Ranking all 24 spirits in spirit island (2021)

kyoto koto and welcome to three minute board games reviewing the various spirits from spirit island i'm sure many of you are familiar with the idea of a tier list we're going to work through a tier list and i'm going to talk through all of the spirits which i have played all of quite recently i've been playing a lot of spirit island over the last month or so uh ever since i got jacob i played the other 12 spirits that came before jacob a hell of a lot and i've been playing quite a bit with the other ones and starting to do some mixing and matching so this is going to be a tier ranking video estear means that i think they are super awesome and amazing and i'd be happy to play them anytime and possibly they're a little bit overpowered at absolutely great spirits would love to play every single time and then you go down the list b spirits c spirits d spirits i actually don't think i'm gonna end up with any d spirits because there aren't any spirits in the game i absolutely can't stand playing there's a few that i'm like yeah on but i'm i'm strongly leaning to the fact that they'll probably end up on the c maybe they'll end up something in the d's here who knows we'll go through the process we'll see how it shakes out so what i'm gonna do is go through the spirits one by one we're gonna bring up their stats i'm gonna have the ranking thing up here and we're just gonna work through it so let's get started the first spirit up is vital strength of the earth the big chunky rock boy vital strength of the earth has a bit of a reputation for being somewhat of a boring spirit he's quite strong but he's slow to develop and he doesn't do anything particularly exciting his special role lets people defend three in sacred sites which means you can build up quite tough thoughts his starting cards are an interesting mix with two cards that slow down the enemy either by pausing them or increasing defender in a region and then it's got rituals of destruction which is a bit of a maligned card because to get the best out of it you need to have three to hand in an area and vinyl strength to the earth is kind of crappy at doing that himself his innate power is pretty cool it allows another spirit or any spirit including himself to repeat a power and he's got a lot of presence and a reasonable number of card plays so while vinyl strength of the earth is kind of dull he's just a solid dependable rocky boy i really quite like playing him solo but he's you know i've been playing multiple spirits he's like anchors down one island but ultimately he's pretty average so we're gonna slide him up to the seat here next up is lightning swift strike whose special rules basically you can make all of your slow powers fast now one of the things in spirit island is when you first start playing you think fast powers are just the bee's knees fast powers are where everything's at because you don't quite have a grasp of how the timing and pacing of the game works as you play more you get more comfortable with slow powers and how good they can actually be so lightning swift strike is a bit of a crutch but he's fantastic for new players to uh contribute to a game and he's still pretty solid all the way through and the ability to make slow things fast especially for other players is one of those cards that comes with you is lightning's boon which allows another spirit to use two powers as if they were fast and just about every time i've played a game of lightning swift strike that's been the deciding factor to blow up a city or two before the uh invaders get to build so lighting swift strike a bit of a crutch for new players but can still contribute uh good damage dealer as well i'm gonna put him up in the a tier or one thing i do want to call out is the where is it it's the immense uh variant card that came in jagged earth which changes uh how lightning swift strike works and moves them from being a spirit that can play a lot of low power cards like six cards get five power turn you can play up to six cards when he's fully expanded this switches that around so you play three cards but you're getting 10 power and it makes um lightning swift strike quite a different spirit so really pleased to see some of these changes they made to the low complexity spirits just to give them an extra wrinkle and i think immense really adds new life to uh this otherwise i think pretty strong spirit okay we're up to river searches in sunlight uh special rules for river surges is that your normal presence count as sacred sites and wetlands that's not a huge thing but it does help you spread out and you can use some major powers later in the game solid sort of average presence and growth tracks you know five power five car draw and the innate power is nothing to write home about but it does have a double growth power which allows us to place two presents to turn so it can expand and get on the board pretty quick and it's got a grab bag of okay kind of spells and effects river surges is just dependable it's a dependable spirit they can move things around push things do a little bit of damage have a little bit of control it's probably never going to be a superstar in a game but it absolutely carries its own weight each and every time he plays a good basic control spirit and for that i'll put it in the beat here uh nothing to write home about super fancy or anything just a good solid control spirit um yeah next up we have the poor ugly boy of the spirit island world shadows flicker-like flames and shadows kind of suffers from a few things he just he doesn't have a strong identity he's got some abilities allowed to target to han he's got some fear he's got some damage he's a bit of a generalist like fear is one of his main things but you know other other spirits do it a lot better and he also has slow growth and all of these factors mean that shadows is probably um among the spirit island community the spirit that gets picked at the bottom quite uh most frequently and i don't think he's that bad um okay he's probably going to be the only spirit ending up on the dt now but i think about it uh there's been some effort made to um buff him up by adding in four different versions of the special rules so you can have a mix and match with those the one i quite like is the one that allows you to target any region and that's quite cool if you're playing a full player game and you really need to do an effect on the other side of the board shadows for quite flames can come to the party but he slow doesn't have a strong identity and yeah i think other spirits just do what he does a little bit better so sad bro you're going down into the detail um yeah um i want to like him more than i do um i want to stick up for him like i have had fun playing him but ultimately he does when he's there you think oh man i wish someone else was doing his job instead now most people play spirit island have what they consider their signature spirit or their favorite spirit or the one they've certainly played most often and for me that is the mighty mana wahine thunder speaker she is just awesome i love thunder speaker and her thing primary thing is that she can move her presence around the board with dahan and she has a lot of powers that allow her to move to heart around the board and for me that is a really dynamic mini game within spirit island it means that you're playing as the general of the dahan army more than you are a nebulous ethereal spirit type and for that i really really like her and she's got a bunch of powers that allow her to move around to han and to protect them during battles and then she's got manifestations of power and glory and this is a effect that you can multiply the damage of the harm by the amount of presence you've got there so if you manage to get like four or five tahan into an area with three or four presents you are talking a lot of damage and with her innate powers that allow you to move troops around you can move them into one area um earlier in the game using other powers fight during the fast phase and then slowly power them out of there into another area to deliver manifestations of power and glory she can wipe out two whole areas in one turd with one army and yeah i think she's a fast-growing spirit she brings it a hard into the game like no one else and while she's not going to be throwing around a lot of big bad major powers she can do consistent damage if you keep those the heart alive she's really good with other spirits like river surges and sunlight who can create more dahan and move them around for you so you're not having to do all the movement yourself and yeah just generally strong dependable spirit who i'm having to take anywhere and she's going up into the s tier i after a very different type of spirit we have a spread of rampant green now spread of rap and green is a very defensive spirit their ability allows you to move presents from sacred sites uh which you're probably going to be building in jungles and wetlands based on their restrictions and you can just stop the invaders from building up in those areas and that is a really really strong ability to slow down the invaders while the rest of your team powers up now spread rap and greens probably not going to be throwing around a huge amount of earth shattering powers themselves but they make their team a lot stronger and they have one power in particular uh the gift of proliferation and that allows another spirit to add one of their presence to the board now if you've got a slow building spirit that only gets down one presence a turn this is an amazing power because it allows them to ramp up and start slinging stuff around really quickly uh spread rapid green is the bass player of the spirits you're not going to be drawn to them you know because you want to be the star of the show and you're not going to go oh wow that's that's amazing what's happening there but you'll notice when they're not there and their contribution just pulls and ties everything together so very much a team players uh spirit and i think spread a rapid green is ester like their ability to just power up other spirits quickly the ability to slow down the invaders so everyone else can charge up i mean you're not playing glory role when you play spread of rampant green but you are contributing massively to defeating the invaders next we have ocean's hungry grass which is one of the weirder more unusual spirits in the game so ocean's hungry grasp their thing is they place presents into the oceans and oceans act as a new space so normally the oceans are just an empty space that you only use for determining whether the invaders can land on the island uh ocean sanctuary grass turns those into a terrifying place for the invaders to be and normally the coasts are where the invaders get strongest because places they can always reinforce from uh ocean sun grass sort of slows that down now i personally have a hard time playing ocean's hungry grasp and i'm not entirely too sure why but i've seen other people play ocean's hungry grasp a lot better than i'm capable of doing it's like a really cool rhythm here with how you push your presence out and then pull it back out drowning um invaders to get more power because their actual power track is really slow so you need to get and constantly be cycling and burning stuff in order to build up uh powder to do things on your turn for me ocean summery grass just has never really clicked so i'm going to put them in the sea tear i understand they're probably stronger and better than that and people are out there going oh my god this is this is one of the strongest spirits had there how dare you sir and tonight i say yeah they just don't work for me um i think i'm probably going to play a bunch more games on the app with ocean hungry grass to like try and get my head around them because at the moment they just they don't just don't click and that brings us to bringer of dreams and nightmares who's a very different spirit you see most of the game you're gonna be trying to damage the invaders and blow up their cities and blow up their towns but bringer of dreams and nightmares can't do that every time they do damage it's converted into fear which generates fair cards now fear is another way to win the game a lot of fair cards is really good it has debilitating effects on the invader and makes it easier for them to win but those forces are still on the board and that can be problematic because you can do a whole bunch of damage generate a bunch of fair cards but if there's still three cities in an area that's that's gonna keep they're gonna keep lighting and they're gonna keep hitting you so this is a tricky spirit i quite like bringer of dreams and nightmares um but that's with a caveat that they need someone else to sort of support them especially against invaders who have deep fair decks um you're gonna need someone who's going to go around and blow stuff up because yeah you can generate all those fear cards but if you're the only one doing that it doesn't in a big game that doesn't help that much and your board can get quite overrun so bring it needs a lot more teamwork and collaboration um really good with some spirits who like having everything piled together so um they can do a major effect and blow things up but yeah uh i'm gonna put bring it in the i'm going to say seat here they're really cool at small games against um low tier invaders and the default where you've only got like nine fear cards not so sold on them when the fear decks start to get a bit bigger and you're really relying on wiping the invaders out all right that was the end of the core spirits from spirit island we're now on to promo pack one and we will start off with serpent slumbering beneath the island serpent is bonkers uh serpent is an absolute wingding kind of spirit that gets insanely powerful in the end game but has to leech off everyone else but i think a lot of people or some people don't realize just how good some of their low tier stuff is like for the early game they're just handing out candy to everyone else they're handing out powers they're handing out energy and they're also have probably the strongest defensive card in the game or one of the strongest defensive cards in the game which is uh elemental aegis this thing can just pan down a defensive grid over an area and if you've got someone who allows you to cast that again you can hand really strong defensive barrier which as serpent takes a while to power up uh is a really really really good thing an awakened serpent who's throwing around all 12 power and five cards to is kind of grotesque but that's a little bit of a trap like you don't have to get there to be useful and i think that's why i'm going to put serpent on the beat here because they've got some great utility they've got some great stuff they can hand out to other players not too viable in a small game at least in my experience i mean handing out all the candy is good and everything but they still need to do some heavy lifting later in the game in a smaller one in a full play game you can kind of hand out the candy and and give people bonuses and then you know be the rock star at the end of the game so yeah serpent slumbering beneath the island really unique spirit um and what i do enjoy playing but definitely what i prefer playing with with four players um at least that's my take all right next up we have heart of the wildfire now how the wildfire is um [Music] look at his face like you just gotta look at this guy he's just the happiest happiest spirit and he has a totally unique playstyle i don't know i'm gendering these spirits but like they're all i guess they but um anyway heart of the wildfire um what they do is when they add their presence into an area they do damage and that damage does blind so you're moving around the board blighting the board but you do have the ability once you power up a bit to clear up that blight so it's the idea of the fire spreading through the jungle and in the regrowth happening behind it this is a very tricky thing to manage especially for new players it's managing that level of blight you can be comfortable having on the board and if you're not playing with the rule which adds an extra blight to the black card it can be quite difficult in um single player because by the time you're on your second turn you've already blinded the board and if it's a terrible blight card um that can that can really hurt so you need to understand how blight works you need to understand how cascading blight works and you need to know how much you can risk in order to use harder wildfire but once you get the hang of it the ability to blow up cities during your growth phase is something quite unique and something very special and how the wildfires just a super fun spirit to play just yep um yeah gonna roam around the island blow stuff up and just make the invaders lives miserable and i have seen a heart of the wildfire blow up the last city we needed to win in the growth phase and that is something very cool so how do i find definitely one for people who like uh seats of the pant gaming i'm going to put them in the b tier because they are really cool they can be incredibly powerful but you really have to know how to manage blind and if you get struck with some pretty bad events or just a bad blight card um you can really regret taking care of the wildfire next we have the two spirits from branch and claw and we're going to start with sharp bangs beneath the leaves um sharp bangs beneath leaves is one of my favorite spirits for much the same reason as i like thunder speaker you're a roving pack of wolves moving the animal tokens around the board and eating all the colonists and that is a great great time sharp fangs does have some pretty critical weaknesses it doesn't get super powerful in the end game it stays pretty consistently good throughout the whole game but you're probably not going to be singing a lot of major powers maybe one every second turn towards the end of the game you also have a hard time influencing areas that have blight so some blight management or the ability to push blight around or remove it is quite helpful because if you end up with half of your board blighted it's really hard to get back in there because you can't gather and move animals into blighted areas but sharp fangs is capable of doing a hell of a lot of damage and being the island's firefighter so some spirits are quite defensive and they occupy their board and hunk it down sharp fangs you can kind of move about everyone's boards just going where the animals are and being a roving attack party quite vulnerable to events though and there's at least one event that has to be taken out of the game and jacketed if you're playing with sharp bangs behind the leaves because it's just a bit rubbish to lose all the animal tokens on the first turn and because of the sort of general ship and the way you play sharp fangs moving around the board and just eating people and eating faces i'm going to put them in the eightier i really like sharp fangs one of my favorites if i'm not playing thunderspeaker i'm quite likely to end up playing sharp facts so your biases are showing next we have keeper of the forbidden wilds and keeper is he's quite boring to be honest like he's really strong like there goes up to nine power five cards and has some pretty strong innate abilities and can just build a defensive wall that stops people invading and just gets powered up and powered up and powered up and by the time you're at in game uh can be slinging around some pretty strong stuff doubles really well with spread of rampant green now what i said spread of rap and green is great for powering up other spirits i was kind of thinking of keeper when i was thinking about that because super super powerful in the end game just a slightly dull experience to play but i'm going to put them in the eighth in the s tier because i think keeping the forbidden wilds with all its defensive ability and the ability to sort of just at the end of the game be slugging out those major powers you know sometimes to a turn really really strong spirit just yeah maybe a little dull all right on to the ones from jagged earth now i've played these quite a bit less than i played the other ones but i've still played each and every one of them at least once and i've played with them at the table at least three times so there are some spirits i've seen a lot more than others but generally i think i've played them enough to have a pretty quick and dirty evaluation of what they do i'm going to start with volcano looming high now volcano looming high is restricted to being in mountain areas so you're going to be placing all your influence and giant stacks in the mountains and you're going to be blowing those stacks up to do hideous amounts of damage you can also place down badlands tokens and do do other stuff that increases the damage around you i found volcano looming high kind of boring like you're capable of these big destructive turns but it also does obliterate your um presence you can't bring that back with various mechanisms they've gone but it just felt like uh every turn you're you're a bit of a superstay every other turn you're kind of crap um spirit and yeah i i think there are more interesting spirits to play like if you want big damage you can go for a high power spirit um i guess by the time you set up for volcano and you're really doing damage you know the big heavy spirits are also slinging around things so i just i don't know if this is one particularly for me i'm going to put them in the detail um i've not played a game where i haven't felt like i've been either underpowered as volcano looming high or not contributing enough or that i haven't had to carry them a little throughout the game because they're having their one or two awesome turns here and there but for the rest of the game everyone else is having to pick up their slack and yeah i might be wrong with that but that's just my impression after playing with them three or four times next up we have the boss god himself shifting memory of ages um yeah we're just going to put this guy straight in the est here and then start talking to you as to why um major powers are amazing um a lot of major powers are even better when you can use the below the line stuff that has all the correct elements and shifting memory ages can just get those things out straight away so in a couple of games i've played with them um there's been a major power that they've gotten like turn one or two and they've started slinging around really early and it's been really really significant uh one was i think on about third or third turn of the game they we raised up another part of the island so we had playing a four play game we raised up a fifth part of the island and what that meant was that when all of the blight actions and that happened the ravage actions and stuff they would happen on four of the five boards our choice and that is huge that is a really really really strong thing another thing about shifting memory of ages is they hand out powers like candy to other people so not only are you super charged and you can get big stonking powers out really early in the game you're handing them out to your friends as well and yeah it's just a really powerful combination of effects to be able to get really strong powers in the game and if you get a great draw it can be super decisive like you can tell by turn two okay i think i've got this in the bag because i've got something i can sling around every turn that is going to cause horrific damage and yeah shifting memory of ages really easy to play too like just draw four major powers look at one that looks cool and just hammer it next up we have grinning trickster stirs up trouble and grinning trickster uh deserves several mentions for having probably two of the best titled cards in any game ever uh over enthusiastic arson and unexpected tigers and trickster is like a actually pretty good spirit all around there's a lot of cool stuff but their real trick is let's see what happens and that is an ability that allows you to target a region and just turn academy from the minor power deck and that can be really really big we've had it removed blight very early in the game in a blighted area which has stopped the black card from being revealed we've had it just blow up cities we've had it push things out of areas that were about to be ravaged it can be really really good we've also had it like backfire on us and i think that's sort of tricks this thing is you can't really rely on what they're going to do to be useful um but they can add strife which reduces the amount of damage that happens with blight actions so they can slow things down make it defensive they're just a real solid all-round and i would say strangely a dependable sort of spirit which considering their theme is kind of weird but aside from the lex see what happens ability which is random everything else of this is quite solid it's solid control solid damage uh solid manipulation they're just yeah they're all around a pretty respectable spirit so i'm gonna put them in the a category um because they are very good and they're capable but the luck goes your way of being amazing when i first looked at jade earth stone's unyielding defiance was the spirit that i was sort of least enamored with i looked at them and i'm like oh they're kind of a big rock guy who you know we've already got a big rock guy um what's their thing oh okay so you know things don't get blighted in your area okay it didn't really do much for me until i played a game where we had some real terrible events and that's where stone's unyielding the fights came into their own so we had some events that were you know going to destroy presence we also had a blight card that was removing one presence to turn and stones un-yielding defiance just went no but i'm gonna i'm gonna shut that down like they got quite defensive they they put down a lot of their powers principally just to get the icons so they could do that and they were spending a lot of minor power so they had left over energy so they could stop that but they pretty much shut down the blight card by themselves and we would have lost otherwise so stays on yelling defiance just went nope we're going to hold the line and we're not going to give up and i got a newfound respect for um the spirit after that game because they single-handedly kept us in what was a pretty rubbish game up until that point um so yeah definitely one that isn't like super flashy you're not gonna look out and go wow i can't wait to do those things but you'll get hit by an event card or you're hit by a bad blight card and you'll just go oh thank goodness they're on the scene so i'm going to put them in the b tier they're i think they're really solid they're a dependable spirit but they keep you in bad games and i think they're going to be one i haven't tried them with very high level invaders yet i think they're going to be one that really comes into their own when you're dealing with high difficulty adversaries who are dropping lots and lots of stuff on the board and are going to blight a whole bunch of things because they'll keep you in the fight those extra couple of turns that you'll need to be able to finish them off next we have mini mines move as one and initially i looked at the spirit i was like oh why what are they different to um sharp fangs you know they're another animal token spirit they're actually really really different with sharp fangs as a predator moving around the jungle like eating things many minds is all about the terror so sharp bangs is packs of wolves and predators biting people and dragging them off into the jungles many minds is people building their houses in the jungle and then finding out that their walls are entirely full of centipedes it's all about the terror of swarms of birds and bugs and wasps and no one likes wasps so where sharpangs uses animals to attack many minds uses animals to defend and to generate fear and that makes them a very different spirit again they're vulnerable to events and actions that destroy animal tokens they can bring some down but they do expend animal tokens themselves for a couple of their effects which i think makes them a little bit more vulnerable than sharp fangs they have a lot more versatility at moving the animals around the board than sharp fangs does as well but i think these two spirits are always going to be compared and contrasted because they both rely on the animal tokens and above different ideas of how an animal spirit would work for me i'm going to put them in the beet here i don't think they're quite as dramatic and and vigorous and violent as sharp fangs but they're a real solid dependable fear generating defensive controlling spirit um they don't have a huge amount of power or card draws they're okay and mostly going to be slinging minor powers and using their spirits and i don't think they've got a huge high ceiling um when they're in a game of how dramatic an impact they will have but they're a solid dependable spirit that will well except for that vulnerability to losing their animal tokens that's that's really what's stopping them from getting up to the a b tier uh s tier is just animal tokens can be so damn vulnerable to the event deck i guess if you're not playing with events it'd probably be an a or an s but because the events can just blow up so many of the animal tokens it can just expose you a little bit so cool spirit and cool idea though here we are with lure of the deep wilderness hawaii sometimes referred to as the candy man because he owns a candy shop in the middle of the island has just come to the middle of the island we have candy and it eats everyone who turns up lua is an amazing spirit idea the the arts really evocative the idea is really cool come come to find the hidden treasures deep in the heart of the island and just get nommed and destroyed the interesting thing about how he reduces towns and cities into explorers and just wipes the explorers out is it's really cool as well and i have it gets bonus damage from on some of these effects for stacking extra tokens in an area and i've had them stacked like this high of delirious effects um targeting the invaders in a certain region and just keeping pulling uh invaders into that region and you're just just eating their face so he does have a bit of a critical weakness and that's the inability to get to your own coastline um that can come back to bite you in the ass it has for me in a couple of games where i've had relatively strong cities built on my coast and the players to my right left have been slow building so those have got quite tough um so yeah he's not without faults but he's a really themey spirit really strong and capable of just eating an awful lot of invaders i'm going to put them up in the eightier i think really good spirit that weakness is is good because it makes you know if he could get to the coastline he'd be like absolutely top ester beyond the pale super good but as it is really really strong spirit real fun to play too all right vengeance as a burning plague now this is one of those polarizing spirits in the games have played i personally have really enjoyed playing uh vengeances at burning flag but the other people i've played with have not enjoyed them at all so i think real potential for some horrific damage here and the tricky thing is the double presence placement has to be a land uh with a town city blight and that puts you into the firing line a lot of the time so you've got to be willing to go where the fire is and you've got to be willing to lose some presence early to get those disease tokens down but then oh late game and once you've got a network of disease tokens out there you're going to be really scary and doing horrific damage like the top level of epidemics run rampant if you can get to it is you're doing three damage per disease token plus one fear and if you've piled up um diseases in one area and other spirits and yourself are using push effects to corral the invaders in that one area you can just squish them and just squish them and wipe them out the last time i played that's what i did i had one area where i put four disease tokens a number where i had three and i was just using other minor powers to just corral people in there and just eating them and i think he's really good i think i'm gonna put him in the beat here i think i would put him in the eight here if i hadn't played it with a bunch of people who kind of had a terrible miserable game with him but yeah a real interesting spirit because you have to rely on those disease tokens and normally you're wanting to use them to slow down builds so in a way it's counterintuitive because those disease tokens you want normally in play to slow the invader down and here vengeance is sort of speeding the game up in order to get a payoff later on with ridiculous disgusting damage shroud of silent mist is one of the coolest looking spirits and one of the coolest spirit concepts of all and says it's a high complexity spirit i don't know if it's high complexity it's certainly a high risk spirit and that's because you want to damage all these things and leave them in your land but damage things still fight back most of the time and that's the knack of using shroud of silent mist is that you've got to have this power generation of fear generation caused by all of these damaged buildings around because the trick with them is nothing in your area of influence regenerates at the end of the turn so you hit a tower for one damage it stays damaged and that generates a fear and it generates some power for you in the end phase so you want to have this network of busted and dilapidated towns around but those towns can still fight back and do full damage so it's a real knife edge you have to walk on another little trick with them is they have a double growth ability but it's into the same area what's into an area you already have presence because you can move your presence one space just before taking an action and i've seen someone who tried playing the spirit it didn't quite click to how that worked for a little while because they're like oh and i feel so slow i can't get anywhere in my eye you can actually you can do that by the way oh and then the spirit came alive because it was sort of using apparently just moving one presence to use the power and just slowly expanding network of influence and you know malays spreading across the island i'm going to put them personally up in the eightier i think they're really cool i think they're hard they're challenging but they the fear you can generate with them just at the end of each turn getting that extra five fear if you're doing it well it's great um they soften everything up so yeah you do have these softened up targets but you can just then use fast actions with low damage to knock them down if you want to prevent a ravage i think they're one of the really interesting and really cool spirits in jager and yeah love to play them again all right start starlight seeks its form one of the weirder more unusual spirits because it can kind of become anything and that's both its strength and its weakness so i'm not going to go into all the different things that starlight can do you have a good look like you can tailor the spirit to be good at a bunch of different things but this is my problem with starlight as first of all if you're playing with someone who's a slow player to start with they're probably going to spend like an entire you know 5-10 minutes just choosing a growth action because they're trying to figure out what the best outcome is so they slow the game down a bit in the growth phase and while i've seen them be a good solid dependable teammate and they've developed in a way that's helped the team out and been useful and i never really felt like i've had to carry them uh in a game and when i played them i didn't think i was you know letting the side down i've never seen them really star either ironically i've never seen them be a standout spirit so there's a lot of options on here there's a lot of things you can do but i'm not sure any of them are particularly berserk or or overpowered and in some ways the lack of identity is the issue the whole spirit is about creating your own identity but it means you kind of lack a role early on you have to create that role yourself but in that regard well why don't you it might be easier just to pick a spirit that fills that role instead um so if you're playing with three defensive spirits you know i will maybe i'll play a damage dealer instead of having to spend four or five turns turning this one into a damage dealer so i'm gonna controversially put them down in the detail i love the idea uh i think they're a perfectly viable spirit but i've also just never seen them be a rock star and i kind of that's one of the things that attracts me to spirits you know the exception like spreads it rapid green is that you need those dramatic cool moments and i just yeah haven't seen starlight really do that and the last spirit from jagged earth is fractured days split the sky this is a weird one like i it's really hard to evaluate there's been some really cool games i've played with fractured sky fractured days where they have you know critically taken important invader strong points off the board about what they're about to ravage and they can do some crazy amazing weird stuff but they also seem to spend an awful lot of the game just flicking things back and forth and keeping themselves busy and not necessarily accelerating the team towards the win so i'm gonna put them uh i'm gonna say sit here like i haven't been hugely impressed with what i've seen them deliver like they have these cool effects and cool stuff that happens you're like wow that's really neat and interesting but not sure they're particularly good at winning the game for you um amazing concept i like just the thought that went into designing you know both starlight and fractured day split the sky i mean they're very high complexity spirits for a reason and again probably haven't seen the best out of them from the people who've been playing them because they've been playing them for like first second or third times each so there's probably a lot more depth than we're not picking up here but for me like the moving back and forth uh the time stuff that's really cool uh having a tableau of cards in front of you that's cool being able to remove land from and from time that's really cool but haven't seen them come to the party and be the rock star in any games yet and we're on to the last two spirits which are i believe promo pack 2 and we will start off with finder of paths unseen which is a really bizarre spirit all of the problems you have with uh program dreams and nightmares uh for not being able to do damage you also have with this wee flying birdie thing here you can't really do damage anytime you do damage and uh you take off one of your presents so you can't afford to do that too often it's not to say you can't do it at all you just got to pay the price i mean your cards are really focused on control anyway but talking of control no spirit in the game um gives you the board control that fire aparts unseen does they can move to han and cities and towns and people just all over the place they can isolate areas they can create sort of pockets of the island that no one can get to they can move presents around the board their presence and other people's presence like no one else they are the ultimate team players um spirit they do need a big bully to come along and help them actually knock things down but amazing amounts of control and one of those ones that i've only only played with this one three times and each time i felt like i haven't quite seen the real potential of them but i can see it a lot clearer in this spirit than i did in the last two of where the ceiling is and i think the ceiling for finer parts unseen is astronomically high and i'm going to put them up in the atf and now no we'll take btf for now so i'll put them up on the btf for now i think they could end up in the east here um with a lot more plays right now that weakness of theirs and not being able to do damage is is a big big factor but all of the stuff they can do moving things around the board there is so much scope there for an expert player and people are really good at this game to be able to just do some crazy stuff and last but certainly not least is downpour drenches the world this is one of those spirits when you first look at it you're like oh okay i'm gonna have to discard cards i'm all about water damage and what's going on here and then you see the um ability that allows you to repeat power cards and this is where downpour drenched the world sort of comes into its own you spread around the board like a mobile firefighting well yeah firefighting thing you drench areas that are about to be uh ravaged and you just stop them you just stop them dead by just pouring rain on them and you use like a basic zero cost defense card you go i'm gonna play that there there there and there and so much you can generate so much control and do so much um defense of zero cost cards you can play multiple times just using um their ability to just retarget retarget with their special and i think downpour drenches of the world is capable of doing some almost holding a four-player board at times by themselves just holding the invaders back while everyone else powers up they're just so good at being that mobile defensive mobile x slow the invaders down let's just hold them here let's curtail them here while everyone else tools up and gets their big powerful stuff and that's that's a playstyle i really enjoy i'm going to put them up on the estier i've had two games for them now and i think they are right up there with one of the strongest spirits in the game and it just it's a unique role of being so mobile uh because of all of your abilities to move and add presence and and floated around the board and then being able to turn places into wetlands and then just re-target them with these low-cost defense uh defensive spells now there's probably other uses for that but in the two games i played i ended up focusing on zero cost defensive um minor powers and just going to everywhere the fights were and just locking them all down and then allowing the other spirits to come off slow powers and just blow things up so yeah downpour drenches the world yeah top notch is tier all right so that brings us to the end of my ratings for janet jagged earth and all the spirits in spirit island i kind of said at the start i probably wouldn't end up with uh spreading d tier i put three there um like i don't think those are bad spirits i just they're not the spirits i enjoy playing the most or the ones that i never felt really contributed as much as they potentially could i'm probably wrong like i'm probably going to get a really big essay about what volcano it should be absolutely yes here in the comments below and if you do have any comments on this tier list and how i've rated them and my thoughts on them let me know and if you enjoyed this video hit the notification button subscribe to the channel and come support us on patreon

Channel: 3 Minute Board Games

Views: 72,682

Keywords: Designer, R.eric Reuss, Artist, Jason Behnke, Loïc Billiau, Shawn Daley, Lucas Durham, Emily Hancock, Kat G Birmelin, Jorge Ramos, Moro Rogers, Damon Westenhofer, Joshua Wright (I), Publisher, Greater Than Game, spirit island, jagged earth, Spirit Island: Jagged Earth, expansion, Board games, Board game, How to play, Board Game review, Short Board games, Three minute Board Games, 3 Minute Board games, summary, hot take, subtitles, review, tier list, Spirit island tier list

Id: 1eBv3RQdSqg

Length: 45min 55sec (2755 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021