Playing A Spread of Rampant Green

 Playing A Spread of Rampant Green in GtG's "Spirit Island"

As I've stated elsewhere, my favorite board game of the past several years is Spirit Island, and it's not even close. So I thought I'd start digging into various strategies that can be used with each individual spirit. For anyone who has played Spirit Island before, you know that strategies have to be flexible to accommodate so, so many factors (other Spirits in play, progression of Invader actions, power cards made available to you, choice of adversary and/or scenario, etc.). In spite of that necessity for flexibility, there are still some sort of universals for the majority of Spirits in the game.

Let's start with taking a look at the Spirit below!

Straight up love this Spirit. Setup is simple and predictable: Put 2 Presence on your starting board - 1 in the highest-numbered Wetland, and 1 in the Jungle without any Dahan. (If there is more than one such Jungle, you may choose.) The player who chooses this is warned by the Spirit board that this Spirit excels at dealing with towns, but is "terrible at handling Explorers." Natively, this is true. But there are plenty of powers that can allow you to handle Explorers, to say nothing of the fact that many other Spirits can do the same. But it is definitely something you have to consider while considering the composition of your party once Rampant Green is selected; if someone doesn't draw into a power that will mitigate Explorers, you're in for a bad time.

Your Innate Powers are extremely useful, but do represent a bit of a split in terms of direction. I say that because while I like them both, the combination of limited card plays and limited income (for a lot of the game, anyway) means it's tough to leverage both Innate Powers in a single turn. The Plant Elements you'll get from your Energy Presence Track will help, but doing just 1 damage via Creepers Turn Into Mortars ends up being situationally useful; it can help a situation rather than often ending a situation before it begins. My preference is to lean toward using Creepers and expanding its use to increase damage output rather than build toward All-Enveloping Green. Don't get me wrong - I appreciate the defense it offers. But your special rules offer you a terrific way of running defense, and I'd rather lean on that and destroy stuff than play too many fully defensive turns. It's worth considering All-Enveloping Green if that's the way your purchased powers are leaning, of course. And at the highest level, being able to remove Blight up to 1 space away from any of your Sacred Sites is nothing at which to scoff. But my preference is to strike a balance so that Creepers can at least score you some Fear.

To that end, the reason I feel comfortable buying hard into Creepers when I'm considering the Powers I'll be purchasing is because of your Spirit's special rules. The first is Choke The Land With Green, and it allows you to prevent a Ravage or Build in a land with your Sacred Site by destroying one of your Presence. In a vacuum, this is obviously an ability to be used sparingly. But not with Rampant Green; see, Steady Regeneration is your other rule, and it reads: "When adding Presence to the board via Growth, you may optionally use your destroyed Presence." It costs you to do this if the land in which you want to place Presence is blighted, but if that land is healthy, then it's free. So destroyed Presence need not stay that way. BUT!

That's right: there's more! I plan on looking at your Growth options a little more closely further along in this post, but for now, there's something I want to note: every single turn, in addition to whatever else you choose to do, you can add 1 of your Presence to a Jungle or Wetland up to 2 away from where you have Presence. So while it's true that if you keep sacrificing your Presence each turn you'll find it difficult to make headway on your Presence tracks whenever you decide to place destroyed Presence instead of Presence on your Presence track, this is a gift that keeps on giving. Sure, it's not ALL you want to do. But it really lets you concentrate on whatever you're doing and deal with some problematic situations later. If you kick the can down the road long enough, it can come back to bite you through some Event or something, of course, but it also means you're not forced to spend entire turns reacting to the board state instead of planning for the future. It is an immensely useful combination of abilities, and it really affords you some breathing room. It also makes helping other Spirits decently cheap, even if you don't draw into Powers that would normally let you have that much of an impact on another player's board. Let's take a look at your Starting Powers below!

Apologies for the glare on that top right card: I'm no master of photography (clearly), and I couldn't find a better quality picture of Rampant Green's starting Powers online.

Given that Rampant Green doesn't have a ton of Energy to spare, you've got some pretty generous starting Powers. The one I probably use least is Fields Choked with Growth. If I play it, it's usually for the Elements it has to offer. It has its uses, of course, being that it's free and can move things around the board. But for my play style, where I'm usually pretty happy to sacrifice Presence only to bring it back, I don't often feel it helps me enough to choose over other Powers. This is especially true because it does not help me use Creepers Tear Into Mortar. Stem The Flow of Fresh Water, on the other hand, is a Power that affords me options. It doesn't help you use Creepers, but on the other hand, Creepers used in concert with Stem means it's easier to destroy towns and cities.

I'm a really big fan of your fast Powers. Of course, these are the ones that will cost you Energy. But my strategy is usually to reveal the first Plant Element on the Energy/Presence track, and then commit really hard to the Card Play/Presence track. So I'm usually happy to place my 1 Presence each turn once I've hit that point, and then gain a Power Card and +3 Energy so I can spend it right away. Gift of Proliferation can only be used on other Spirits, but it gives you elements you need for Creepers, and the sooner everyone else is on the board, the happier everyone is. This is especially true when playing with a Spirit such as Serpent Slumbering Beneath The Island, who wants to gobble up Presence from other Spirits in order to become more powerful. Overgrow In A Night is obviously really pricey, but allows for turns in which you will place 3 Presence. The power of such an ability for this Spirit cannot be overstated. The quicker you're on the board, the more shields you can throw up against Ravage and Build. Even if your Presence is all of the map, the Power retains usefulness because now, you can use it to generate Fear instead of adding Presence. Win-win-win, in my book.

Let's talk about your Growth options:

1. I mentioned this before, but you will "Always" have the option to add 1 of your Presence to any Jungle or Wetland up to 2 spaces away from a land that contains your Presence. Hugely helpful; pull Presence from your Presence tracks until it behooves you to pull from your Destroyed Presence. In addition to this option, you can pick any one of the following three.
2. Reclaim your cards and draw 1 Power card. Obviously making for a weak turn, but you reclaim when you have to. I really try to limit this and only Reclaim when it's absolutely necessary in the early game. The faster I've got Presence out on the board, the more useful I am. If I slow down expansion so I can reclaim cards (few of which are likely to do a better job of saving your turn than Choke The Land With Green anyway), now I'm slowing down and will have more trouble keeping up with the Invaders as they begin to accelerate their own growth and development.
3. Add 1 Presence up to 1 land away from where you've already got Presence, and get an additional card play this turn. This is the only way you'll get Presence onto lands that aren't Jungles or Wetlands, so there will obviously be times you're forced to take this Growth option. I say "forced" not because it's a bad Growth option - I'm not saying that at all! But I am saying that I always take the same action in addition to my automatic Presence action unless I'm forced to do something else...
4. ...Gain 1 Power card and 3 Energy. I ping pong between this option and option #3 (listed just above this one) because I really do want to get all of my Presence out on the board. But generating both power card and energy economy while continually putting Presence on the board turn after turn becomes a nightmare for the Invaders. Or, you know, would if it was a player and not the game controlling them. But being able to continually expand my hand while getting a ton of Energy to spend on my Powers means I can build up a solid hand and put off Reclaiming cards.

I love this Spirit, and I think it fits well into nearly any combination of Spirits. It'll take a couple of minutes to get to a point where Rampant Green is meaningfully contributing to the Fear Pool and removing threats from play rather than mitigating them, and as previously mentioned, you do need to have a plan for dealing with Explorers (whether through grabbing Power cards until you get one or two that allow you to do that or by teaming up with Spirits that have an easier time pushing Explorers around or killing them). But outside of that, you've got a Spirit that is extremely flexible. Which is funny, because I don't find this to be a responsive Spirit, persay. I say that because it can afford to kick the can down the road a little bit, like Stone's Unyielding Defiance. The latter can afford to let Blight hit the board because it can control said Blight, choosing to pull it from the box instead of the Blight Card. Plus, unless that Blight outnumbers Stone's Presence, it does not destroy anyone's Presence, nor does it Cascade. Does such action fix the problem? Nope. But it buys you time until you can deal with the problem. It means you don't have to immediately start working to prevent the "bad thing" from happening, because you can just mitigate the "bad thing" at a small cost to yourself so that you can keep working on setting up your big turn. Just as Blight does not disrupt the plans set in motion by Stone's Unyielding Defiance, Invaders don't disrupt plans that A Spread of Rampant Green would like to set in motion. You don't have to worry about that big incoming Ravage because you can simply sacrifice a Presence to prevent the Ravage from occurring in the first place. So while it's a slight inconvenience for you, you can remain committed to the big picture and see the forest for the trees instead of the other way around.

This Spirit isn't flash; it's all substance. More often than not, when I'm playing this Spirit, I'm not pulling off huge turns that generate 2 new Fear cards. Instead, I'm asking who needs help where, then assuring the other players that "I've got it handled" and they can afford to ignore it for a turn. "Don't worry about that land, I've got it covered. Keep doing what you're doing." I won't argue that it's a Spirit fully dedicated to a support role, but that's where I think it fits best, and if you try to sort of do your own thing, you might hurt yourself bending over backwards into a role that A Spread of Rampant Green isn't really designed to fill on its own.