has enlarged and changed its nature by gaining new Power Cards, particularly any which interact with Sands.

But getting back to Incarna: the idea of a Spirit that had a “primary form” is one that’s been around since the fairly early days, certainly since before the base game was released in 2017. That being said, it wasn’t something I’d specifically planned on being in this expansion, or for that matter any expansion at all! I have a lot of “hey, a Spirit could do this thing, or that thing!” ideas, and most of them never go anywhere for one reason or another.

The first set of Spirits for Nature Incarnate didn’t have any Incarna Spirits. At that point, the plan was still for this to be a small 4-Spirit expansion, and Ted had some concerns about the composition of the handed-off Spirits for filling those four slots: there were either 0 or 1 Spirits that I estimated around Moderate complexity, the others were split 50-50 between High complexity and Very High. Ted felt we should have at least two Moderate-complexity options in the mix, and asked if I could do some more designs.

One Spirit in that second set was a moderate-sized rework of a Spirit that hadn’t made it into Jagged Earth, and part of the reworking I did was giving it an Incarna - it felt right, for reasons I’ll get into in its update, which I think is not too long after this interview. The developers really liked the Incarna concept, and noted that “how does an Incarna work?” could just be part of the expansion’s rules rather than something on the Spirit panel, especially if the expansion had more than one of them. Ted floated the idea of a big stompy Incarna Spirit, which sounded fun, but the thematic-and-elemental details didn’t come together quickly in my head, plus the expansion already had a bunch of very offense-heavy candidates. So the second Incarna Spirit was more about board control and defense of a sort. But after I finished that design, the stompy-concept finally clicked, and we got Ember-Eyed Behemoth, which is not just stompy but pleasantly straightforward all-around.

“This Spirit or Aspect could or should be an Incarna” cropped up another few times over the development process, and when it came time to name the expansion, it was really clear that the name should reflect the presence of the Incarna, what with half the new Spirits using the mechanic.

E: Oh, sure. Half the Spirits had some sort of origin prior to the start of design for Nature Incarnate, anything from “just a name + thematic concept” to “this was a candidate for Jagged Earth that was dropped from testing once we decided what the 12 published Spirits would be”. And Ember-Eyed Behemoth shares part of its name and concept with a pre-publication playtest Spirit from 2012-2013, though not much mechanically.

This isn’t all that surprising; while making Jagged Earth, I never really stopped designing new Spirits. I slowed down over time, because I was running the development for Jagged Earth, and because past a certain point it became clear that we had enough viable candidates, but sometimes my headspace would be better suited to new designs than to iterating on existing ones. I think I ended up with about 27 designs that had a panel + Unique Powers roughed out? Which, to be clear, is still the very early stages of design, the Spirit might not even ever have been played, but they’d gone beyond “concept” to some sort of initial implementation. So if you go by that metric, Jagged Earth produced more unpublished designs than published ones.

I don’t think any of the Spirits in Nature Incarnate can really be said to be two prior concepts merged together, nor split apart, for that matter. There’s definitely been evolutions, though: the first Incarna Spirit had this one piece of its design - just a single Unique power card - that testers really found appealing, and the dev team said, “well, why don’t we lean into that and make it the center of the Spirit’s gameplay?” So it ended up metamorphosing in a really interesting and thematically-appropriate way, it’s great!

B: Where do you get your inspiration for spirits that aren’t reworks of unused spirits?

E: All over the place. Sometimes I’ll think of a natural thing - or observe one, or be reminded of one - and run with that. But not every spirit is a tangible hill or river or storm, some are more subtle or abstract concepts. I mean, I try to give a distinctive and unique viewpoint to the Spirits that are tangible things like hills or rivers or storms, but, for instance, Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares is not a bit of the physical world you can point to in the way you can “the ocean” or “a volcano”.

So there’s also Spirits like Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares, or Finder of Paths Unseen, maybe even Grinning Trickster Stirs Up Trouble, which you can sort of think of as action or task or happening-based Spirits? A Spirit defined more by what it does than by it being a particular thing, though that’s kind of a human-viewed distinction to make, Spirits would see both as expressions of fundamental nature. But even from the human point of view, it’s not a sharp dividing line. Fractured Days Split the Sky is both a Spirit of the sun + moon + heavens (things you can point to) and the eclipse (a happening) and a number of things intertwined with the concept of fractured time (recurrence, disjunctions, stasis, might-have-beens).

And then there’s also Spirits which are harder to pin down, it’s less easy for a human to point to what they “are”, because Spirits are beings and can be complicated, or simple along lines that aren’t readily visible to humans. Thunderspeaker is like this. It used to be Bright Thunder Roars, a specific thing in nature, but it’s grown and changed from that starting-point. It still partakes of its former nature, but it’s not quite that anymore. Just like other beings, Spirits can grow and change over time. Shifting Memory of Ages can be thought of as a Spirit of memory, but it’s also much more than that: it’s a being with a long and complex history, and that history has shaped what it is now. This is also true of more directly representative Spirits, I should add!

In Western culture, we tend to draw this very strong line between what is the landscape and what is sapient. In Spirit Island, that’s just not true - the Spirits are the land, and Spirits are sapient. But Spirits are not only the land - they are many other things as well, richer and more diverse.

Not all Spirit concepts first spring from that “what is this Spirit?” direction, though - the seed of a design might come from something elemental, or mechanical, or play dynamics, or play experience, or the setting’s lore, or the game’s themes, or even “what Spirit might consider this Major Power as an ‘ultimate’ of sorts, at least for its starting nature?”

B: Getting more into that, which does come first - lore or gameplay? Is there ever anything that you have to redesign for lore over gameplay? Is there a priority?

E: Lore in the sense of “the text on the back of a Spirit’s panel” can come at any point in the process - sometimes as a part of the initial concept, sometimes not until a good ways through development - but that’s different than the thematic concept of a Spirit. I can know “this is a lightning Spirit, also of swiftness and wind and storms; it is sparking and bursty and dangerous to buildings, but gets along decently well with the Dahan, though it’s more of a ‘swoop in, swoop out’ sort than living side-by-side with them” without knowing the Spirit’s exact appearance or the full text of its lore blurb.

It rarely matters whether a Spirit’s thematic concept or mechanics or something else entirely forms the initial seed of an idea, because whichever arises first then gets used to fill in the other very early on. If a Spirit’s theme suggests certain mechanics, those mechanics will absolutely then loop back and influence the theme. Often it’s more of a three-way dance between thematic concept, elements, and mechanics, sometimes including other things, too. All the things that can prompt Spirit ideas can also be parts of a Spirit to fill in during design, and once filled in they may exert force on the other parts of the design. There’s a lot of ping-ponging back and forth early on, elaborating more on one facet for a while then circling back to see what those elaborations imply about the rest of it.

One of the challenges we tackled with Nature Incarnate was that since I wasn’t running development, there was more opportunity for changes to drift a Spirit away from what I considered its core thematic nature. I could only braindump so much about a Spirit’s theming to the devs (there’s always little details and feelings that are tricky to convey) and since I wasn’t running playtesting I didn’t have as strong a sense of the mechanical pressures on a design as they did. But the devs were great about pinging me when they weren’t sure on theming, and I did periodic reviews to be a touchstone on thematic elements. When we did find any drift, it usually wasn’t hard to address.

You can’t really say “X is more important than Y” as any sort of blanket rule about lore, theme, mechanics, or anything else, it’s all tradeoffs and balancing-acts. Whether a particular bit of mechanical complexity is worth the thematic boost it gives isn’t something you can reduce to mathematics, not just because how do you quantify theme?,, but also because it depends so much on other factors: how complex is the Spirit already, in what ways? Does this bit of theme come through through other parts of the design? What does this set of Spirits need in terms of complexity and play experience? Etc. The truism in game design is “experience is paramount”, but even the experience of a specific Spirit may need to flex in service to more holistic considerations of the game as a whole.

E: Thank you to all of you to all of the people who are excited about Spirit Island! Seeing people being happy about the game online is immensely gratifying and makes it even more fun to work on.

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Thanks to Eric for sitting down with Bailey to give us a little more information about the creation and inspiration of Incarna. We’re going to round off this update with another card preview!

Spirit Island is great at creating moments where players work as a team to decide what to do. Here’s a blight card that does just that:



Like the Aid from Lesser Spirits Blight card, the players must divide a set of Power cards. And since they each gain a Major Power, players also get a burst of energy to help play their new power. But! This leaves only 2 Blight per player, so you've gotta either act fast, or have a solid plan for defense and/or recovery.

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There we have it! Some fantastic insight to the creative and practical process of putting together Spirit Island from creator R. Eric Reuss, and a glimpse at one of the new Blight cards for Nature Incarnate! We look forward to bringing you more content on Wednesday! See you then!