[guest post] time passes from spirit island by CJ Q. '23

i’ve⁠01 cj: speaking is lumia n. '24 known cj for 3.5 years now. though the first 6 months it was very much not closely. of course, that was back when i was a prefrosh and didn’t know him very well or talk to him very often.

time passes.

frosh fall was when i really got to know cj.⁠02 cj: the amount of times i am mentioned in this post is kinda uncomfortable lol i soon came to learn that i had a lot of common interests with him, such as esp, puzzles, and board games, and even later i would discover that a couple other things that cj liked, like squares and writing, were also things that i liked.

time passes.

i finally met cj in person in frosh spring, when mit let people live on campus again. this was back in covid times, when we had these things called “pods”. i was in the same pod as alex and a couple others from a sizable friend group, and we played a lot of board (and video) games together. cj wasn’t in our pod, but since i lived on floorpi anyways, i interacted with cj’s pod a lot, with my interactions including playing stone age with his pod in his pod’s lounge⁠03 all the pods had rooms as lounges. his pod's was H306 and mine was H314 with me standing outside the door and telling them my actions. we also did a couple of puzzlehunts together, one of which we were fast enough to win $400 in.

time passes.

yannick, who was in cj’s pod, had the goal of playing all the board games on floorpi before he graduated. i don’t remember whether he actually completed this, but from what i remember from looking at data, he at least got pretty close.

one board game that he hadn’t played yet was spirit island. apparently cj liked it a lot, because the day after, he dm’d me this message:

of course, i said yes, though i’d also never played before. (this was after we got vaccinated so we could actually play together)

i did remember looking at all the games on that shelf earlier, when i wanted to play a shorter game with my pod, and we passed up spirit island because the box said 90-120 minutes. cj told me that it was closer to 30 minutes times the number of players, and as i’m writing about it 2 years later, i agree with this.

he then asked me to choose one of the four low complexity spirits, just based on vibes.⁠04 cj: this is the correct way to play your first spirit island game i happened to have picked shadows, which happens to be the weakest spirit currently in the game plus all expansions, but we weren’t playing at a high enough difficulty for that to actually matter. also, i think shadows is the best spirit to play with first, if power progressions are being used.

cj explained the rules to me very well, despite having played the game only once before. he explained roughly how the invaders worked, what blight and dahan and fear did, and how we fight against them. like always, there were a couple of outstanding questions, but those were niche enough that they were better answered as they come up during the game.

i don’t remember which spirit cj played, i think it was river. since neither of us knew anything about strategy, winning was nontrivial, though not difficult either.

now, there were at least 4 things that made me want to play more:

1. the theme was great, especially with plastic = bad and wood = good⁠05 cj: not very subtle, this game comparisons, having heard a lot about plastic being bad in the semester before. it was also a game against colonialism, and you were playing as supernatural spirits using powers to stop the invaders from colonizing and destroying the island and the natives, which i also really liked.
2. it was cooperative. i started getting tired of competitive games because i was really bad at them, but i don’t play a lot of cooperative games so my experiences with them were pretty untarnished. (ok actually the only cooperative game i’ve played so far was hanabi which i didn’t particularly like,⁠06 cj: i think hanabi is a bad game, fight me but my experiences with hanabi are very forgettable)
3. the jungle hungers, which is the third card in shadows’ power progression, is one of the coolest major powers in the base game. it also helps immensely that it’s really easy to hit the extra threshold at that point of the game.
4. cj invited me to look through all the majors and all the spirits after that game ended. there were definitely some that were cool, such as entwined power and powerstorm, but a lot of them were less interesting and just did like 4 damage. however, all the majors had thresholds, which were the more interesting parts. if the power cards you played this turn had at least these elements on them, you’d get to do an additional cool thing with these majors.

we ended up playing a lot more in the rest of the semester. i would play a game with a podmate right afterwards, and then we spread it around the rest of our pod.

the next couple of games, i would play through the 3 other low complexity spirits with cj, in sandbox-ish games against the max level adversaries (where we control all the random cards), just to see what the adversaries would be like. i don’t quite remember anything else about those games, except that one of them had both of us trying to play 2 low complexity spirits at once, which was definitely too overwhelming for the amount of experience either of us had. i think i played lightning and river for that game, and i didn’t yet understand how their synergy worked.

i and cj would both eventually play all 8 spirits in the base game at least once that semester. at this point, this was basically the only board game on floorpi that i would end up playing for the rest of the semester. by the end of the semester, we were playing against low-level adversaries and winning pretty consistently.

eventually, i would find out that spirit island had expansions, and my hyperfixation got even stronger. we did buy the expansions with the prize money from the puzzlehunt, but it was very late in the semester so we wouldn’t be able to play it before the summer ended.

time passes.

as fall 2021 began, the first thing i did after returning to campus was looking for the expansions we bought. unfortunately, branch and claw failed to be delivered, so we only had jagged earth, but jagged earth was a lot of content anyways.

we opted to not add all the expansion content yet, at least not combining the power card decks together, because we were still playing with a lot of newer players, and we would need to separate the decks if we wanted to do so. fortunately, some jagged earth spirits could be played without expansion content.

so became my first game as starlight. then a second, then a third, then like 10 more. before long, starlight became my most played spirit. i of course also tried out the other spirits that didn’t need tokens several times, though we were also locked out of a lot of the spirits because we didn’t want to combine decks together. i played fractured, memory, and shroud several times, though i still enjoyed starlight a lot more. i think the reason i liked it was because it was the spirit that did the most of the two things i enjoyed the most: gaining power cards, and matching elements with each other.

time passes.

at some point later in the semester, i became floorpi’s gamecomm,⁠07 manager of board games 08 cj: floorpi is run through comms, which are people responsible for something like buying games or maintaining the kitchen so i bought branch and claw basically immediately. i also noticed that promo pack 2 was available, so i bought that too. i would buy promo pack 1 later in the semester when it became available again.

we finally decided to combine the decks together. with the extra power cards from both branch and claw and jagged earth, the minor and major power decks became huge and shuffling them became hard. we still had everything stored in plastic bags too, so setting up a game would take almost as long as a (2-player) game itself.

therefore, cj decided to buy an organizer.⁠09 cj: this is from towerrex, i love all their organizers

this is also around the time when cj made a spreadsheet to document all of floorpi’s games of spirit island. the first few games didn’t have a lot of details on them, but as time progressed, we started adding more and more calculations to the spreadsheet, like a sheet for spirit pairings, person-spirit pairings, and info sheets for the spirits and for the adversaries. i was able to find some extra details for our earlier games through pictures that cj posted on blog posts before.

when the organizer finally arrived, setup time became short enough that we went from playing two games a week to almost one game a day. at some point, cj said⁠10 this is a riff on the quote “We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth,” which i thought was kinda silly “two games a week for survival, four games a week for maintenance, six games a week for growth.” he also started asking me “do you know what game i want to play?”

this was definitely the most active semester. we would play several larger games, including one game where we needed to draw another island board because there were only 6 boards in the physical game, but we played the card that added a 7th. after that we would play the card that destroys a board, but we would do shenanigans that would leave one of its lands intact and other shenanigans that let the card destroy a land on a different board all the way across the island. in the end, the island ended up looking like this:⁠11 cj: to be clear, that is one isolated land, not adjacent to anything

time passes.

in 2022, we started with playing about 4 games a week, though the amount we played slowly dwindled due to other commitments. i would still be updating the spreadsheet, adding other sheets for spirit-adversary pairings and other statistics. the spreadsheet would work slower over time, and we started talking about building a web app to do these calculations more quickly.

we also kinda stopped playing with just each other in 2 player games. i think we just didn’t find it interesting enough anymore. instead, we tried controlling more than 1 spirit at a time. sometimes we would play 2 handed, but other times we would each control 1 spirit but have another spirit be jointly controlled, making the game 1.5-handed.

another factor that may have contributed was that we completed every spirit-spirit pairing, so we didn’t have nearly as much to work towards anymore.

even though we stopped playing with just each other nearly as much, we started becoming more involved with the greater spirit island playing community. i and alex would become active in the main spirit island discord server, discussing strategy and rules. on the server, alex would post pictures of the games that we played on floorpi and at et. we would also consume more spirit island content⁠12 cj: you know a game's serious when there's lots of content around it such as various youtubers, and a podcast about spirit island that was started just before jagged earth came out had a new season announced.

by this point, spirit island has long been thoroughly entrenched into our lives. when we play other board games, we use spirit island terminology to talk about things. for example, cj apparently forgot how resources worked in 7 wonders, so i told him they work like elements. this would be much more visible in other cooperative games though. when we play aeon’s end, we would call our characters “spirits”, the monster we fight against an “adversary”, and our spells “slow powers”. i would even answer questions asked to general groups with spirit island references. the silliest one i remember is someone asking about how to choose a major, and i said something about taking the one that fits my elements.

i would also change both my minecraft username and skin to starlight. i would then import my minecraft username into real life, and that’s why my name is now lumia. relatedly, i would experience gender euphoria by hitting every elemental threshold with starlight,⁠13 cj: a feat i have not done yet which is the hardest spirit to do this with, on the day that i changed my minecraft username.

time passes.

in the fall, two new expansions for spirit island was announced. the first one was horizons, which was a standalone game that was a slightly simplified version to cater to more people, but it had new spirits so we wanted it anyways. the second one was nature incarnate, and it was talked about a lot, because they were introducing a new mechanic and a lot of content. we were also pretty hyped for it and printed out some of the announced content so we could play it ourselves.

i bought horizons on the day it came out, traveling south to a target past where the red line split. it took a decent amount of time, but i did get to see cj’s reaction⁠14 cj: it was a pretty strong reaction lol to seeing it just sitting there on my bed after he returned to his room that night.

a couple days later, i would give alex the stuff we printed on floorpi, since we didn’t need it anymore. i forgot to tell him not to look at it until he got home, so he figured out pretty quickly that i have acquired horizons.

in november 2022, nature incarnate would open its campaign on backerkit, which got fulfilled in under 15 minutes.⁠15 cj: incredibly wild they gave us a bit of sneak peeks at everything. we would talk about the stuff getting revealed as they got revealed over the month. we implemented some of the changes immediately, in particular the replacement of one card with a new card, and the retirement of another card.

time passes.

i and cj have started going to et more often. in spring of 2023, cj pledged to et while i initiated⁠16 pledging basically means becoming a member of the house, initiating basically means becoming a resident of the house (though i wasn’t moving in until summer). so we had more chances to play spirit island at et.

floorpi was more convenient for all of us, but et’s copy had sleeves, which made a major difference, in that we could add more cards to et’s copy more easily because we could put the new nature incarnate cards we printed in front of other cards (that we could steal from horizons, because horizons’s cards were just a copy of the cards from the base game), and then we wouldn’t be able to tell apart the newly added cards from the cards we already have.

anyways, our schedules didn’t line up well enough for us to play on floorpi often anymore, so a substantial proportion of our games this semester were at et, where we could play with the new cards. i would try to play spirits that liked major powers at et so i could see more of them.

since cj is graduating and ec is getting cast down after this semester, i have been appreciating playing with him on floorpi more. he seems to be so naturally good at the game, and he’s pretty decisive about what he’s doing every turn, unlike me who often takes a while to make decisions about what cards to play. (though it definitely doesn’t help that starlight is one of the most complex spirits and massively widens the decision space)

as we played our final game on floorpi before packing everything, we made sure to make it memorable, and end up sinking the entire island except for one land. i’ll miss cj so much after he graduates, hopefully he comes and visits us regularly. i think we’ve convinced him to come play some games with us after nature incarnate comes out.

I MISS BESTIE ALREADY 😭😭😭