How Spirit Island supports so many spirits.

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Spirit Island is a cooperative game designed by R. Eric Reuss where players take on the role of spirits protecting an island from invaders. To date, Spirit Island and its expansions provide an absurd roster of 37 unique spirits (player characters), each of which comes with new starting cards, innate powers, and special rules. What’s more, any of the 37 spirits works both solo and in any combination.

These are some of the reasons I’ve identified for why Spirit Island supports so many distinct player characters where other games might not.

Defenses and wrenches

In order for spirits to work solo, they must provide some form of defense from the invaders, but Spirit Island provides many mechanisms to fascilitate that defense.

Invaders follow a rigid three step process to proliferate and ravage the land. In each step, the invaders attempt to add a new piece to several spaces on the board—first an explorer, then a town, then a blight token. When enough blight tokens have been added to the board, you lose. Importantly, each step requires the presence of the previously placed pieces, making this process fragile to disruption.

Pieces Placing Pieces

Assume that no invaders were already present in a land, as is often the case at the start of the game.

In the first step, explore, an invader arrives in the land. For this, the land itself need not contain any invader pieces.

In the second step, build, the explorer builds a town in the land, which cannot happen without the explorers presence.

In the third step, ravage, all invaders present in the land deal damage to it. If the invaders deal 2 or more damage to the land, you must place a blight token. Importantly, the explorer only deals 1 damage, while the town deals 2. This means that the towns presence is necessary for the invaders to successfully place a blight during the ravage.

The explorer is required to place the town, and the town is necessary to place the blight, such that if you prevent the placement of any of these pieces, remove them immediately, or just move them to a new land (not being targeted by the invader card), you will prevent the placement of the blight token, defending the land.

Preventing the piece

You can prevent the placement of any piece directly with a card or ability to do so. You can also prevent the placement of a ravage token with defense, which negates damage. The Jagged Earth expansion also introduced wilds tokens, disease tokens, and unrest tokens, which prevent exploration, building, or ravaging respectively, along with the isolate keyword, which will prevent an exploration.

Removing the piece

You can destroy, damage, or remove either the explorer or town, or remove the blight token once placed.

Moving the piece

The invader cards target a type of land, and invaders will only explore, build, and ravage in that land type on their respective turns. This means that if you push or pull a piece to an adjacent land, it will not continue to perform the same actions in that new land.

The Design Space of Defense

Invaders have 3 phases, each of which are vital for the eventual ravage to harm the land. This provides a massive design space for players to prevent a loss by throwing a wrench into any part of the invader’s process.

Specialization

Spirits can specialize in any of these mechanics or combine them in new ways. Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds, for instance, can push explorers from a land to prevent them from building and then place wilds tokens to prevent them from returning.

There are other spirits who escape these standard mechanics entirely, like Stone’s Unyielding Defiance, who has an ability to place blight tokens from the box rather than from the limited supply, preventing the blight from contributing toward a loss.

Driving off the invaders

Victory in Spirit Island is achieved when invader elimination and fear production converge to satisfy a victory condition. This allows spirits who specialize in clearing invaders and spirits who specialize in producing fear to both function solo and to complement each other’s efforts when working as a team.

To function solo, spirits must be individually capable of driving off the invaders. Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares is fully committed to fear production and is incapable of destroying invaders, but Bringer can still win a game on their own since there is a victory condition after producing enough fear.

Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds, on the other hand, works by preventing invaders from exploring, slowly eroding the invader’s presence without ever producing fear. Since the fear that Bringer creates relaxes the victory condition that Keeper must satisfy, these spirits still work when paired as a team, along with any other combination of spirits.

Clearing invaders

Some of the defensive mechanics work by clearing invaders, meaning they also progress towards a victory.

The difference comes from how fast the ability is and how effective it is at clearing lots of invaders. Defense often requires a quick power, but doesn’t necessarily require the power to take out more than one piece. Clearing the invaders, conversely, usually requires a power which can take out many pieces, but you have more time to set it up.

Fear Production & Abstract Values

Fear production, on the other hand, introduces entirely new mechanics. Shroud of Silent Mist produces fear whenever a damaged invader shares a space with the Shroud’s presence—an entirely new mechanic. The versatile concept of “fear” can justify many creative new mechanics.

The Gradient from Clear to Fear

Most spirits don’t exclusively clear invaders or exclusively produce fear. Since the two methods converge toward victory, individual spirits can combine abilities that clear invaders and abilities that produce fear while still being effective. Ocean’s Hungry Grasp is the most direct, with one innate power that produces fear and one innate power that destroys invaders.

The same mechanic that allows an invader-clearing spirit to share a board with a fear-producing spirit also allows for a spirit with a blend of outputs to be viable in its own right.

Growth and Presence Tracks: Many more gradients

Growth options set the rate and distances that spirits proliferate, along with the rate that they acquire new powers, giving us several more gradients on which spirits can exist.

Big Powers vs Many Powers

Spirits with high energy production and limited card plays excel at playing one or two powerful cards each turn, where spirits with limited energy production and many card plays excel at playing lots of low-cost cards each turn. Since power cards are attained during the game, this means different spirits will prefer to acquire different types of cards, resulting in vastly different hands between spirits.

These two extremes exist on another gradient, with most spirits operating somewhere in-between. Some spirits even play around with how these limitations work, like Shifting Memory of Ages, who can spend resources to play additional cards on a turn.

Fast or Slow, Near or Far

Spirits spread their presence at different rates and distances. Vital Strength of the Earth adds one presence to the board no matter which growth option the player chooses, but usually only at 0 or 1 range, which means it spreads slowly but consistently.

Lightning’s Swift Strike, on the other hand, can add 2 presence 2 spaces away, but at the cost of deferring any other growth. This allows Lightning to spread rapidly, but only when the player is willing to make sacrifices to do so.

We now have our third (and possibly fourth) major gradient: how fast and how far does the spirit spread their presence?

The Presence Track and keeping things fluid

In an early version of Spirit Island, all spirits had 2 standard cards to spread presence and produced the same amount of energy as a flat multiple of deployed presence, which Reuss said “diluting the unique feel of each Spirit”.

Spirits still produce more energy and play more cards based on how many presence tokens they’ve deployed, but the presence track allows these three factors to be tuned independently. A spirit that spreads faster doesn’t necessarily increase energy production faster, and a spirit that spreads slower doesn’t necessarily lack energy production.

Shadows Flicker Like Flame proliferates slower than most other spirits, but they gain 1 energy production from every presence placed. Despite removing presence tokens from the track more rarely, the values printed on the track still increase in value at an acceptable rate.

A Vast Sandbox of Mechanics to Manipulate

Spirit Island has many additional mechanics that allow spirits to further distinguish themselves by breaking with the mechanics intended function. For almost every rule, there is an exception in the form of a spirit.

When spirits acquire power cards, they pick one of four and discard the rest.

Except Fractured Days Split the Sky, who retains one more in a special set of power cards to be acquired later.

Power cards produce elements that are lost at the end of a spirit’s turn.

Except Shifting Memory of Ages, who can prepare elements, retaining them through turns and only spending them when necessary.

The lands have a type for the invader cards to target which tends not to affect spirit presence.

Except Volcano Looming High, who can only ever add their presence to mountains and cannot increase the range of their abilities.

Fear produces fear cards, which are randomized at the start of the game and unknown to spirits.

Except Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares, who can reveal fear cards before they are executed.

Invaders recover health at the end of turns.

Except with Shroud of Silent Mist, whose presence prevents invaders from recovering health.

Passive exceptions to established rules can be terse and impactful. If X rule isn’t true for one player, what effect does that have on gameplay?

Lessons for other games

R. Eric Reuss designed Spirit Island over nearly a decade, and it shows. It wouldn’t be possible to just “do what Spirit Island does,” but I have learned some lessons that I employ when designing other co-op games.

Don’t commit to any design restraints that aren’t strictly necessary. There are almost no universal rules for the design of spirits. The few that seem to exist are only set by component restrictions, like how there are only 13 presence tokens in each color.

Player characters (usually) must be capable of handling both urgent and important tasks, but their methods are fluid. For Spirit Island, each spirit has some form of defense and some mechanism to win, but the details of these abilities are varied and expansive.

All characters should contribute to the same victory condition. An alternative win condition may cause different player characters to pull in different directions, making some team compositions less viable than others.

Keep some game state a little abstract. “Fear” is a specific thematic concept, but it can mean many things mechanically. Ocean’s Hungry Grasp has an ability which simply produces some fear. The ability is called “pound ships to splinters”, though, which fits the theme perfectly. If fear was called something more specific, like “lost cities”, it would be harder to justify this ability.

Gradients allow for more variety than distinct options. Some spirits specialize in clearing invaders and some specialize in producing fear, but most exist somewhere in-between. When possible, place player characters on a spectrum from one extreme to another.

Make rule breakers. Every rule is another opportunity for an exception, and simple exceptions can have drastic consequences on gameplay.

Any feature of the game can be the focus of a rule. Lure of the Deep Wilderness can only add their presence to an inland land—a land not adjacent to the ocean. To most spirits, inland lands hold no special meaning, but the distinction is vitally important to Lure of the Deep Wilderness, making them feel distinct.

Have many mechanics. I wouldn’t add mechanics for the sake of mechanics, but the more you have, the more there is to play with for player characters.

And finally, be willing to try anything. Spirit Island has a truly deranged card called Cast Down to the Briny Deep. When fully charged, the card removes one of the island boards and everything on it from the game, which can allow you to end the game by destroying the island itself. Never assume anything can’t be done.

Nothing is sacred.