Spirit Island: Feather & Flame

Spirit Island: Feather & Flame

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Spirit Island: Feather and Flame is an expansion released in 2022 for the award-winning cooperative game Spirit Island. In Spirit Island, players take the role of different spirits of a distant island where magic still exists. These spirits of the land have awakened to protect the island from colonizing Invaders from European countries that threaten the population of the Island and …
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Category Tag SKU ZBG-GTGSISLFTFL Availability 3+ in stock
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Spirit Island: Feather and Flame is an expansion released in 2022 for the award-winning cooperative game Spirit Island.

In Spirit Island, players take the role of different spirits of a distant island where magic still exists. These spirits of the land have awakened to protect the island from colonizing Invaders from European countries that threaten the population of the Island and the nature itself. Players role is then to cooperate together to push away the invaders from the shores of the island before the damage done to the land is irreparable.

Every turn, each spirit will choose which action to take, which of their power cards to play and which part of the island to defend or regenerate. As each spirit has different powers and abilities, players can work together to combine their spirits’ elemental powers and develop a winning strategy. At the same time, players could challenge themselves to win with each single spirit in solo games.

Spirit Island: Feather and Flame expansion increases base game variability for both solo games and cooperative games by adding four new Spirits and one new Adversary. In addition, the spirits of this expansion are among the more complex in the game allowing players to bring the challenge to a whole new level.

This product includes:

· 4 additional Spirits (Finder of Paths Unseen, Downpour Drenches the World, Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island, and Heart of the Wildfire). All these Spirits were previously releases in Spirit Island Promo Packs 1 & 2;

· 18 Innate Power cards to be used with the new spirits;

· 5 Fear Cards;

· 5 Aspect Cards for the base game spirits (Vital Strength of the Earth, Lightning’s Swift Strike, Shadows Flicker like Flame, River Surges in Sunlight);

· 2 Scenario Panels (A Diversity of Spirits; Varied Terrain);

· 1 New Adversary with its escalation panel (The Kingdom of Scotland).

Players: 1-4

Playing Time: 90-120 Min

Age: 13+

Awards

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You Might Like

  • Four new spirits to play
  • More replayabilty
  • Convienient way to get Promo pack 1 & 2

Might Not Like

  • Spirits are on the complex side
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Description

Spirit Island: Feather and Flame is an expansion released in 2022 for the award-winning cooperative game Spirit Island.

In Spirit Island, players take the role of different spirits of a distant island where magic still exists. These spirits of the land have awakened to protect the island from colonizing Invaders from European countries that threaten the population of the Island and the nature itself. Players role is then to cooperate together to push away the invaders from the shores of the island before the damage done to the land is irreparable.

Every turn, each spirit will choose which action to take, which of their power cards to play and which part of the island to defend or regenerate. As each spirit has different powers and abilities, players can work together to combine their spirits' elemental powers and develop a winning strategy. At the same time, players could challenge themselves to win with each single spirit in solo games.

Spirit Island: Feather and Flame expansion increases base game variability for both solo games and cooperative games by adding four new Spirits and one new Adversary. In addition, the spirits of this expansion are among the more complex in the game allowing players to bring the challenge to a whole new level.

This product includes:

· 4 additional Spirits (Finder of Paths Unseen, Downpour Drenches the World, Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island, and Heart of the Wildfire). All these Spirits were previously releases in Spirit Island Promo Packs 1 & 2;

· 18 Innate Power cards to be used with the new spirits;

· 5 Fear Cards;

· 5 Aspect Cards for the base game spirits (Vital Strength of the Earth, Lightning's Swift Strike, Shadows Flicker like Flame, River Surges in Sunlight);

· 2 Scenario Panels (A Diversity of Spirits; Varied Terrain);

· 1 New Adversary with its escalation panel (The Kingdom of Scotland).

Players: 1-4

Playing Time: 90-120 Min

Age: 13+

Spirit Island is a cooperative game where you take on the role of a spirit defending your island against colonising invaders. The game is challenging, complex and highly strategic but offers deep, rich and satisfying gameplay. The Feather And Flame expansion is no exception!

Each player takes on the role of a different spirit of the land with their own unique elemental powers. The spirits responsibility is to rid the land of the invading forces. Each turn players simultaneously select power cards to play, paying the required energy. Players can activate power cards in any order but come in fast and slow cards. Fast cards are played earlier on in the round and slower power cards played towards the end of the round (after the invader phase). Playing certain power cards may give you access to your spirit’s inherent abilities.

The invaders will also ravage, build and expand into various regions of the map each round. They will attempt to spread blight, destroy your presence and remove the indegenous Dahan. As the spirits you have powerful attacks and powers at your disposal to fight back and save your land.

Each spirit feels different and plays different. Each game, despite trying to achieve the same objective, feels different. The replayability is high just in the core game. Add to this the Branch & Claw expansion from 2017, the Jagged Earth expansion from 2020 and now the Feather & Flame expansion which has just been released there is a huge amount of content which will keep you entertained for many, many plays. Feather and Flame expansion is a combination of promo packs one and two boxed together in a single expansion.

Final Thoughts

So, what does Feather and Flame bring to the table? In this small box expansion you will get four new spirits to get to grips with, one new adversary to tackle, two new scenarios to test yourself against and a bunch of new cards.

Feather And Flame: Spirits

The spirits in this box are probably the main draw for me. However, these are not for the faint hearted. Ranging from high complexity (x3) to very high (x1) complexity these spirits bring depth and complexity that will take some time to get grips with. The growth paths branch off in multiple directions with Finder of Paths Unseen and to a lesser extent Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island. Heart of the Wildfire gives you fire tokens which, with certain powers trigger additional actions. Similar to Heart of the Wildfire, Downpour Drenches the World gives you access to water tokens. The use of these additional tokens is not new and was seen in Branch and Claw but I like how they have been incorporated and utilised in this expansion.

The spirits took me a good few plays to get to grips with and I am still not sure how to effectively run them but they are a lot of fun to play. I am always amazed at how different the spirits feel in each expansion and Feather and Flame is no exception. These spirits are a great addition if you are huge Spirit Island fan and will give you a lot of additional content to play.

And The Rest

Scotland is included in this expansion as an adversary, with a base difficulty of one. Whilst the adversary is just more of the good stuff that was included in the core game, it again adds more content and more replay value to the game.

There are two new scenarios, A Diversity of Spirits and Varied Terrains. Diversity of Spirits adds some limited communication elements for a thematic touch. Why should the air spirits and the water spirits speak the same language? This is not my favourite scenario to be honest but I can see how some people will enjoy the limited communication aspect. Varied Terrains which adds a unique effect to each terrain type. This is a pretty interesting scenario which I have only touched on in my plays but I had fun with it. Both of these scenarios, as with everything in this expansion, adds more replayabilty and more content for hardcore Spirit Island fans to dig into.

Overall, if you are a fan of Spirit Island and have not picked up the promo packs one and two yet then this could be a good option for you. It adds more content, more replayability and four challenging spirits to get to grips with that have some interesting mechanisms. This is not an expansion that I would recommend picking up first however. But it is a must if you are a fan.

Feather & Flame is the latest expansion for Spirit Island and includes all items previously released in Promo Pack 1 and Promo Pack 2. The expansion includes: 4 new spirits with their powers, 5 aspect cards for the spirits of the core game, 5 fear cards, new adversary with its reminder tiles and 2 scenarios.

Overall, the expansion does not add any new mechanics but it expands the material available adding more challenges. In fact, the spirits of this expansion are among the more complex available to date. As Feather and Flame uses the same rules as Spirit Island the core box, I will focus on how you could use the new spirits, adversary and scenarios and integrate them into your games.

New Spirits

As mentioned, the newest expansion of Spirit Island adds four new spirits. Three spirits are rated high and one very high for complexity. What makes these spirits so challenging to play is a combination of some of their main traits:

· Two spirits have the two presence trackers that cross each other. One of them multiple times in a complex network.

· All spirits have one or more options to gain additional elemental tokens. One of them generates very reduced amount of energy per turn although it generates tons of elemental tokens.

· Three out of four spirits have some kind of limitations or backslash for their powers. In detail, two of them damage the land or the invaders/Dahans every time they add their presence and the other one needs to sacrifice presence tokens to add more then 5 of them to the map.

When using one of those four spirits, the players should evaluate if their characteristics match their playing style. These spirits need to be pushed to use their strengths to the maximum to achieve victory and players will need to plan their strategy accordingly.

For example, one of my favourite spirit is Heart of the Wildfire, a very offensive spirit of fire and destruction. The spirit will generate additional fire tokens as he grows and these tokens will influence both the fast innate power “Firestorm” and the spirit special rule “Blazing presence”. In both cases the spirit generates damage proportional to the fire tokens BUT it will not attack only the invaders. The more powerful the spirit grows, the more damage it will also deal to the Dahan and to the land itself. The destructive force of this spirit is, however, balanced by the innate power “The burned land regrows” that allows you to remove blight tokens.

In addition to the above, this spirit only has four power cards although it could get new ones during the growing phase (2 options out of the three available). This initially seems a great opportunity to use multiple powers but you soon realize that Heart of the Wildfire can generate a lot of energy only by generating a lot of fire tokens (and uncontrolled damage). Moreover, getting good new power cards that fit this spirit style could prove challenging due to the randomness of the deck. The only way to use this spirit efficiently is to turn its destructive powers towards the invaders quickly enough to balance the damages it will deal at a later stage.

Overall, each new spirit is different and it will take some time to figure out how they can be used effectively.

Feather & Flame – Aspect Cards

The aspect cards are not new to the game, as we have already seen some in the first expansion: Branch and Claw. Aspect cards can be used to change how one of the core game spirit plays by swapping a special rule for that spirit with the one on the aspect cards. Most of the times the change increase the complexity of the spirit but offers more strategic options. Let’s look at a few examples.

The spirit Vital Strength of the Earth loses its “defend 3” rule to gain a fast power that increases the number of cards it could play each turn or the damage it deals. This allows a player to focus on removing presence mainly to generate more energy per turn while still playing a good number of power cards.

Similarly, the spirit River Surges in Sunlight can lose its River domain trait (each presence in the wetlands count as a sacred site) to gain “Travel”, a trait with two effects. The first is the ability to move 2 Dahan huts from a land to a land where there is a spirit presence token. If 4 or more huts are present in a land as a result of these moves, the second effect will be triggered and that land will become a sacred site and gain defend 1.

The only aspect that does not supersede a special rule is “Immense” for the Spirit Lighting Swift Strike. This new rule allows the spirit to generate double the energy but each power card played counts as two cards. This trait seems opposite somehow to the aspect of Vital Strength of the Earth as players can avoid to growth the energy tracker but they need to increase very quickly the amount of cards they can play per turn to ensure they are effective enough.

Feather & Flame – New Scenarios

Feather and Flame includes two new scenarios. Adding a scenario to your games is pretty simple as all rules needed for the scenario are listed on the scenario card itself. If you have never played a scenario I would recommend to not play it with adversary and other additional elements as the number of rules to keep in mind could be a bit daunting.

The first scenario, “Varied Terrains” adds an extra rule to each terrain type. The special effect of the terrain takes place during a different invader phase and it is always in favour of the invaders. The effects range from adding a new explorer or a city after the explore or the build phase, to build twice per turn or to always cascade the blight. Considering the increased building, it is recommended not to play this scenario with the Kingdom of England as this adversary is notably good at building.

The second scenario is a bit more peculiar as it a adds a limited communication element to the game. In this scenario, players can only use gestures, body language and noises to help coordinating a strategy. Each player can speak freely during the execution of their actions to explain what they are doing or to ask for tokens etc. Essentially, the scenario does not increase the adversary strength but it forces the players to read each other strategy to be able to support it. There is also a nice benefit if a presence token is added to a land with at least another spirit presence.

Feather & Flame – New Adversary, Kingdom Of Scotland

The new adversary that comes in this expansion is a mighty one: The Kingdom of Scotland. In general this adversary does not penalize a particular spirit choice or play-style too much. Its strength comes mainly from the ability to generate repeated waves of assaults that can be a problem if you are unable to constantly contain them.

When playing at any difficulty level above 1, the rule “Seize opportunity” changes the invader deck structure a first time. As a result, there is an increased chance that the same lands will come up repeatedly. Especially if the land is on the coast.

The more the difficulty level increases, the higher is the chance of repeating the same lands both on the coast and inland.

As a result, even if a player manages to avoid the invaders to ravage a land, they will need to defend the same land right after, perhaps with a new town added due to one of the other special rules of this adversary.

Zatu Score

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You might like

  • Four new spirits to play
  • More replayabilty
  • Convienient way to get Promo pack 1 & 2

Might not like

  • Spirits are on the complex side