We got beat yesterday evening during our weekly game of Spirit Island, and by “we” I mean My Darling B and I. Tim did just fine defending his territory and he did what he could to help us protect ours. Winning the game is a group effort! So when B and I went down, we took Tim with us. Yay, team!

It’s a game of anti-colonization. Invaders explore the island, building towns and cities and blighting the land. Natives defend the island with the help of spirits, each of which have unique powers. My favorite spirits are Ocean’s Hungry Grasp and River Surges In Sunlight. Ocean is good at drowning invaders but can only get them if they’re near the coast. River is good at flooding the lands, which washes the invaders down to the shore where Ocean can get at them. That’s a pretty good example of how the game relies on teamwork.

I was playing Fractured Days Split The Sky, a spirit I had played only once before. It’s a spirit with very complex powers that frankly intimidated me so much I didn’t dream of playing it for the longest time, but I could tell from watching Tim play Fractured that it was a spirit with a lot of potential for helping out other spirits, so I wanted to learn how it worked.

I played Fractured Days last week and again last night and both times I felt like I was groping around in the dark with no chance of finding the light switch that turned on the big light bulb over my head, so I asked Tim for any hints he could give me that might help me learn how to make this spirit work. He pointed out that one of Fractured’s power cards, Blur The Arc Of Days, could be very useful for destroying invaders. He’d tried to point this out to me during the game but I was slow to pick up on it because to me, the power card seemed to be no more than a way to spawn and move the Dahan, which are the island natives we as spirits are supposed to be protecting.

The card also lets Fractured Days force invaders to ravage the lands. I didn’t see how that was helpful. Ravaging invaders can blight the island until the spirits gain the ability to defend against blight. Out of habit, I had trained myself to prevent the invaders from ravaging. Tim pointed out that after I acquired power to defend the land, I could destroy invaders by spawning Dahan, forcing the invaders to ravage, and protecting the Dahan from the ravage with my acquired defense, which allows the Dahan to fight back against the invaders, destroying them. Such a simple strategy that it completely evaded me. Now I wonder what other seemingly useless powers I’ve been overlooking.

Scotland Six kicked our butts! Tim picked the adversary for our game of Spirit Island last night. He likes a challenge, so he picked one of the tougher adversaries (in this case, Scotland — the adversaries are named for 19th-century countries or dynasties) and he dialed it all the way up to the most difficult setting (1 being the easiest, 6 being the most punishing). The game board is an island divided into six smaller boards, one for each spirit, and each spirit’s board is subdivided into lands named for their most prominent characteristic (mountains, jungle, wetlands). Spirits protect the island from encroaching invaders using magical powers which strengthen and multiply as the game progresses, but invaders can get a jump on the spirits by giving them the advantages of a particular adversary. The adversary Tim chose last night, for instance, can build lots and lots of towns under certain conditions. And build they did, all over one of the boards I was supposed to protect, while my spirit was still young and not very powerful. In other words, I got swamped early on and never recovered, even though other spirits tried to help me. In the final battle, all our spirits were overwhelmed by the blight which invaders bring to the island. We went down fighting, though.