Teaching Deb Spirit Island on a Wednesday That Went Long

Deb runs my shift at the plant and one day back in the break room she asked what I do on the weeknights I’m not there, since apparently I’d mentioned games enough times that it stuck. I told her about Spirit Island, badly, the way I always explain it badly the first time, and she said she’d actually like to try it sometime if I didn’t mind teaching a total beginner. I said sure. I said it would probably take an hour, hour and a half tops for a first game at low difficulty. I want that on the record because it did not take an hour and a half.

We sat down on a Wednesday, her choice, since Thursdays are already spoken for with Marcus and the rest, and I brought the base box and picked what I thought were the two gentlest spirits in the set. First mistake, honestly, is that “gentle” in Spirit Island still means explaining fear tokens and blight cascades and dahan and invader phases in an order that makes sense to someone who has never touched a cooperative game before. I used to be very patient explaining things at work, back when I was new and grateful just to have the job, and some of that patience has worn down over eleven years the way patience does. Teaching Deb reminded me I still have it in me when it’s something I actually love talking about.

The turning point, and I mean this as a real turning point in the session, not just a nice moment, was about forty minutes in when she looked at the board, looked at her spirit power cards, and said “wait, I can combo these two before they even get their action, right?” and she was right, and it was the exact kind of card synergy that took me three or four plays of my own to notice. I didn’t teach her that. She found it. That’s the whole appeal of this game in one sentence, honestly, and watching someone else discover it on their own on a Wednesday I’d promised would be short was worth every extra minute it actually took.

We didn’t win. I want to be honest about that too, since it would be easy to write this up as a triumphant teaching story and it wasn’t, we lost to the invaders around turn nine when the terror level spiked faster than either of us accounted for. Deb took the loss better than I expected, actually better than some of my Thursday regulars take a loss, and said she wanted to try again with a harder spirit next time, which is not the reaction I get from everyone I’ve tried to teach this specific game to.

It ended up being closer to three hours once we accounted for the two times I had to re-explain the same fear token mechanic because I hadn’t actually explained it clearly enough the first time. My own fault, not hers. Next Wednesday, if her schedule lines up, we’re trying it again, and I’m bringing a spirit with a little more bite to it, since apparently a beginner win isn’t actually what she was after.