Thanks for digging up that Spirit Island review! It delivered.
I'm not a big board game player, I don't really have a group or anything in my city that would be too interested in more complicated stuff, so I don't really get a chance to play things like this. But when I go to my hometown for christmas my best friend is big on this stuff and he introduced me to it this last holiday, and I loved it. Played like four games of it over two days which was an enormous amount of hours, then bought my own copy and made my brother that I live with play it with me. Easily my favourite board game I've ever played, but that might not be saying much.
You hit the nail on the head with a lot of the criticisms and the pros
The theme of the game is great. It's a really fun spin on a reverse Catan, which focuses settling in unspoiled lands to generate resources - this is the opposite where settlers are coming in and spoiling the land so the natural spirits want to expel them. Since Catan is such a big gateway board game that even I have played, it hits really well.
I didn't even notice the wood pieces for spirit presence / native Dohan vs plastic pieces for the settlers thing you pointed out but that is a really neat detail. You got some keen insight there.
It is very long. I think it took like 3-4 hours for my brother and I to play our first game because it took like an hour to figure out how to set up and then like an hour for our first turn. The heartening thing is that I was absolutely taking that long on my turns at my friends house but this time I was pretty ready to go while patiently waiting for my brother to try and theory craft his perfect turn. So that makes me hopeful that the analysis paralysis get better when the players are all familiar with the game.
I don't think it would go away completely though. I think you are on point with some of the complaints
It's kinda nice that everybody takes their turn at the same time so that you can work together figuring out what to do and coordinate your abilities, and can pivot based on what other player are doing. However, it also means that you could wait awhile for a teammate to come up with their brilliant play and now that throws the play you were gonna do right out the window so now you gotta take more time coming up with another move. It can really make the game grind to a halt - so it's a bit of a shortcoming. But it's also a big part of the fun, so tough to figure out what the solution is. Maybe other games strike the balance of the fun parts of this strategy without taking so long.
Everything always feels like its on the edge of disaster so there's a lot of pressure to chase "the best move", otherwise these settlers are gonna build up more than you'll be able to take down. I'm hopeful that with more experience, the notion of "it's okay if they cause some ravages or build up some cities and towns, you will scale up too and be able to deal with it, don't sweat it so bad" will start to settle in so the early turns don't feel so nervewracking.
Overall, the spirits are all so brilliantly varied and fun to play I'm super excited to play this game more in the future. I could imagine myself buying the expansions and stuff for more spirits to play and more challenges... I just need to find more people to play with. Maybe I should look into finding a board game group in my city....
The batman villians all seem to be one big joke that batman refuses to laugh at - SantaRPG