grysqrl

Spirit Island is a heavy game. I’d like to think that we covered everything clearly in the rulebook, but there’s always room for improvement. Eric has created a great FAQ that we continue to build as questions come in. The intent is that you could look something up quickly mid-game without having to search through lots of forum posts. There’s a link/QR code to it on the back of the rulebook.

If you find that you still have questions, feel free to post them here, on BGG, or on the Greater Than Games forums and we’ll try to get you an answer quickly (and post it on the FAQ if it isn’t already there).

It’s worth noting that Omnitron-II will only flip if there are no Components in play. This includes Components belonging to Omnitron-X. So, if you want to get rid of those pesky railguns and beams and rays but don’t want to have to deal with an endless stream of drones, have Omnitron-X keep at least one Component in play and destroy all of Omnitron-II’s. Omnitron-II will stay on its front side, where it is somewhat less terrible.

If you are playing with the advanced rules, bear in mind that you will be electing to keep the device damage reduction in place, so this little trick can work against you if you don’t have the right team.

Don’t forget that you can deviate from your blueprint. You are essentially subtracting one point from each of your dice by missing the six point bonus for completing the blueprint, but if you can overcome that point deficit by building a tower with lots of black dice on top, for instance, it can be worth it.

Handelabra released version 1.1 the other day. The update includes six unlockable promos. How do you unlock them? It’s a secret! Kind of. By now, people have figured out all of the unlocks. If you want to figure it out yourself, then stop reading. If you need them unlocked this very instant, here’s how (as best as I can tell):
-Young Legacy: Baron Blade has to incap Legacy at Wagner Mars Base
-Rook City Wraith: Use two Infrared Eyepieces on one turn
-Super Scientific Tachyon: put five Burst cards into your trash on one turn
-GI Bunker: as Bunker, use all three modes during one game
-Bomber Blade: kill Citizens Blood, Sweat, and Tears in one round (must have defeated Baron Blade previously)
-Omnitron II: kill both of Voss’ ships in one round (must have defeated Omnitron I previously)

It sounds like many folks have had problems with the sliders being too loose. If you hold the sliders in boiling water for ~20 seconds, they will soften a little bit. Then you can close them a little bit and they will fit better. Use pliers.

When going through the start-of-phase events, I was having trouble keeping track of which cards have been processed and which have not, especially when one card triggered other card plays. So, what I do is place a wooden cube on every card that needs to be processed. Once it’s done, I remove the cube. This also works well for marking Station cards that need to be flipped during the Aftermath phase.

We’ve been getting a little frustrated with the losing-most-of-your-stuff at the end of each chapter, so have added the following house rule:

An additional free action available on your turn – spend 9 cheese to permanently add one of your currently held items (not consumables) to your starting equipment.

Now Filch doesn’t have to spend the first half of each chapter looking for a knife or two to make Knife Strike worth using. And getting captured is a little less punishing. This seems stronger than leveling up and adding skills, so we increased the price accordingly.

I second Timberella’s suggestion of using stands for monsters. I actually set aside a certain number of stands on the main board and in the outskirts to match the limits for each of those places. That way, if I have to place a monster and there are no stands left, I immediately know that I hit the limit and the monster has to go to the outskirts or it’s time to bump the terror level. I find it much easier to track this way without having to keep two more numbers in mind all the time.

Obviously, you need to have extra stands for other boards when playing with expansions, since those monsters don’t count towards the Arkham monster limit.

A fun little trick when Mr. Fixer faces off against Plague Rat (or any other situation where he is damaging himself or other heroes):

1) When a hero is infected, they will deal themselves damage at the beginning of their turn.

2) With Jack Handle in play, whenever Mr. Fixer deals damage, he instead deals that damage to all non-hero targets.

Therefore, at the beginning of his turn, an infected Mr. Fixer will deal that infection damage to all non-hero targets instead of himself.

I totally forgot about Omnitron-X. Fixed Point allows you to get multiple plating cards out at the same time. Not only does this give you much better protective coverage, but your Defensive Blasts will be ridiculous.

The next time you play as Mr. Fixer or the Naturalist in Time Cataclysm, be on the lookout for Fixed Point. Both of these characters use a one-mode-at-a-time mechanic (Forms for Naturalist and Styles and Tools for Mr. Fixer) where playing a new mode card destroys existing modes (or returns them to your hand, in the case of the Tools). Fixed Point prevents this resulting removal of cards already on the board, allowing you to have multiple modes out simultaneously.

-Jack Handle + Dual Crowbars = 2 strikes against all non-hero targets
-Alternating Tiger Claw + Riveting Crane + Jack Handle gives you and all of your teammates irreducible damage against everything on the board
-Crocodile Form + Rhino Form + Gazelle Form = an unstoppable beast that benefits from all icons on all of Naturalist’s cards

Next time you see Fixed Point come up, try it out. Just make sure you don’t play one of your mode cards after Fixed Point goes away or they will all be destroyed.

I haven’t been playing for long, but every time the Abduction Search card comes up, it completely derails what’s going on. The effects seem a little bit too strong for something that’s totally random and is nearly impossible to prepare for. Ordinarily the effects are as follows:
-Remove the mouse from the board
-Advance the hourglass token
-Remove all wounds/effects
-Lose equipped non-starting items and all cheese
-The mouse is out for the rest of the battle (if in a battle)
-The next mouse’s search is wasted to bring this mouse back (rescued instead of finding a Search card)

I’ve been modifying it as follows:
-The mouse is removed from the board as normal until another mouse successfully searches for them
-The hourglass marker is not moved
-For each equipped piece of non-starting equipment (doesn’t include pack) and for each piece of cheese, roll a die. If the die shows a *, then they keep the item/cheese. If not, then they lose it. Normally they would lose all of it.
-I haven’t decided about whether or not to keep the wounds yet (I’ve only had wound-less mice abducted so far).

This keeps Abduction disruptive, but makes it a little bit less terrible; the games have been more fun as a result.

Does anyone else do anything else like this?

Sentinels includes a scaling mechanic where many effects are derived from the number of heroes being played (H). Usually, this means something like the villain deals a target (H)-1 damage or something like that, so the fight gets more difficult when you add more heroes.

You can make the game more challenging by playing villains on Advanced mode. Another way to do it, if you’re looking to make things a little more dicey for our heroes is to artificially increase the value of (H); so you might use (H)=5 if you’re only playing with 4 heroes. It can add a little spice to that villain that falls down a little too easily for your liking.

Conversely, you can lower (H) to make the game easier, though, this can create some interesting complications when you encounter (H)-2 of something and (H) is less than 3.

cleave29’s tip below actually isn’t a legal play. Wrest the Mind cannot be played on a character card (i.e. the main villain, other heroes, and a few exceptions like the Operative).

There is another nice two-card combo that you can use:
-Play Twist the Ether on Visionary, allowing you to change her damage type and boost or lower it by 1.
-Play Wrest the Mind on a non-character villain or environment target
-When the target of Wrest the Mind deals damage, you can redirect it to the villain (or whatever target you like). Twist the Ether then allows you to reduce the damage that Visionary does to herself and to the Wrested target (making it survive longer). Or increase the damage to the Wrested target if you want to kill it faster.

This is primarily useful on targets that deal large, single-instance damage (e.g. 5 damage to a single target rather than 1 damage to each target) since it costs Visionary HP to use Wrest.

A role I’ve been tinkering with for awhile. The new Quarantine Specialist is actually a lot like it.

-The RRC starts with two Med Kits in inventory.
-For an action, they can place a med kit in the city they are currently in or spend an action and a card to place one in that city.
-Once placed, the med kit absorbs the next cube that would be placed on the city and is destroyed.
-The RRC can pick up additional med kits for an action at any research station.
-The RRC acts as a durable med kit – disease cubes can’t be placed on their current location.

One of my groups plays such that instead of each individual hero taking their entire turn in order, all heroes play the same phase at the same time. This means that everyone does their “at the start of your turn” cards at the same time. Then everyone does their play phase at the same time (in any order, if it is relevant). When the play phase is done, everyone uses their powers (again, in any order). Then everyone draws and does their “at the end of your turn” items.

This has the effect of making the game go more quickly (no waiting around for three other people to play in sequence) and gives the heroes some more flexibility in how they play off each other.

It’s easy to get confused about Akash’bhuta’s Game Play section if you don’t read it carefully enough. I just played her for the first time and misread the “whenever a villain target enters play/is destroyed” line as instructing you to play the top card of the environment deck (when you should actually just discard it).

Do not make my mistake! This caused horrible chain reactions where I pulled a villain target, which caused me to pull an environment target, which caused more villain targets, which each caused more environment targets… until I had about 10 primeval limbs and most of the denizens of the block out on the first villain turn.

Luckily, I realized my mistake about halfway into the game and managed to recover once I started playing correctly.

In games that I host, we usually pull out all of the Rumor mythos cards and play without them (especially in small games). I find they are more of a distraction from the story than an interesting challenge and they make the game less fun.