Spirit Island: Jagged Earth

I honestly did not need another Spirit Island expansion, there is already so much content from the base game I haven't explored. The new spirit designs continue to impress and offer wildly unique playstyles to master which keeps the game fresh. Too intimidated to try the 'very high' complexity spirits.

The most interesting expansion for the moment. So much content, the spirits are really interesting, with each having their own gameplay, and the event deck add some really cool moment during the game.

I am still in my first games of this expansion (after playing the base game a lot), so I might still change my opinion. I have not tried yet the new spirits. I do not have the other expansion Branch and Claw, so my opinion is based on the changes in mechanisms compared to the base game. On the one hand, the tokens are a good idea to introduce some further depth to the strategy. However, there are no many opportunities to use them during the game and they depend more on the luck than on the player’s decision. Therefore, at the end, tokens only make the game more fiddly and luck dependent, but without the benefits that it might bring to the strategy. On the other hand, the events just make the game more luck dependent and less fluent. The expansion is fine once you have played too much the basic game and need something else. But, the price is almost as much as the base game and I think this is overpriced, not because of the included components, which are ok, but because of the added ideas (not so novel and not really changing the game so much. Apart from the new spirits, the little new changes are even coming from the previous expansion! ———— I upgraded my score from 7 to 8.5 because of the variety of the new spirits. It allows many, many hours of play. The big contribution of this expansion is actually the new spirits, and not so much the new mechanisms.

A huge expansion in terms of spirits, adversaries, and scenarios that further raises the replayability of spirit island. The codification of actions and the addition of a more situational power cards make the game feel more complex and drafting a bit more frustrating. A bigger and stranger event pool has also caught me off guard more often. Minor things like component and art quality are noticeable. Overall the game has gotten a bit messier as it has gotten bigger, but this is an insanely ambitious expansion of really interesting ideas and concepts that mostly land. After some initial disappointment, I've come to fully appreciate the added complexity of this bigger version of spirit island.