Overview & How to Play

If you’ve spent time researching crunchy coop games, you’ve probably stumbled upon Spirit Island, currently the number 11th ranked game on Board Game Geek!

Now, to ease newcomers into what Spirit Island, a Diet $30 version exists at Target! It has the same gameplay as normal Spirit Island, so what is that?

Ahem. Once upon a time, there was an island in the middle of the ocean, where Spirits, us, made peace with some shroom looking natives called Dahan. It was chill and happy until the white-colored invader pieces came in, blighting the island. We must kill them to protect the island!

Every turn looks like this: you first gain some energy, then use energy to program some cards from your hand, keeping in mind what locations the invaders will activate this turn. Then everyone’s fast (bird symboled) cards go off, you choose to do them in any order, e.g. defending an area to prevent attacks this turn, or set up one of your fellow Spirit teammates.

After all the fast abilities, the invaders will do their 3 pronged move for 3 regions on cards:

1. Ravage land they’re in, spreading blight and/or killing your Spirit’s presence tokens there

2. Build more of themselves

3. Explore, to spawn more dudes

After all the baddies, us Spirits still have our slow (turtle symboled) cards, we trigger those. Once everyone is done with all their slow abilities, then discard all the cards you used that round, and start the next round of programming away with your remaining hand!

Anytime we meet our win condition of killing all the white invaders we win the game!

Why is Spirit Island so popular?

What we’ve explained so far seems like fairly straightforward coop play, but Spirit Island actually has an insane amount of depth once you start factoring in every spirit’s unique passives that they should exploit to gain advantage, while also combining it with their unique hand of cards. So, the game becomes very puzzling to push or pull allies/enemies to the right land, thinking how to prevent baddies from attacking/building, and/or to set up one of your big attacks.

Also, each card you play will have elements on them, so those will fuel your spirit’s unique innate abilities- so that’s another thing to consider when playing every card! There’s never a shortage of things to do every turn, with multiple spirits thrown into a single island to work together.

The gameplay loop is pretty much endlessly replayable and gives new ways to puzzle in every match, as each player’s spirit’s presence unlocks are entirely different, and you’re just getting MORE cards and MORE elements to combo as you progress every turn.

Pros

Horizons of Spirit Island, or as we like to call it: Spirit Island Horizons, has some component streamlining with its single board, where you can now clearly see an island flanked by water. Compare that to the original: that had modular tiles and 2 boards after all was setup. Horizon’s 1 board is double-sided, where it has the numbers for your player count setup exactly printed on it for Blight and Fear, making setup just a smidgen faster than before.

And sure, with Horizons there’s no more small plastic minis for pieces, but the cardboard tokens are still good quality, and the player boards being a single sheet with some type of nice laminate over it feels very sturdy.

The rest of the stuff we’re gonna praise here is all par for the course for Spirit Island, incredible art, clear symbols everywhere, an awesome player guide at the back of each spirit, and the board colors are super easy to keep track of. The card art taken from Spirit Island is still very imagery invoking, and there are zero copies of cards in the entire game! And yes, the 5 new spirits keep up the Spirit Island standard of gorgeous art.

We’re not going to go too in depth about Spirit Island gameplay or how the theme meets gameplay in general, we’ll save that for the bigger Spirit Island review when we drop it… maybe/probably one day.

The new spirits are unique to Horizons, which we can talk about. Thank goodness this is still awesome because Spirit Island’s crunchiness really came together with Spirits being entirely different: with unique hands of cards, passives, innate powers, different ways to progress, AND cool names/backstories… and that’s still here! And since this can look a bit complicated, the new Spirits are all really easy to pick up by Spirit Island standards.

The “Devouring Teeth Lurk Underfoot” that looks like a lizard + Dune sandworm gives you a simple +1 damage on attacks, to facilitate ME SMASH sort of gameplay. Or, if you pilot “Eyes Watch from the Trees”, you can pull Dahans into any region you’re defending- so then newcomers are easily taught how you can turn defense into offense, as defended Dahans survive ravages, and counterattack the invaders.

There’s 3 more Spirits: one good at pushing baddies to different regions, another to do more damage (again), and the last is also defensively minded. Same Spirit Island type of asymmetry, just simpler now.

Plus, real cool thing with these 5 starting Spirits is that they ALL have something included in their starting hand that will blatantly help another Spirit, which is a great way to start the cooperation for new groups. You can do the Spirit Island:

“Hey do you need to just do a SMIDGEN extra damage somewhere?.” Or,

“Are you attacking this turn? I can get you +3 damage, (holy heck that’s a lot, that’s 3 white dudes!)”.

And what is entirely new to Spirit Island is a Power Card Recommendation that will just tell you what cards to upgrade with for each Spirit! So if you don’t know what the heck to upgrade mid-game, as that can be a bit complex with drawing 4 Power Cards to choose 1, cross analyzing all of their abilities and Element payouts with your current hand and Spirit’s abilities, you can just look up what the game suggests, grab it, and it will definitely align with your Spirit’s Elements and initial suggested strategies.

To round it all out, there is a lot of replayability in this box for $30, where it’s the same formula as Spirit Island, where you won’t see all the 15 Fear or 36 Minor & 22 Major Power cards every game. Plus, when you factor in how you can take the ‘no-repeats’ Power Cards into the 5 new Spirits’ unique starting hands of cards, that’s so many ways to mix and match abilities!

Cons & Nitpicks

Right away we have to start with the Quick Start guide, it’s not horrible, but still far from good. It doesn’t even show player’s board setups, rather it just explains through text, which is NOT newcomer friendly. Overall, its just a TON of paragraphs of text without many visuals. Not only is this not that ‘quick’ because its clunky, it just isn’t that thorough as it only goes through a SINGLE round. And it’s only for 3 players, so if you have less than that, be prepared to pilot multiple Spirits at the same time if you’re learning the game.

We compare this to Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, the other streamlined version of a popular board game. Jaws is straight up throwing players into a 5 scenario long tutorial that supports any player count, complete with streamlined cards, an actual story, and ramping difficulty. You will REALLY understand Gloomhaven through this, as you can learn by DOING.

Horizons has no such ease, like sure, its spirits are easier than base Spirit Island’s overall, and it gives you the Power Card upgrade cheat sheet, but that doesn’t feel like nearly enough, for a system that is actually MORE complicated than Gloomhaven.

To round out the learning woes, there’s no player aids, which is really weird because Spirit Island expansions already have really good ones, so why not put those in? Plus, the rulebook is just as long as base Spirit Island, where in separating examples and visuals from the text, runs VERY long at almost 20 pages of pure rules.

A new confusion was what the back side of certain pieces on the island mean: it is meant to show that they’re damaged, but the rulebook will just tell you to ‘flip things over’ in text to mark this… not even showing the damaged symbol! Compare this to normal Spirit Island, where there’s a full section talking about how to damage pieces.

Then, smaller spaces on the board can get really cramped, as cardboard Dahans, Towns, Cities, etc. quickly fill up each region. Normal Spirit Island didn’t have this problem because these pieces were tiny miniatures, but now, Horizons uses the same map, just with bigger pieces, so there’s gonna be problems. There’s a 3x token for explorers which doesn’t help much, since Towns, Blight, and Dahans on average take up the most space. Not sure why they didn’t just make the board bigger.

Some nitpicks include international availability, since this game is being sold exclusively at Target; but Greater than Games has noted that you can just order Horizons through non-US game stores… so maybe that won’t be too much more expensive/long-winded to get? Then, you can’t play Horizons with 4 people, which is odd coming from normal Spirit island, and if they included another game board that single player could also use, 4 players would be easily do-able with the amount of Spirits and components already in Horizons.

And the insert included was just lazily done cardboard, but luckily the game includes plastic bags for everything.

The last nitpicks are for Spirit Island as a whole: we would have wished they had some type of system to help you keep track of Elements, as that can get confusing mid-late game when lots of cards are flying around. Then, the setup and playtips for each spirit are on the back of its player board, where you put the wooden presence discs on top of. So to look at your playtips mid game, you need to take off your presence tokens off of specific slots.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve skipped ahead to see our Recommender Score below, you might’ve been entirely shocked at the 5/10. The question is, how can this be!? Horizons is gameplay that just as good as Spirit Island, but just less expensive! Well, we’re evaluating Spirit Island Horizons as its own product, a game specifically trying to streamline the original and have it reach more gamers/non-board gamers than ever before. For reference, we would give Spirit Island, the original, a 9/10 Tentative Score, where the Tentativeness comes from us only playing it under the supervision of one of our Spirit Island fanboy buddies.

Again, Horizons has all the Spirit Island core awesomeness, where aesthetic is fantastic, gameplay is the the same balancing of cards and resources to puzzle away the colonists, all while wielding distinct Spirits to thematically save the island. But besides making the Spirits simpler, Horizons isn’t that easy to start, which is what it’s TRYING TO DO.

There’s no new player aids or tip sheets, the Quick Start guide isn’t really a quick start, AND that was ONLY FOR THREE PLAYERS. Again, our Holy Grail for making a whole new tutorial game for an existing game is Jaws of the Lion, which excelled in getting you playing Gloomhaven as fast as possible with a play as you go tutorial, and went beyond in having that tutorial tie into its campaign!

So… why not just get actual Spirit Island, that has the same crunchy euro-y asymmetric coop gameplay but just more of it? That is technically $90 MSRP, but when you factor in that it’s been around for so long and is always in stock, you can find it at around $70 on average on Amazon, closer to $60 on board game specific websites, and it’s currently $50 on Amazon at the time of writing this. $50 blows Horizons out of the water in value, as the base Spirit Island is the same gameplay, just better components and even included variants.

If buying Horizons would save you $50-60 bucks over buying base Spirit Island somehow, then we would say Horizons’ score raises to a 6/10 on price alone.

A big question is: well is Spirit Island even a good game to get this “Jaws of the Lion” tutorial treatment anyways? Kind of? It’s a system that due to how complex it is, was historically tricky for fans to keep track of their own Spirit and side of the island while actually helping newcomers out. But that’s the nature of Spirit Island, so you would have to change a LOT of Spirit Island gameplay for it to be more newcomer friendly. Not changing the core mechanics works better in Jaws of the Lion because Gloomhaven’s core gameplay is fairly simple.

For those Spirit Island fans out there, who just drool over anything new Spirit Island, then sure, here’s 5 spirits for $30 which isn’t bad, then you just disregard the rest of Horizons.

But these 5 spirits are super easy compared to Spirit Island’s big collection of complex spirits, so would these noob spirits be something you wanna play if you’re a veteran? Maybe you get these noob spirits to use to introduce your friends to Spirit Island, but base Spirit Island already had easy spirits! Maybe you just wait for an expansion pack to just get these spirits on their own?

Horizons of Spirit Island just feels lazy and perhaps TOO insistent on being inexpensive, cutting corners in learning, replay value, and some quality of life to do so. We’re not gonna fault you for getting this, but if you are at Target looking at Horizons, see if you just can’t save up more for actual Spirit Island.