Spirit Island Rules and Solo Guide | 5 Turn Phases

Spirit Island is a cooperative game for 1 to 4 players, ages 14 and up, and it runs 90 to 120 minutes. A turn is five phases, not three, and the Blight you should be watching for is added by Ravage damage rather than by cities being built.

I am Spector, a dad to Alex, 7, and Emma, 10. Spirit Island is the game on our shelf that I love most and hand to my children least, and both of those are true at once. It is the best cooperative game I have ever played and it is a terrible Tuesday night game with a seven year old at the table.

So this page is the rules, properly, because the rules are what stand between you and the game. Everything here is checked against the printed rulebook from Greater Than Games, the Jagged Earth rulebook, the Nature Incarnate rulebook, and the publisher’s own product pages. Where the old version of this page was wrong, I have said so, because a strategy guide that invents a rule is worse than no guide at all.

Start with the three things that decide whether you buy it, then read the rules.

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Spirit Island at a Glance

Aspect	Details
Designer and publisher	R. Eric Reuss, Greater Than Games, first published 2017
Player count	1 to 4 in the base box, 1 to 6 with Jagged Earth
Age	14 and up, printed on the box
Play time	90 to 120 minutes per the rulebook, shorter at 1 to 2 players and longer at 4. The Greater Than Games store lists 100 minutes
Spirit count	8 in the base box
Adversaries	3: the Kingdom of Brandenburg Prussia, the Kingdom of England, the Kingdom of Sweden
Scenarios	4, each with its own difficulty number from 0 to 10
Win condition	Meet the current Terror Level: no Invaders, no Towns or Cities, or no Cities, depending on the level
Lose by	Blight running out, any single Spirit losing all its Presence, or the Invader Deck emptying
Randomness	None after setup. The Invader Deck is fixed and public once it is built
Best first game	Brandenburg Prussia at level 1, no Scenario, no Blight Card, and a Power Progression card

The Five Phases Of A Turn, Which Is The Whole Game

A turn in Spirit Island is five phases, not three, and it is not a cycle: the Spirit Phase, the Fast Power Phase, the Invader Phase, the Slow Power Phase, and Time Passes. A turn is not three phases and it is not a cycle. The rulebook prints five, and if you learn nothing else from this page, learn these.

Phase	What happens
1. Spirit Phase	Three ordered steps: Grow, then Gain Energy, then Play and Pay for Power Cards
2. Fast Power Phase	Fast Powers and Fast innate Powers resolve, in any order the players like
3. Invader Phase	Four parts: Blighted Island, then Fear, then the Invader Actions of Ravage, Build and Explore, then Advance Invader Cards
4. Slow Power Phase	Slow Powers and Slow innate Powers resolve, in any order
5. Time Passes	Discard played cards, clear all Damage and Elements, and remove the single turn effect reminder tokens

Two things follow from that list, and they are the difference between winning and losing.

Fast Powers are your only window before the Invaders act. The Invaders move in phase 3, so a Fast Power has to be used in phase 2. You cannot hold one back and use it in the Slow phase, even if you want to. A Fast Power that damages a City before the Invaders act is a different number than the same card afterwards.

You choose the order of your own Powers. The rulebook says outright that Powers may be resolved in whatever order the players want, and that table talk is not merely allowed but likely necessary for victory. Emma worked this out faster than I did. She started ordering her own cards around what she could see me doing, which is the single most useful habit in this game.

The Invader Deck Is Not Random, And It Is Not A Cycle

This is where the old version of this page was wrong at the root, so it gets its own section.

The old page said the deck is “composed of three types of cards: Explore, Build, and Ravage” and that “the invaders cycle through these phases in order.” Both halves are wrong.

The 15 Invader cards in the box are 15 separate cards, and three of them sit face up in three action spaces on the Invader Board at all times: Ravage, Build, and Explore. They are not drawn one at a time and they do not cycle. What the deck controls is which land type each action hits, and the Invader Board keeps one of each land type in play so all three actions are always available.

The deck itself is 12 cards, arranged in three stages. The rulebook prints it exactly: 3 Stage I cards on top, then 4 Stage II cards, then 5 Stage III cards on the bottom, shuffled together stage by stage. The box ships 4, 5, and 6 of them so you can pull one of each and play the tidy version. Brandenburg Prussia and the other adversaries then change this deck at setup, which is the entire reason they are interesting.

After Explore, all three cards slide one space to the left. The Ravage card goes to the discard, the Build card slides into the Ravage space, and the Explore card slides into the Build space. That is the whole spreading mechanism, and it is one sentence long.

Each action has a land type and a reminder tile on the board, so the useful thing to do at the table is read the three tiles and ask which lands are exposed.

• Ravage hits lands of the shown type only. Where Invaders are present they deal 1 Damage per Explorer, 2 per Town, and 3 per City, and that damage goes to both the land and the Dahan. If a land takes 2 or more Damage it gets a Blight, and that happens once no matter how hard you were hit. Every 2 points of Damage destroys one Dahan, and you cannot spread Damage around to save them. Surviving Dahan then fight back, each dealing 2 Damage to the Invaders in that land.
• Build only affects lands that already contain Invaders. A land with more Towns than Cities gains a City, and every other land gains a Town.
• Explore turns the top card of the Invader Deck and adds one Explorer to every land of the shown type that either contains a Town or City or is adjacent to one. If there is no card to turn, time has run out and you lose.

Nothing in the base game adds a card to the Invader Deck during play. The old page claimed that Build “adds to the Invader Deck, accelerating the game speed.” Nothing does. Only adversaries and scenarios touch that deck, and only at setup.

Once the deck is built, nothing about it is random. If you want the general argument for why that matters more than it sounds like it should, our guide to randomness in tabletop games covers the other end of the scale.

Blight Is The Real Clock, And It Cascades

The old page never explained Blight, which is a shame, because Blight is the timer the whole game runs on.

Blight is added when a land takes 2 or more Damage in a single Ravage, it destroys one Presence from every Spirit in that land, and if the land already had Blight it cascades to one adjacent land you choose. Those are the two things adding Blight does, and the cascade is where the real decision lives. It destroys one Presence from every Spirit with Presence in that land, and those Presence are removed from play rather than returned to the panel. And if the land already had Blight, the new Blight cascades: you must add one Blight to an adjacent land of the players’ choosing, and if that land also has Blight, it cascades again from there.

The rulebook works this through with a real example, and the example is the actual strategic decision in the game. A City takes 3 Damage, so the land gets a Blight. Because Blight already existed there, you must cascade. You can put the second Blight in the empty land, which is safe. Or you can put it in the yellow Presence land, which removes the yellow Presence entirely and leaves the purple untouched. The rulebook says plainly that the first option is likely the better choice because it does not destroy any Presence. That is the game teaching you to think.

Two more things about Blight that catch everyone once:

• Blight is added by damage, not by cities. A Ravage that puts 2 or more Damage into a land blights it. A Build does not. If you have been playing as though every city is a countdown, that is the wrong model and it will cost you the game.
• The Blight Cards are the loss timer. The base game ships two. You draw one at setup, place it on the Blight Space Healthy Island side up, and move the printed amount onto the card. The Blighted side of the card is what you actually play against, and the amount is printed on each card, so read yours. One of the two base cards shows 5 per player and states that if there is ever no Blight left there, the players lose. If you skip the Blight Card entirely, which the rulebook recommends for a first game, the Invader Board prints the Blight instructions instead.

Fear, Terror Levels, And How You Actually Win

The old page said not to be afraid to use the optional Fear Cards to give yourself a win condition. Fear is not optional and a Fear card is not a win condition you pick. Here is the real version.

You win Spirit Island by meeting the current Terror Level, which is no Invaders at level 1, no Towns or Cities at level 2, and no Cities at level 3. The rest of this section is how you get there. You win by meeting the current Terror Level, and the Terror Level is printed on the Invader Board the whole game. It starts at 1.

• Terror Level 1 means no Invaders on the island.
• Terror Level 2 means no Towns or Cities on the island.
• Terror Level 3 means no Cities on the island.

Fear is how you climb toward those. You generate Fear in two ways. Destroying a Town generates 1 Fear, and destroying a City generates 2. Powers carrying the Fear icon generate more. Note carefully that removing or replacing a Town or City does not generate Fear, only destroying it does. For every Fear generated, you advance one Fear marker from the Fear Pool on the Invader Board to the Generated Fear area.

You put 4 Fear markers per player in the Fear Pool. When all of them have advanced, you turn the top card of the Fear Deck face down into the Earned Fear Cards space, flip it face up, and resolve it, then discard it. Each card shows the Terror Level it grants, and if the card reveals a Terror Level divider, the Terror Level rises immediately. The rulebook says outright that you might instantly win at that moment. Fear effects last only for the current turn, and a newly earned Fear card goes on the bottom of the stack of cards you are currently resolving.

There are 15 Fear cards and 2 Terror Level dividers in the base box, so Terror Level 3 is reachable but you have to work for it.

This is also the thing cooperative games usually get wrong. Most cooperative games have a single shared clock, and the players spend the whole game defending it. Spirit Island has two: the Blight race, which punishes you for letting the Invaders hurt the land, and the Fear race, which pays you for hitting them hard enough that they leave. Choosing which one you are speeding up is the strategic spine of every game. Our Parks guide is a much gentler game built on the same idea of racing an open track rather than defending a wall.

Presence, Sacred Sites, And Why You Have No Presence Left

The old page used the word Presence several times and explained it never. It is the engine of the whole game.

Your Spirit panel has two Presence Tracks: the top one is Energy Gained per turn and the bottom one is Card Plays, and you always use the highest uncovered number on each. That is the whole engine, and here is the rest of it. Each Spirit has two Presence Tracks on its panel. The top one is Energy Gained per turn, and the bottom one is Card Plays. You gain Energy equal to the highest uncovered number on the top track, and you can play as many Power Cards as the highest uncovered number on the bottom track. There are 52 Spirit Presence tokens in the box, 13 in each of 4 colours.

Three rules do the real work:

• Unspent Energy carries over to the next turn. Unused Card Plays do not. So spending your Energy to its limit is a real decision, and holding a card back to play it next turn is not free.
• A land where you hold two or more Presence is a Sacred Site, and a number of Powers can only be used from one. Some Spirits are built entirely around this.
• Destroyed Presence is removed from play and set beside the island rather than going back onto your panel. And if any single Spirit ever has no Presence left on the island, the players immediately lose.

The last one is the real solo difficulty in this game, and it is the reason the rulebook warns you about the luck of the draw when you are playing by yourself.

Energy, Cards, And The Power Progression Card

The base box has 22 Major Powers, 36 Minor Powers, and 32 Unique Powers, and you start each game with your Spirit’s four Unique Powers in hand.

Two limits on card play, and they are separate. You can play as many cards as your Card Plays track allows, and you must have the Energy to pay for them. You pay Energy the moment you play a card, including a Slow Power, and you gain all of that card’s Elements immediately when you pay, whether the Power turns out to be Fast or Slow. Elements leave play when the card leaves play. You can also skip a Power’s effect entirely, which is often correct, and you still keep the Elements.

When you Gain a Power Card, choose whether you are taking a Minor or a Major, draw 4 from that deck, keep one, and discard the rest. If you gained a Major, you must permanently Forget one of your own Power Cards to pay for it, and any Power can be Forgotten, including a Major.

For a first game, use the Power Progression card. There are 4 in the box. You take your Spirit’s progression card, set aside the Minor and Major Powers listed on it, and when you would Gain a Power Card you simply take the next one on the list instead of drawing 4. It is the single best teaching tool Greater Than Games put in the box, and the rulebook tells first time players to use it on page 3.

Spirits And Unique Powers

The base box has 8 Spirits, and I am giving you the official names rather than a clever ranking, because every clever ranking you will read is somebody’s opinion.

Lightning’s Swift Strike, River Surges in Sunlight, Vital Strength of the Earth, Shadows Flicker Like Flame, Thunderspeaker, A Spread of Rampant Green, Ocean’s Hungry Grasp, and Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares.

Each Spirit gets a panel and four Unique Power Cards, and the four Unique Powers are your opening hand. The panel also carries a Play Style and Complexity line, a Special Rule, and a list of Growth Options.

The rulebook names four Spirits as the low complexity choices for a first or second game: Lightning’s Swift Strike, Vital Strength of the Earth, River Surges in Sunlight, and Shadows Flicker Like Flame. Pick from those four. I will not publish a numeric complexity score for any Spirit, because the printed score lives on the panel and every community table I checked disagreed with the others.

A few things the old page got wrong about specific Spirits:

• The old page described Thunderspeaker as using “the Dahan as an army,” which is not what Thunderspeaker does. Its identity is lightning and a card engine that trades cards for damage.
• The old page called Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares “high power, high risk, one mistake can leave you defenseless.” That is a mood, not a description. Bringer is the base box’s most Fear focused Spirit, and Fear is how you win at high Terror Levels, so it is arguably the best Spirit in the box for a confident player.
• The old page said the base game has “over ten different spirits.” It has 8.

The Gateway Bridge: if the draw is that you each want a different Spirit, our Root guide is the other game where every player has a genuinely different toolkit and nobody can take anything away from anybody.

• Similarities: Both give every player an asymmetric toolkit that changes how the shared board is played, and in both the only real interaction is the shared threat.
• Differences: Root has two hidden hands and a deck you build between turns, so the interaction is direct. Spirit Island has no hands, no deck building, and no player interaction at all beyond talking.
• Why this game fans will enjoy it: If the thing you like is the feeling of playing a character, play either. If the thing you like is the feeling of solving one shared problem together, Spirit Island is the purer version of it.

Board Setup, Per Player

The old page gave a setup time and a complaint about cardboard, and never described the setup. Here it is, from the rulebook.

Setup has four named parts, and one instruction must happen first. If you are using an Adversary or a Scenario, choose it before setup begins, because it changes how the game is set up.

1. Invader Board. Put 4 Fear markers per player in the Fear Pool. Shuffle the 15 Fear cards, put 9 in the Fear Deck space, 3 from the bottom, and 3 above that. Make the Invader Deck as described earlier and put it on the Explore space. Draw a random Blight Card, place it on the Blight Space Healthy Island side up without looking at the back, and place the printed amount of Blight onto it.
2. The Island and Supply. Randomly pick one island board per player and arrange them to form the island, using the printed 2 player, 3 player, or 4 player layout. Populate the boards with Invaders, Dahan, and Blight as the icons in each land indicate. Then shuffle the Minor and Major Power decks, and put the Energy, Cities, Towns, Explorers, and Dahan near the board where everyone can reach them.
3. Player Setup. Each player takes all Spirit Presence and single turn effect markers of one colour, then takes a Spirit panel and its four Unique Powers. Each player starts on a different island board and follows the Setup instructions printed on the back of their own panel, which is where you put your starting Presence. Spirits are not restricted to their starting board. Presence and Powers may be placed on or used on any board. Then flip your panel and place all remaining Presence onto the dashed circles on your Presence Tracks, leaving the leftmost numbers in solid circles covered.
4. Invaders’ Starting Action. Reveal the top card of the Invader Deck. The Invaders Explore in that land type, and leave that card face up in the Build space. The Invaders have already acted once before your first turn, and everybody forgets this.

Each island board has 8 numbered lands with exactly 2 of each of the 4 terrains: Jungle, Mountain, Sands, and Wetland. Lands next to the Ocean are Coastal, and the Ocean itself is not a land and is not in play. Each board starts with 6 Dahan.

Our 7th Continent guide uses a similar map scale and a much gentler clock, if you want the same shape of island with a tenth of the rules load, and our Everdell guide is the other game on our shelf where a shared board of interconnected places slowly becomes a city, with a fraction of the icon reading.

Adversaries, And The One The Rulebook Recommends

The old page said adversaries “add specific rules that make the invaders smarter or more aggressive” and gave an invented example about building cities faster or damaging your Presence when you destroy their towns. Neither of those is a thing that happens.

The real mechanism is the Escalation effect, printed on the Adversary Panel and performed when a Stage II Invader card with a flag icon is revealed for the first time. The rulebook is explicit that Escalation happens as soon as that card is revealed, before Explore. Some adversaries also add a loss condition. On top of that, every adversary has six difficulty levels, and the effects are cumulative, so fighting at level 3 means you are also using levels 1 and 2.

The three base adversaries, and what each actually does:

• The Kingdom of Brandenburg Prussia is the recommended first adversary, and the reason is that most of its changes happen during setup rather than adding new rules mid game. Its escalation is Surge of Colonists, dealing 1 Damage to each land with 3 or fewer Invaders. Its levels reshuffle the Invader Deck, removing Stage I and Stage II cards and bringing Stage III cards forward, so the Invaders move fast and land harder sooner.
• The Kingdom of England sends so many immigrants that its colonies spill into unexplored land, pushing its borders forward constantly and pushing hard to found a capital during Stage II. Its escalation builds Towns in every land without Invaders and overbuilds them. The rulebook notes it is easier for Spirits good at wrecking Towns and harder for Spirits that rely on killing Explorers to prevent Builds.
• The Kingdom of Sweden has more dangerous Ravages, a Crown policy of assimilating the Dahan where Invader population is large, and an escalation that mines Iron Ore. It can also add Blight during setup, and the rulebook has a specific note that Blight added during setup does not cascade and does not destroy Presence.

The published difficulty chart is on page 28 and it is the piece of the book most players never find. Brandenburg Prussia starts at difficulty 2. England and Sweden start at difficulty 3. Brandenburg Prussia reaches difficulty 10 at level 6, while England and Sweden top out lower. Using the thematic maps adds 3 difficulty. Scenarios carry their own difficulty number from 0 to 10, and the printed note is that difficulty is a rough guide, because some Spirits are much better or worse against particular adversaries and combinations vary in how well they work together.

Scenarios, And Why You Should Wait

The old page never mentioned the 4 Scenarios at all. Each one changes the situation the Spirits find themselves in rather than the Invaders’ behaviour, and each carries a difficulty number in its upper right corner from 0 to 10. The four in the base box are Blitz, Guard the Isle’s Heart, Rituals of Terror, and Dahan Insurrection.

One precedence rule matters and it is easy to get wrong. If a Scenario and an Adversary contradict each other, the Scenario wins. Playing without any of them is explicitly allowed, and the rulebook recommends it for a first game.

Solo: What The Printed Rules Actually Say

The printed solo mode in the base rulebook is four sentences with no bot and no difficulty adjustment, and Jagged Earth does not extend it, it deletes the section and replaces it with a Play Options chapter. Here is the section I could not find written properly anywhere else, so I read all three rulebooks for it.

The base rulebook gives solo four sentences

That is the whole thing, on page 22, and it is worth reading as written because it is much more modest than most solo mode write ups suggest. Solo games work much like normal games, but with a single board as the whole island. The only difference is that you can target yourself with Powers that specifically target another Spirit, though you do not gain the extra benefits from Powers that are better when used on another Spirit, like Gift of Constancy or Elemental Boon. Then the rulebook concedes that the luck of the draw is high and that you have no fellow Spirits to compensate for your Spirit’s weaknesses and limitations.

That is it. There is no bot, no autoplay deck, no extra Invader cards, and no difficulty adjustment of any kind. The old page’s claim that setup time is “slightly reduced” in solo is an inference, not a rule, though it happens to be true in the obvious way, because you are using one island board and one set of pieces instead of four.

What actually makes solo hard is on that page too, even though it is phrased as a casual aside. With one Spirit, you have no second pair of eyes, and if your Spirit has a blind spot, nothing covers it. If any one Spirit having no Presence loses the game, and there is only one Spirit, then every Presence you lose is a real threat rather than a temporary inconvenience.

Jagged Earth deletes the solo section entirely

This is the finding that surprised me. Search the 20 page Jagged Earth rulebook for solo and there is no Solo Player Mode section, no heading, and no rules text. The base rulebook paragraph still applies, unchanged.

What Jagged Earth puts in its place is a Play Options chapter on pages 16 to 21, and it is the most useful part of that expansion. Six options, none of which is a bot:

• Alternate island layouts, including the printed standard 5 player “Crab” and 6 player “Two Centers” shapes, plus named alternates like Fragment, Opposite Shores, Coastline, Sunrise, Leaf, and Snake. The rulebook explains why layouts matter: a lower Coastal land with no adjacent board is where Blight cascades get bad fast, and some layouts make it easy to build a safe zone the Invaders cannot Explore.
• Archipelagos, splitting the island into two or more disconnected islets, with Coastal lands on facing boards treated as Range 2 across the water.
• Including an Extra Island Board, which is the only genuinely solo specific rule in the chapter. It gives you a second board with no Spirit starting on it, and it prints a setup table by player count. At 1 player, no Invaders are placed on the extra board at all, not even the initial Explore. At 2 players you get the initial Explore only, at 3 a Coastal City plus the initial Explore, at 4 an Inland Town plus it, and at 5 you set it up as normal. It also adds 1 Fear Marker per player to the Fear Pool, moves the Blight pool from per player to per board, and is printed as worth roughly plus 2 to 4 difficulty, more if the game is already hard.
• Combining Two Adversaries, with the base 3 Fear Cards per Terror Level plus whatever each adversary adds, one adversary leading and one supporting, and a printed formula for the combined difficulty.
• Playing Without Events, if you want the base game’s predictability back. You leave the Event Deck in the box, add 1 Fear Card to Terror Level II, and use the two Command Beasts reminder cards.
• Playing With Fewer or No Tokens, so a new group does not have to learn all five token types on game one. Anything you would have added becomes 1 Energy and 1 Fear instead. The rulebook is honest that this is a one off option to ease learning and not a well balanced system for long term play.

Nature Incarnate adds exactly one solo rule

And it is a small one. In single player games, if you flip a Blight Card that has only 2 Blight per player on the Blighted Island side, you may draw a random replacement from among the unused Blight Cards. The rulebook specifically says not to redraw Still Healthy Island cards, because they still have another card’s worth of Blight behind them.

The most useful line in the appendix

The Jagged Earth clarifications appendix says, of Fractured Days Split the Sky, that Pour Time Sideways is useless in a 1 board game, and that in solo this Spirit badly needs at least one Major Power. That is the publisher telling you the expansions are not solo balanced the way the boxes suggest, and it is the reason the Extra Island Board exists as a solo tool rather than a difficulty gimmick.

If you want the wider field rather than the deep end of this one game, our solo adventure guide has the lighter end, and if you are specifically shopping for cooperative games rather than solo ones, the games like Pandemic page is the right shelf. Helldivers 2 is the other cooperative game I would put in front of a group that wants the pressure of fighting a system rather than defending a landscape.

Our House Strategy, Not Official Rules

Everything above is printed. This part is what worked at our table, and it is house practice rather than anything Greater Than Games wrote.

• Read the three reminder tiles at the start of every Invader Phase and say the land types out loud. Emma and I do this together. It takes five seconds and it stops the most common mistake we made, which is defending a land that was never going to be Ravaged.
• Count Blight in the corner of your eye, not on the board. The cascade is the clock, and it becomes obvious once you stop looking at the cities and start looking at the second Blight.
• Pace the Spirit Phase with a timer if a new player is teaching. The rulebook actually suggests this on page 8, in a sidebar called The Urgency of War, and points out that some Spirits are printed as taking a long time choosing Power Cards. We use a two minute timer and it is the single change that made this game playable with a new adult at the table.
• Ask the new player to narrate the Invader Phase out loud. They are not going to be the one choosing a Power, and narrating gives them the part of the game that is not a decision.
• Do not teach Blight Cascades on game one. Play the pre printed Blight space on the Invader Board with no Blight Card, as the rulebook advises, and introduce the cards when the second game starts.
• Two player is genuinely the best count for this game, more than three. Emma and I get a full game done in about 90 minutes with two, and I do not enjoy it with four. If your group is bigger, our Gloomhaven guide is what I would hand four adults who want a heavy cooperative game with something to talk about between sessions.

The Expansions, Including The One That Does Not Exist

Promiseland is not a Greater Than Games product, it is a fan expansion, and the official line is Branch and Claw, Jagged Earth, Feather and Flame, and Nature Incarnate. The old page told you to buy Jagged Earth and Promiseland. Promiseland is not a Greater Than Games product. It is a fan expansion by Peter Boggess, made by fans, and it is not what you are buying when you order from a legitimate retailer. Here is the actual line, taken from the publisher’s own product list.

Product	What it actually is	Player count	Is it worth buying?
Spirit Island	The base game. 8 Spirits, 3 adversaries, 4 scenarios, printed solo rules, everything you need	1 to 4	Yes. Nothing else is required and nothing else is included
Horizons of Spirit Island	A cheaper standalone entry point with fewer, simpler components and five easier Spirits. Same mechanics, not an expansion	1 to 3	Yes, if you have never played it or you are buying for a family. This is the box to start with
Spirit Island: Spirit Promo Pack 1	2 Spirits, Serpent Slumbering Beneath the Island and Heart of the Wildfire, plus their innate power cards. Later folded into Feather and Flame	Uses the base game	Only if you find it cheap, since the content is available elsewhere
Spirit Island: Branch and Claw	2 Spirits, Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves and Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds, the France adversary, and Event cards	Uses the base game	Only if you want Events early. The Jagged Earth rulebook says Jagged Earth is best balanced with it
Spirit Island: Jagged Earth	10 Spirits with 41 Unique Powers, 2 adversaries, 3 scenarios, 30 Event cards, a second island board, Badlands, Beasts, Wilds, Disease, Strife, and the Isolate effect. Takes the game to 6 players and makes a Blight Card mandatory	1 to 6	Yes, and it is the one to buy first. It is also the expansion that gives solo the Extra Island Board
Spirit Island: Feather and Flame	The third expansion, and it collects both Promo Packs into one box alongside new content	Uses the base game	If you want the Promo spirits in a single legitimate box. It is the quiet value pick of the line
Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate	8 Spirits, 24 Aspect cards that bolt onto other Spirits, 1 adversary, 2 scenarios, 9 Event cards, 9 Fear cards, 8 Blight cards, 4 Healing cards, and the Incarna token type. Requires the base game and Jagged Earth	1 to 6	The Aspects are the best value in the entire line if you already own Jagged Earth

Buy the base game and stop there for your first three games. After that, Jagged Earth, because it is the one that changes the player count, the solo options, and the difficulty ceiling all at once. Nature Incarnate next, for the Aspects. Branch and Claw last, or not at all.

One practical note that will save you money. Greater Than Games suspended all work in April 2025 because of United States import tariffs, and in April 2026 Handelabra Games bought out the company and handed control back to its owners with some of the veteran team returning. The line is not dead, but if you are waiting for a reprint of something, check before you assume. And if your copy is a 4th or 5th printing, buy the Errata Pack. The 4th and 5th printings have text errors that do not exist in the 1st to 3rd or the 6th and later printings.

Spirit Island FAQs

How many players does Spirit Island need? One to four players in the base box, and one to six with Jagged Earth. Two is the best number by a wide margin, because the game is a shared puzzle and a third player adds a Presence track to manage without adding a decision. A single player is a legitimate and popular way to play, and the base rulebook covers it in four sentences.

How old do you have to be to play Spirit Island? Fourteen and up. That is what the box and the publisher both print. The reason is not the arithmetic, it is the icon language, so a motivated younger player with an adult is fine but a lone ten year old will stall on reading the cards rather than on thinking.

How long does a game of Spirit Island take? The rulebook says 90 to 120 minutes, slightly shorter at one or two players and slightly longer at four. The Greater Than Games store lists 100 minutes. A first game runs longer than any of those because of the teach.

How many phases are there in a turn? Five: the Spirit Phase, the Fast Power Phase, the Invader Phase, the Slow Power Phase, and Time Passes. The Spirit Phase itself has three ordered steps, which are Grow, Gain Energy, and Play and Pay for Power Cards.

What is the Invader Deck and how many cards are in it? The deck is 12 cards arranged in three stages, being 3 Stage I, 4 Stage II, and 5 Stage III. The box ships 4, 5, and 6 of each so you can remove one of each. Three Invader cards sit face up in the Ravage, Build, and Explore spaces on the Invader Board, and after Explore they all slide one space left.

What causes Blight, and what happens when it lands? Blight is added when a land takes 2 or more Damage during Ravage, and only once no matter how much damage lands. Adding Blight destroys one Presence from each Spirit in that land, and those Presence are removed from play. If the land already had Blight, the new Blight cascades to one adjacent land of your choosing.

How do you win Spirit Island? You meet the current Terror Level, which is printed on the Invader Board. Terror Level 1 needs no Invaders on the island, level 2 needs no Towns or Cities, and level 3 needs no Cities. You climb by generating Fear, mostly by destroying Towns for 1 Fear and Cities for 2, and by earning Fear cards.

Is Fear optional in Spirit Island? No. Fear is generated automatically by destroying a Town or a City and by Powers with the Fear icon, and each Fear generated advances a marker. Note that removing or replacing a Town or City does not generate Fear. Only destroying it does.

What is the solo mode in Spirit Island? The base rulebook gives it four sentences on page 22, and that is all. You use a single board as the whole island, you can target yourself with Powers that target another Spirit, and you do not get the benefits of Powers that reward being used on another Spirit. There is no bot and no difficulty adjustment.

Does Jagged Earth change the solo rules? It removes the solo section from the rulebook and replaces it with a Play Options chapter. The only genuinely solo specific rule is the Extra Island Board, which at 1 player places no Invaders on the extra board at all, adds 1 Fear marker per player, and is printed as worth roughly plus 2 to 4 difficulty.

Do I need the expansions to play Spirit Island? No. The base box is complete, including solo play, 3 adversaries, and 4 scenarios. Jagged Earth is the one worth buying first because it takes the game to 6 players, adds an Event deck and a second island board, and gives solo the Extra Island Board.

Is Promiseland an official Spirit Island expansion? No. Promiseland is a fan expansion made by enthusiasts, not a Greater Than Games product. The official line is Branch and Claw, Jagged Earth, Feather and Flame, and Nature Incarnate, plus Spirit Promo Pack 1, Horizons of Spirit Island, and Errata Pack 1.

The Verdict On Spirit Island

Spirit Island is one of the great games of the last decade and it is the best cooperative game I own. The two clocks, Blight and Fear, pulling against each other, is a design idea I have not seen done better anywhere. The Invader Deck being completely deterministic means every loss is a decision you made rather than a shuffle you drew, which is the rarest thing in cooperative gaming. And the art, with the Invader pieces deliberately printed in white so that light does not mean good, is doing real work rather than decoration.

It is also a two hour commitment with a long teach, a big table footprint, and an icon language that will not become automatic for a month. If the table has a nine year old in it, box honesty matters more than my enthusiasm: 14 and up. Our board games that do not look babyish to a tween guide is the shelf for that age, and our guide to games for kids who dislike complex rules explains the complexity gate properly.

Buy Horizons if the group is new to it, because it is the same game with an easier on ramp. Buy the base game and Jagged Earth if the group is ready. Either way, start on Brandenburg Prussia at level 1 with a Power Progression card, and read the three reminder tiles out loud every Invader Phase. That is the whole beginner’s method, and it will get you to a win.

If the problem is not this game but the table it needs, the guide to games that need no table space is the honest answer, because Spirit Island genuinely needs the biggest table on our shelf. And if you would rather build a solo engine that does not take two hours, Gaia Project gives you the same satisfaction of optimisation in half the time. For a card game with the same kind of long term planning, our Dominion guide is the other end of the spectrum, and for the sequential rather than simultaneous turn structure that some people find much easier to learn, Terraforming Mars is the honest alternative.