Wrath of the Lich King and Spirit Island

 Wrath of the Lich King and Spirit Island

Avengers Assemble! That's how that goes, right? Team-up all day, everyday!

It was recently our friend Clayton's birthday, and so we celebrated with games, because of course we did! There were four of us, and Roger had told me I should bring Wrath because it was right up Clayton's alley. I also brought Spirit Island because I know Clayton is a big fan and we had the right group of 4 to have it hit the table.

We sat down and sure enough, Clayton was immediately intrigued by Wrath. So we got that set up to start! Roger suggested we try it at hard difficulty instead of standard, since everyone at the table had experience with Pandemic and since Roger and I had won the game a week or so prior. We agreed to do that and I decided since I had played the dwarf last time, I would play a human this time. Specifically, I chose the human who gets a reroll in combat. We had the dark elf Archer, the dwarf, and the character who can transport anyone else. Felt like a decently balanced party, though maybe with too much of a focus on combat abilities.

We drew into some really tough quests from the start. One forced us to discard a card wherever we quested, and that was the one Arthas was occupying. Another said we couldn't take the Heal action while adjacent to that Quest space. Which, and this is on us, we didn't read until after we placed one of our two Strongholds. So we had placed it on a really prime location between two regular quests and the final quest! Except we couldn't heal there until we completed the mitigating quest. *Facepalm* It wasn't long before Arthas moved into that region, making it that much more difficult to actually fix the problem.

And at this difficulty level, the Scourge Rising cards came fast and furious, basically punishing us for choosing to quest sometimes instead of knocking down Ghouls with every available action. The overrun just became too much, which led to needing to place Abominations, but being unable to do so. Before we even really got halfway through a quest, the Despair marker put us out of our misery. It was ROUGH, man. I knew we had kicked it up a level after our last win, but man, it just felt as though we couldn't catch a break in this one!

OVERRUN! Except it was the undead coming for us instead of animals.

What better salve for our wounded egos than a little Spirit Island? Maybe we couldn't defeat the Lich King, but surely we could boot some scrawny colonist garbage off of an island! Roger and I are very alike in that we encourage other players to select their Spirits first, and then we'll make choices that supplement the party. So we left first choices to Fox and Clayton. Fox chose Vengeance as a Burning Plague; I fully supported this choice, as I thoroughly enjoy playing that Spirit (as I've detailed here). Clayton chose Shifting Memory of Ages. He had just obtained his own copy of the Jagged Earth expansion, though he had played with it numerous times before. So playing with one of the new spirits was a fun idea! Plus, he had chosen to set us against the England adversary at level 2 difficulty.

For anyone unfamiliar with the game, the core game of Spirit Island is fun, but even with Event cards randomizing some positive and negative effects each turn, once you've got a handle on how the game works, it becomes a little predictable. Not rote, but there are definitely patterns you can learn to recognize and anticipate. However, part of the replayability and challenge of the game is based in the Adversary and Scenario mechanisms. They add even more theme and difficulty to games and are really worth exploring! Anyway, England can be a little brutal, even at *only* level 2. Each board starts with additional cities and towns, but even that is at least manageable because that's only a one-step effect. It's EVERYTHING ELSE. As long as a land designated for a Building action is adjacent to lands with 2 or more towns or cities, that land will Build, regardless of whether or not anything is in that space. The Escalation is rough too. To say nothing of the fact that there's an additional loss condition if 7+ towns and/or cities are ever in a single land.

I mention all of this because we knew we would be in for a tough time. So Clayton chose a Spirit with which he was familiar so he wouldn't get completely swept away with the tide when England reared its ugly head (and I'm here to tell you that it absolutely did so). Also, Shifting Memory of Ages can swing Major Powers early and often. It can do some straight-up MEAN things. So fielding a heavy hitter was a welcome idea. Roger insisted I pick next, as he was between River Surges in Daylight and Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares (we could definitely use support for Fox and Clayton's picks, and Roger is familiar with both of those Spirits), and he was happy to play either. I decided I'd take a risk and play something new; I had been wanting to try Volcano Looming High for quite some time, but it never felt like the right opportunity. I'm not sure this qualified, but after everyone insisted I do something new, I chose Volcano. Looking back, this was a terrible decision because Fox and I started on adjacent boards and both had Spirits who need to wind up before they can really start throwing punches. But England was going to build at a ridiculous rate and we couldn't afford to wait a long time until we were taking their pieces off the board. Nonetheless, it was the choice we made. Roger ended up playing the River with the hopes of moving Invaders around enough that we could avoid the really bad Builds.

Yeeeeaaaaahhhhh, this was basically our life philosophy through the entire game...

Gotta tell you: I did not anticipate enjoying Volcano Looming High as much as I did. It just doesn't feel like my kind of play style. Though honestly, I have really come to believe that my actual play style of a lot of games does not align with what I often perceive my play style to be. When Biff and I were playing the Conquest LCG, he created a Tyrannid deck based around big baddies that hit really hard, but could stomach a first strike or a counterattack. No glass cannons in that list. He said it was akin to the notion of a rolling boulder: just because you can see it coming at you down the mountain doesn't mean you can stop it. Just because you knew he was going to hit you with these monster Tyrannid cards didn't mean there was anything you could do about it. I never thought of brute force as a tactic that appealed to me. But when playing Conquest, I was most successful with a Ba'ar Zul deck that mostly featured Orks. My most successful Armada fleet features one Kuat Star Destroyer and two Gladiator Star Destroyers, all of which are proficient at chucking ordnance at my opponent. And recently, rather than counting on black crit effects, my Kuat traded all of that in for Expanded Launchers so it has a base of 10 dice to throw at an enemy from its front arc (in my most recent match, I attacked a Venator Star Destroyer that had taken 2 damage to its shields; my Kuat killed it in one shot. It was disgusting to see what could happen when rolling 4 doubles amongst 3 red, 3 blue, and 5 black dice - the extra blue came from a Concentrate Fire dial, if you're keeping track at home...). And currently, my favorite Spirit to play is Heart of the Wildfire, though Volcano is now extremely appealing to me and I'll come back to it sooner than later.

All of that to say: when Volcano decides "enough is enough," it can really back up the sentiment. But it definitely takes a moment to get going. Luckily, the first power card I drew was a minor one called "Quicken the Earth's Struggles." Not only did it give me elements I needed like Fire and Stone, and not only was it cheap, but it offered me the ability to Defend 10 at a sacred site. In and of itself, the card is *fine*, but nothing brilliant. Wouldn't have necessarily given it a second glance, because building sacred sites is rarely something one does with impunity, and continually reclaiming cards is how one loses the game. However, Volcano Looming High can only occupy Mountain lands anyway, and it really wants to build up so that it can use Explosive Eruption and annihilate the Invaders in and around its space. One of its special rules is that its Power Cards gain +1 range if it has 3+ presence in the origin land. Suddenly, being able to defend 10 is incredibly powerful. Snagging that card first really gave me a "break glass in case of emergency" option, which meant that while I did need help in keeping things under control sometimes, more often than not, I could use that card, protect the land from Blight, and everyone else could take care of one another. If that weren't the first Power I drew, I'm not sure I'd have been able to hold out long enough to build up. Especially given that our efforts to defend our lands were often somewhat sabotaged by Event and Fear cards. If you've played the game, y'all have been there: you decide which land will be blighted, which ones won't, you move presence to mitigate the damage as best you can, and then a Fear or Event card comes up that would've allowed you to have a much more effective turn had you known what it would do. I know it's part of the game, but man, it can feel pretty punishing sometimes.

I worried at first that I wasn't generating enough energy because the starting power that drew my eye was Pyroclastic Bombardment. It's fast, it's direct damage, and we really needed Invader mitigation. But I usually just couldn't afford it. I was surprised to play the Spirit and learn this would be the starting power card that I used least often. But having "Quicken" to lend me some easy and reliable defense meant I had the luxury to plan a turn ahead, which meant that I used Rain of Ash and Lava Flows pretty frequently to set up my targets and then do more damage than I had any right dealing. I did get to use Explosive Eruption a couple of times throughout the game, but only had one very big opportunity to annihilate my surroundings. That said, when I had the opportunity to use it, it was so much fun to set off. By the time I'd set it up the way I wanted, I had 7 presence on a pretty central mountain, so I was able to blow 6 presence to do 4 damage and a blight. But by that time, I was also surrounded by Badlands, thus increasing the damage I was doing, and it just got ugly for the Invaders really fast. I won't lie: it felt good to finally feel like I was contributing a big hit because Clayton was over there, swinging away with Major Powers, courtesy of Shifting Memory of Ages. And Fox had gone in pretty hard on Major Powers with Vengeance as a Burning Plague, so she was also getting in some big swings.

We did have one or two close calls, wherein I think the most towns and cities we had on one space was 6, but we pretty regularly carried 4 or 5, and that was flirting with disaster, for sure. We also held our breath because we hadn't really invested in Blight removal, so we knew we were headed for a Blighted Island and a bad time. We managed to put it off for awhile, but when the card finally flipped, it was late enough in the game that it was manageable. We sort of lucked into "Untended Land Crumbles," which effectively adds new Blight during each Invader Phase unless Spirits are willing to pay 3 Energy per board or destroy a Presence on the affected board. By the time this card flipped, Roger and Clayton had more than enough Energy to help pay not only for themselves, but for Fox and me. And while losing Presence could hurt my bottom line when it came to damage, it was a thing I was capable of contributing whenever needed. Had we drawn into it earlier, I think it would've been devastating. But our ability to kick the Blight can down the road for as long as we did was what made it possible to hang on for a victory.

It was a really big relief by the time we got to Level 2 Terror, because it happened on a turn when we'd really winnowed down how many cities were left on the board. At that point, there were three cities left on the island, so all we had to do was destroy those three. However, we were also at a bit of a point of oblivion because if we couldn't win the game by the time we hit the Invader Phase, they would've built something like 5 new cities, which would've made it extremely difficult to win. Luckily, two of those three remaining cities was within striking distance of my ability to level them with Explosive Eruption, and I believe Roger polished off the last remaining city. It wasn't a win by a razor-thin margin, but if we hadn't closed the game out at the moment that we did, I'm not sure we could've made up the ground we would've lost with all of the new buildings. Also, it was a mixed blessing that we literally removed every Jungle Invader card we possibly could have from the Invader deck. So while we sometimes ended up with more than we could handle in the other terrain types, it turned out that Jungle was always a fairly safe space to dump Invaders we couldn't just eliminate. Event cards sometimes caused them to migrate to bad places for us, and England being able to build when a space was adjacent to 2+ towns/cities meant Jungles were still a threat. And we didn't know Jungles would be safe until the very last bit of the game, but we were willing to take a chance and wait for the choice to bite us, and it never really did. By the time Jungle came up, it was near the end of the game and we mostly had things in hand by then. So we eliminated the Invaders and won the day!

Overall, it was a good evening of co-op games, and a good time was had by all! And not for nothing, but I had so much fun that I have come back to playing Spirit Island solo (though I control 2 Spirits on two boards instead of just 1 of each). I still struggle with it, but I'm all about playing against those Adversaries at higher levels than I ever have before, and I'm willing to play against them solo a couple of times so I feel comfortable suggesting we make the attempt during a game night. I acknowledge I'm likely begging for heartache and frustration in doing so, but I've decided it's time to take the plunge, and I'm sure I'll share with y'all how it's going!