Erratum for setting up the Healthy Island Card
Erratum for setting up the Healthy Island Card
During Setup, you get exactly 1 additional Blight in your Blight pool.
(i.e.: If you are using a Healthy Island card, treat it as if it said “2 per player, +1". If you are not using a Healthy Island card, treat the Blight space as if it said “5 per player, +1".)
This does NOT apply after Setup (i.e., when Blight Cards flip) - just at the start of the game.
This also applies to any Scenarios (e.g., Blitz) or other effects (e.g., Sweden level 6) that change the amount of initial Blight. In all cases, add one additional Blight.
Blight Cards in future expansions will not fix this, as doing so would make them distinguishable from previously-printed Blight Cards.
Note that this does not affect the board from Horizons of Spirit Island, only the core game Invader Board and all Healthy Island cards. The rulebook in core game 14th printing and onwards mentions this errata, as does Nature Incarnate.
Explanation, for the curious: The Blight system has a fencepost error which makes smaller games harder. While the # of Blight sitting on the card scales proportionally to the number of players, the number of usable Blight ("how much Blight can we let happen without the Blight Card flipping?") does not:
- Players: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
- Blight on card: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12
- Usable Blight without flip : 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11
- Blight per player: 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2
- Usable Blight per player: 1, 1.5, 1.666, 1.75, 1.8, 1.833
This erratum adds 1 extra blight on setup, which has the usable Blight per player scale proportionally with the number of players, and makes the experience / Difficulty of smaller (1-2p) games more in-line with that of larger games. (In some ways the change very slightly disadvantages larger games relative to smaller games, but practically speaking that impact is much lower than the upside from multiple Spirits cooperating.)
No changes are needed for flipped Blight cards (whether Still-Healthy or Blighted); if you want a deeper look into why see
these comments.
Likewise when setting up for the Second Wave scenario, do not add an additional Blight, since it was already added in the first wave.
