Before I start, let’s add an aside, you probably can’t tell this (because imaginary people don’t read blogs), but I keep trying to write these longer blog posts with something resembling a cohesive structure and a thesis. Unfortunately, I am horrible at doing that so what I end up with is a bunch of drafts that will never be finished. The ideas that are presented within them are no longer prevalent in my gaming life and therefore I just don’t have the mental spoons to finish it up and then every time I look at my blog dashboard I go “I should totally finish” rather than working on something fresh in my mind. So that’s how I go 6 months without posting anything…
But this all changes today with some hopefully shorter blog posts to hopefully let me actually post what I think about. So without further ado…
Teaching the Rules
There is a joke that exists among my player group that I Game Daddy for that can be shortened to a Seinfeld meme:
The claim is that I effectively skip over some rules or greatly simplify some aspects of the game. And then when they inevitably come up I “Yadda Yadda’ed past that part”. I don’t feel the need to defend myself here when I have no actual audience to debate, but I want to point out that this is something you often have to do when teaching rules. You don’t want to be going into the nitty gritty corner edge cases that are unlikely to come up because that would turn your 10-minute rule teach into 30-minute one and no one want to deal with that. On the other hand, in some co-op games, we shorten the rules on purpose, particularly about handling the “adversary” or “board” actions. For example, in Pandemic it is often standard that the rules explainer will be handling drawing the cards and doing the epidemics and all that fun because it’s not something that may need to be taught right away to a new player. Ultimately getting to play the game is what is preferable to most boardgamers. Similarly in Ghost Stories, explaining the makeup of the ghost cards (when it enters/on your turn/when it dies) is useful but often you can explain most of the individual symbols as they come up to get players into play faster. This is not true of all games particularly…
Teaching the Rules, in Spirit Island
Hey, there is the title, we finally got here. In Spirit Island, there is a relatively involved and long Invader phase. To make things even more complex it is in the middle of player turns, between the fast phase and the slow phase, not in the beginning or the end (though it sometimes feels like it is both in the beginning and the end of the turn due to how the turn structure and powers work). Many Spirit Island cards and powers are what is described as “Slow” meaning they happen after the invader phase.
Spirit Island, in general, is about anticipating and reacting to threats that you know are coming. A very important part of the game is actually understanding what happens in the invader phase and having players internalize it because when they are planning their turn they will sometimes be targeting cities, towns, or other threats that don’t even exist on the board at the time that they are playing their cards. This means that to be even remotely successful at Spirit Island you really have to understand the invader phases, particularly how the ravage and the build phase work to know how the board will look when many of your powers are going off. Ultimately this means that I spend an extra 10-20 minutes explaining these things in quite a lot of detail, which makes many players’ eyes glaze over since most players don’t understand the importance of this fact until about halfway through the game when they see that they can use their powers preemptively to blow up someplace that looks pretty sparse but will later be brimming with activity.
Fortunately, the game does give you at least a few ways to deal with this. Something that I have found helpful is that if no one selects Lightning Swift Strike as the spirit to play, I will often take it. Being able to do most of your turn in the fast phase and, more importantly, making other peoples powers happen in the fast phase rather than in the slow phase can quickly teach people the value of fast powers but also how to anticipate fast and slow powers for the players. Overall, I enjoy Spirit Island a lot as a co-op game. It has a very interesting arc (which can be a whole other post and topic, that I feel others have described far better than I can), and if I played repeat games more often than I currently do I would definitely get more out of it.
….maybe I just need some expansions for it.
Cheers