Spirit Island Nature Incarnate Review

Overview

When combined with its previous expansions, Spirit Island is a near-perfect board game. Nature Incarnate balloons the already limitless replayability of the game even further with new spirits, aspects, and a few other goodies.

Many of the new spirits, and aspects of older spirits utilize a new mechanism called an Incarna, a more physical manifestation of that spirit. For example, The new Ember-Eyed Behemoth quite literally stomps around the island like Godzilla, while Thunderspeaker can take on an aspect that allows her to lead the Dahan into battle as a war general.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

Incarna Tokens — *The new incarna tokens represent physical manifestations of certain spirits.*

While Nature Incarnate does add a few additional bits and cards to expand other aspects of the game. The focus of the expansion is zeroed in on the new spirits and revitalizing old ones with new aspects. That focus serves up some truly great new playstyles, but I can’t help but feel that Spirit Island is becoming a bit too crowded, and not just from the nasty colonizers arriving at the shore.

Nature Incarnate’s additions are excellent, but they feel bloated and overfull. Its spiritual teacup is now overflowing onto the table and it might be wasting its flavor with extreme overabundance. Of all the directions that Spirit Island could expand in, I’m really not sure it needed even more Spirits.

I also want to note that Nature Incarnate requires the Jagged Earth Expansion in addition to the Spirit Island base game. A game expansion requiring another expansion is somewhat unusual, so it’s worth pointing out.

Gideon’s Bias	Nature Incarnate Information
Review Copy Used: Yes	Publisher: Greater Than Games
Number of Plays: 20+	Designers: R. Eric Reuss
Player Counts Played: 1, 2 & 4	Player Count: 1-6
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: Co-op Area Control & Hand Management
Fan of Weight: Yes	Weight: Heavy
Gaming Group’s Thoughts: Loved It	Price: $59.99

Additional Notes: Nature Incarnate requires both the base game and the Jagged Earth Expansion

Presentation

The entire box contents of the Nature Incarnate expansion spread out on a table — *As always, Spirit Island is a great looking game*

As I mentioned before, Nature Incarnate seriously focuses on Spirits, and the vast majority of the components reflect this. The new Spirits and their boards, the variety of power cards they use, the new aspect cards, and a trove of new tokens to be used with the new content. All of it makes up most of what’s in the box. There are two new scenarios, one new adversary, and a handful of new event and fear cards, however.

As usual, everything does look fantastic with great artwork on both the spirit boards and their cards. Spirit Island has always been a visually beautiful game without utilizing bulky eye-catching miniatures, and this still rings true with Nature Incarnate.

The rulebook itself is shockingly thick for a relatively simple expansion. But this is mostly because the rulebook also serves as an Errata document for the entire game. On one hand, that’s fantastic, it’s incredibly rare to have a physical rules update to a board game without printing them off yourself. On the other hand, it can make finding and referencing the new rules specific to Nature Incarnate a bit cumbersome.

A page of the Nature Incarnate Rulebook — *Official Errata is a nice thing to have.*

While I absolutely adore having an official errata document, I do wish it was split into its own booklet, separate from the new rules.

What I Like About Nature Incarnate

More of a Great Thing

Nature Incarnate is the other side of the coin compared to Horizons. While Horizons was a beginner-friendly entry point into the world of Spirit Island. Nature Incarnate is for the enthusiast who’s already deeply entrenched in colonizer smiting. This is evidenced enough by the fact that Nature Incarnate requires the Jagged Earth expansion, but also within the Spirits themselves.

There are no low-complexity Spirits in the box, and most of them lean toward being higher on that scale. The vast majority of aspects also raise the complexity of older spirits, rather than lower it. However, being an “expert” expansion, so to speak, really allowed the designers to crank out some seriously cool mechanics for the spirits.

Some, but not all of these new mechanics focus on the idea of an “Incarna”. A physical manifestation of the Spirit. This is the easiest to explain with the Ember-Eyed Behemoth. The Ember-Eyed Behemoth is a walking mountain that stomps around the island like a giant Kaiju. It can quite literally, Smash, Stomp, and Flatten invaders and Dahan alike with its Incarna.

The Ember Eyed Behemoth board — *The Ember-Eyed Behemoth is a walking mountain*

Other Incarnas are slightly more subtle such as Towering Roots of the Jungle whose Incarna is a massive tangle of towering trees and roots that can protect the land from blight. On the other hand, Breath of Darkness Down Your Spine travels as menacing shadows and darkness, kidnapping invaders to the endless dark.

Incarnas aren’t limited to the new spirits either. Old Spirits can be given Incarna by using some of the new aspects. Thunderspeaker can lead the Dahan in person, The Slumbering Serpent can creep over the ground with its locus, and the Lure can have its own lair deep within the island.

The Incarna’s present a very cool new playstyle and a great way to revitalize a couple of old favorites. They are incredibly fun to use, to such an extent that I wish more spirits actually had Incarna because only a handful do.

The Towering Roots of the Jungle board — *Towering Roots uses the new vitality tokens to protect the land from blight.*

However, Incarnas aren’t the only unique way that the new spirits and aspects play. Take Dances Up Earthquakes for example, who can place impending cards that slowly accumulate energy each turn to go off later. Wounded Waters Bleeding can change its abilities and focus as it evolves into either a vengeful spirit or one of healing.

Relentless Gaze of the Sun can be a single-minded monster, torching everything that angers it, or changing its nature to better cooperate with other spirits.

Every new Spirit and Aspect offers novel ways to experience the game, and considering the existing roster of spirits, that’s pretty impressive. Every Spirit in the game has an incredible depth that would take many, many games to exhaust even one of them. The new additions in Nature Incarnate maintain the same quality as past spirits with great mechanics, unique concepts, and an impressive balance between them.

What I Dislike About Nature Incarnate

Safe & Unnecessary

I really want to emphasize the new Spirits are fantastic, fun to play and I’m happy I have them. But, I most definitely did not need them. I really can’t overstate this enough, most Spirits have more depth contained in them than entire other board games. You could play every day and still spend weeks mastering a single Spirit. Before Nature Incarnate, there were 29 Spirits available through the base game and various expansions. Now there are 37.

The thing Spirit Island needed the least, was more Spirits. There are so many directions Nature Incarnate could have gone. It could’ve expanded the decks of power cards or added new invader units and mechanisms for us to fight against. Heck, adding Incarnas to all existing Spirits would have been a cool idea.

The behemoth incarna on an island board — *The Incarna mechanic is very interesting, but only a handful of spirits have them.*

I definitely think if people choose board games as a hobby, they should play as much as possible. But given the depth and learning curve of every spirit, I don’t see how anyone could play enough that 37 spirits would provide actual variety as opposed to analysis paralysis where you end up playing one of your favorites anyway.

I’m usually all about adding more variety, but this is a little bit too much of a good thing where the variety is actively detracting from Spirit Island. If you attempt to play as many spirits as possible, you’re only going to scratch the surface of each one. If you choose to play a few and master them slowly, you have a lot of unused dead weight at your table.

As cool as new spirits are, I think it’s overflowing a cup and spilling it on the table, simply wasting the flavor instead of enjoying it. It’s a bummer because there are many other more meaningful ways the game could have expanded.

Verdict

Nature Incarnate is in such a weird place for me. I love the new Spirits, but that’s because I love Spirit Island. You could throw 100 of them at me, and as long as they were unique and fun compared to the others, I’d enjoy them. But I can also recognize where consuming something just becomes gluttonous.

The fact of the matter is, no one has played Spirit Island so much that all 29 previous spirits would feel stale. No one has that kind of time, not with how deep every Spirit is. And certainly not without becoming bored of the gameplay loop as a whole.

A mid game island board of Spirit island with the Nature Incarnate expansion — *As fun and interesting as the new spirits are, the game is beginning to feel bloated.*

No one needed 8 more spirits to revitalize the game. If you have a plate of different cookies, and you are enjoying those cookies, but are struggling to eat the second half of them. Dumping several more cookies on the plate isn’t going to make the meal more enjoyable.

The content in Nature Incarnate is perfectly fine, great even. But if I have two great chairs, I can only sit in one of them at a time, if I have 37 of them, well, I’d need a bigger house for no real reason.

It’s not like Nature Incarnate positions itself as one choice among many. Nature Incarnate not an expansion you choose between in comparison to the others, because it needs one of the others to function in the first place. It’s not for people who play Spirit Island piecemeal, it’s for completionists who have everything, and those who have everything, need it the least!

The Wounded Waters Bleeding Board — *The new spirits have unique playstyles, even the ones without incarnate*

I’ve never really felt this way about expansion content before, likely because most games aren’t as deep as Spirit Island in the first place and actually need the content.

It’s a strange feeling because I’ll happily play the new Spirits, and enjoy the Incarna mechanic. But to really get the most out of it, you would have to play a lot of Spirit Island. I do mean, a lot. More than I can play it, and my job is to play and make content about games.