Spirit Island and board games (52)

This afternoon Lynn came over and we tried to play a game called Spirit Island. Tried being the operative word: this game is complicated.  

As I've researched the game—which has been completely necessary, because just reading the (32 large-format pages of) instructions is far from sufficient to actually understand how to play it—I've been tiptoeing into the alternate reality that is gamerdom. It has its own vocabulary, with terms like Eurogame, Ameritrash, engine-building, and co-op having specific meanings. 

Spirit Island, for example, is a co-op game, meaning it is both highly cooperative and asymmetric: the various players assume different personae—that is, spirits—with different, mutually assistive but individually insufficient powers. Today, we played with three "low complexity" (i.e., beginner) spirits: Lightning's Swift Strike, River Surges in Sunlight, and Vital Strength of the Earth. Our cooperative goal: to vanquish marauding colonialists. (That, indeed, is the overall goal of the game, which counts it officially as anti-colonial—an actual category; as, on the other end of the spectrum, are colonial games, such as Catan, as a recent Atlantic article spells out.) 

I have discovered various YouTube channels of folks who take games very seriously, and spend quality time walking viewers through the set-up, rules, and execution of hundreds of games. For Spirit Island, we watched a 1-hour and 21-minute video hosted by Monique and Naveen of BeforeYouPlay, which was really informative: they not only explained the mechanics, but they played an entire game, discussing their strategies and moves. They also have an intermediate-level walk-through, 1 hour and 42 minutes long—which we will no doubt watch after re-watching the beginner version. (Did I mention this game is complicated?)

The other day, having grown fascinated by this whole subculture, I watched Monique and Naveen talk about the ten (or twenty-one, since they each had ten, plus two runners-up, though they shared #3) games they would never part with—and I hadn't heard of a single one of them. Many seemed to be Eurogames; some were card games; a few came in enormous boxes ➹; and a lot of them were out of print, so if I wanted to find out more about them, I'm just out of luck. 

A while back, when we first opened up Spirit Island, took a gander at all the moving parts, tried to set it up, and then realized we needed guidance, we found another fellow on YouTube who had three or four half-hour videos dedicated to the game. I might have to track those down too. And I'm sure there are others out there. The key, I'm finding, is to locate a teacher who is thorough enough, but not too detailed; who doesn't talk too fast and doesn't assume too much; and who is pleasant to listen to. We need all the help we can get!