Thoughts around the topic of Spirit Island 2nd edition

by R. Eric Reuss, April 2023

Periodically, the subject of a 2nd edition of Spirit Island gets brought up on BGG, Reddit, or elsewhere.

I've chimed in on a number of such conversations in hopes of answering questions, addressing uncertainty, and setting expectations. But over time, those answers fall out of public awareness. So I've written this reference post that I or others can link to when the topic comes up.

Please note that all of this is purely my personal views and understanding - I am not speaking for the publisher, the dev team, nor anyone else. This is also being written at a particular moment, and my thoughts on Spirit Island can certainly evolve and change over time.

The quick overview

A 2nd edition is not guaranteed - whether one happens will depend on a number of factors.

But I would very much like to do a 2nd edition someday!

That said, if it happens, it will probably be a while.

A 2nd edition would be rather more than just tweaking some Spirits - part of the point would be the ability to make more fundamental changes.

For several different reasons, I'm not particularly interested in making a 'balance patch kit' for the current edition, and have doubts about whether doing so would even be a good idea.

I'm aware that a 2nd edition is a big ask for people heavily invested in the game - that the people most involved in Spirit Island (who might best appreciate improvements!) are also the most likely to find the prospect of a new edition daunting or discouraging due to already owning so much game material. Related to this:

I would, ideally, hope to maintain at least a little backwards compatibility, so that many existing game materials still have use - though there are limits to this, and I certainly can't guarantee it.
I realize that some people would choose to stick with First Edition, and that's OK! You can have the same fun you're having now; board games don't expire.
It would make me really happy for there to be an upgrade kit of some sort - I don't know if it would save money, but it would almost certainly use less wood/plastic. However, that is ultimately a publisher decision!

I routinely read "what would you like to see in a 2nd edition?" threads with interest for insight into what folks find most appealing / concerning.

The deeper dive

A 2nd edition is not guaranteed

Spirit Island has definitely shown that it has enduring appeal, which is one of the necessities for a 2nd edition.

However, such a thing would also require design, development, testing, and publishing. If I get hit by a bus or am just tied up with other things, that implicitly defers it. If the publisher doesn't think it's a good idea, it won't happen at all. There are reasons not to do it this very instant (see below). And just in general, no board game is guaranteed until it's actually available for purchase — things happen.

I would very much like to do a 2nd edition someday

I am very pleased with Spirit Island as it stands: many people (including me!) love playing it, and it does a lot of things well / right.

There are still things I'd very much like to change! In game design, the longer you spend working with a system — particularly one in active use — the better you come to understand it, and I am fortunate enough to have been able to spend a lot of time with Spirit Island. Plus, there have always been things which didn't come out quite right the first time around, like the Blight Card fencepost error which led to the +1 Blight errata.

It will probably be a while

If nothing else, right now I'm occupied working on Dahan-centric stuff, and I would rather like to give any new mechanics from that some time in the wild before printing a 2nd edition, so that the 2nd edition could incorporate lessons thereby learned.

But even aside from that, it's just a big undertaking!

Rather more than just tweaking some Spirits

When players talk about a second edition, they often call out the first-generation Spirits, and point out that they could be improved. And it's true! I'd love to revisit them and give them a greater diversity of strategic paths, to shake up their play. (Aspects can do this in some ways, but are limited in the types of changes they can make.)

But that's not the first thing that leaps to my mind when a second edition is brought up. Or at least, not the only first thing.

The up-front rules of Spirit Island were put together intentionally, but the substructural workings that guide rulings and content generation — and which occasionally break through to the surface, as with the Action rules in Jagged Earth — have grown more organically and haphazardly, in response to need. They work, but they're creaky in some places and inelegant in others, with dead-ends (like Branch & Claw's "next normal...") and overlaps — they could really benefit from an overhaul. In some cases, the substructure of the game or how language is used even limit the design-space, making some things I'd like to try impossible.

I've also learned a great deal about how precise to be with language over the course of multiple expansions: the base game was over-loose with its terminology in places and needed tightening up. Jagged Earth showed that it was possible to get too tight, that crafting language which was precisely correct in absolutely all edge-cases could add a mental tax to everyone but rules mavens, and that it's often better to go with wording that's clear, intuitive, and correct in all normal situations, then clarify the weird edge-case interactions in a FAQ.

There are pieces of content with design consequences: e.g., the threshold on Unlock the Gates of Deepest Power has an impact on the utility of a notional Power saying "Target Spirit gains 1 of each element" (This is slowly becoming less of a factor as the Major Power deck grows, but still); the double-coastal-Wetland on board D interacts badly with Scotland; Fire and Flood complicates most potential abilities involving land-targeting powers; etc.

We now have a great deal more data on what works well / poorly / confusingly for newer players, which both opens up the design-space Low Complexity Spirits can play in and suggests concepts that might be better deferred from the base-game to expansions.

There's physical component tweaks: legal island layouts exist that you can't make because the Ocean isn't quite the right shape, for instance.

And... well, a whole lot more. I have a text-file where I keep notes on things I'd like to do, change, try, examine, or revisit in a second edition, whether to improve the gameplay of a single item, to make the system work better in some way, to make things a touch more approachable for a new player, to improve usability, aesthetic or thematic considerations, and more. It's currently around 80K of plaintext, and it's far from comprehensive.

I'm not particularly interested in making a "balance patch kit" for the current edition

There's three interwoven reasons for this:

First: The number of things that would be touched by such a patch kit would be huge, and the (not at all small) time + effort required to put such a thing together is time and effort not being spent on a 2nd edition. So doing a balance-patch would either delay a 2nd edition, or deprive it of dev / testing time (probably making it worse), or both.
Second: if such a thing came out before a 2nd edition, it would put players who like to use the latest-and-greatest into a situation where they're being asked to re-buy a bunch of content twice in a row — once for "first edition rebalanced", then again for "second edition". That doesn't sit well with me — even once is a big ask (see below).
Third: Balance-patching is less straightforward than it might seem, there can be ripple-effects. For instance, we've learned that it's good for higher-cost Majors to usually (there are always exceptions) help with more than one land, particularly at threshold. But if we rejigger the entire existing Major Power deck to do this, that shift will affect the "Energy vs Plays" balance of every Spirit in the game.

The last reason touches on another factor: doing a balance-patch for first edition would be of very limited help in making a second edition; it is not "on the way", so to speak. A second edition is fairly likely to include some sort of changes which would require re-checking balance across a wide swath of material, so even if there'd been a "first edition balance patch product" all that stuff would need to be balance-refined again.

I'm aware that a 2nd edition is a big ask for people heavily invested in the game

I've several times considered whether I ought to push for a 2nd edition earlier, in order to minimize how much stuff would be out at the time of its release, but there's a flip side to that coin: the more time passes and the more Spirit Island material is released, the better the devs and I understand the game, which has a direct bearing on making a really excellent 2nd edition.

A second edition should strive to make the changeover worthwhile for players, in several ways:

Don't half-ass it: only do a 2nd edition if the volume and nature of changes merit a 2nd edition. (I'm confident this is the case.)
Don't half-ass it: do a good job with the redesign and redevelopment for a 2nd edition.
Have lots of good stuff: both better versions of classic favorites and interesting new material.

I would ideally hope to maintain at least a little backwards compatibility?

Back when the Handelabra app first came out, I saw how hard it was to "step back" to having less content: even though the base game + Branch & Claw is a lot of different Spirits, people — including myself! — found ourselves missing the content from Jagged Earth.

To the extent that it's reasonably possible — without compromising changes which want to be made to the game as a whole — it would be great if we could say, "it'll be a little weird in places, but sure, you can use your first edition stuff with second edition". I would love that!

However, "it'll be weird in places" is pretty much inevitable: anything which changes the structural dynamics of the game (such as the Major Power changes mentioned above) will affect the strength of different Spirits differently. If nomenclature changes, old materials will still be using old nomenclature. There are places where trying to keep backwards compatibility could make new materials less usable, which I wouldn't want: part of the point of a Second Edition would be to make the kind of updates which we can't make incrementally.

So as much as I'd like to make promises about compatibility, I'm leery of giving any specific assurances because I just don't know exactly how broad or deep that "weird in places" would get, and I don't want to set expectations of "oh sure, thus-and-such 1E stuff should still be usable" only to let people down because that doesn't work out at all (unlikely) or because people have different notions of what "usable" means (much more likely).

Some people would choose to stick with First Edition

And that's okay! There's already loads of content, and by the time a 2nd edition rolls around there will undoubtedly be even more. Some folks will be content to stay in that very large ecosystem of play.

Obviously, my hope is that the contents of a 2nd edition would be exciting and appealing enough that many people would choose to make the switch over to the new ecosystem. But nobody should be shunned or shamed for saying, "nah, I'm good, thanks".

It would make me really happy for there to be an upgrade kit

Let me say up-front very clearly: this is ultimately a publisher decision (much like releasing a 2nd edition at all).

And given how extensive I anticipate changes would be, my best guess is that an upgrade kit might well consist of "everything except the plastic + wooden pieces".

But even so, the base game has roughly 200 plastic + wooden pieces. Multiply that by tens of thousands of copies and it could save literally tons of plastic & wood, plus shipping those tons over the ocean.

(It might also carry some modest price benefit? But that starts getting into "which has a bigger impact, fewer components vs worse economies of scale?", and I don't honestly know those numbers well enough to guess at how they'd balance out. But even if the upgrade pack cost the same as the non-upgrade version, I suspect that a non-trivial number of Spirit Island fans would opt for the lower environmental impact / the sense of less waste.)

There'd be a number of tricky questions around such a pack — which 1st edition products would it presume the purchaser owns? If a sculpt changed significantly should it be included? Does it fit at all in a distribution model or could it only be acquired direct from the publisher? And so forth. I very much doubt that it would be possible to satisfy everyone — all of these involve tradeoffs! — but it would be great if it were possible to gain some environmental-impact benefits.

I routinely read "what would you like to see in a 2nd edition?" threads with interest

(This is not a call to start making more of them; they crop up often enough organically!)

While I have a pretty strong authorial vision of where I'd like the game to go — the contents of a 2nd edition wouldn't be a matter of "what gets the most votes?", but the result of deliberate decisions — I still find it really valuable reading what people find appealing, unappealing, concerning, and so forth. Anything which wants more than trivial tweaks will involve competing design priorities, and knowing, e.g., what players find core to a Spirit's fun vs. "that dynamic which gets old after a few games" is the kind of thing which could prove super-useful when weighing tradeoffs.

Some addendums and elaborations

(springing from BGG/Reddit discussion)

"A new edition" and "more content" are not always in tension. One reason I'd like to do a 2nd edition is that there is content that I have conceived of but cannot currently make because it doesn't work well - or in some cases, at all - under the current edition! My notion of a second edition isn't a "last hurrah" re-release of only pre-existing content, but a more-stable base for the game to continue.

While this is vastly speculative, I suspect that a 2nd edition would be much more likely to be released in parts than as a huge airdrop single-purchase: the re-buy is a big enough ask as it is without including "...and you have to go all-in". Which I realize makes backwards compatibility even more desirable!

One reason I'm so cagey about backwards compatibility is that what "compatible" means is incredibly nebulous - it's not a boolean yes/no, it's a fuzzy multidimensional gradient. E.g., for each of the following statements, I can easily imagine some people thinking "yes, that's compatible" while others disagree:

"This 1E Spirit is playable exactly as printed, but the balance is a bit off."
"This 1E Spirit is playable exactly as printed, but is exceptionally stronger, providing roughly -5 Difficulty in a solo game." (Or "...exceptionally weaker, providing roughly +5 Difficulty in a solo game.")
"This 1E Spirit plays fine, and is roughly balanced if you lower all threshold numbers by 1." (Or "double all Energy numbers", or any other deterministic math.)
"This 1E Spirit is playable exactly as printed and is roughly balanced, but one of its innates is now the star of the show while the other is much less useful, which makes it feel different." (Or "...which makes it less strategically deep." Or "...which gives it a lower diversity of playstyles.")
"This 1E Spirit's panel and cards use different templating than 2E materials, so don't have the same visual appearance."
"This 1E Spirit uses old 1E terminology, but if you know what it meant in 1E it works fine."
"This 1E Spirit uses some rules that changed: if you play it by the 1E rules it works fine, but under the 2E rules it's a little wonky."
"This 1E Spirit is playable exactly as printed, and is roughly balanced in most setups, but if played solo or alongside other fast-starting 1E Spirits it will reliably obliterate most 2E Adversaries due to gaining board control around Turn 2-3."
(This list could get very long, I'll stop here.)

...which means making any assurances about backwards compatibility risks badly misleading people who have particular notions of "compatibility". But I don't currently know what particular notions would become the crux of misunderstandings, nor precisely how things would change in a 2nd edition, so I can't avoid it by getting specific.

I'm acutely aware that it can be... not harder, but trickier to learn a new, slightly-different version of an already-known ruleset. This crops up a lot when playtesting games. ("Wait, it doesn't work like X anymore? When did that change?" "5 versions ago." "Ah, crud.") I'd definitely aspire to have some sort of rules changelog so folks can just see the differences.