Somehow, the pictures of Spirited on its Kickstarter campaign page put me in mind of Root—cutesy animals spoiling for a fight. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Spirited, published by New Zealand’s Garphill Games, is significantly simpler and much less vicious.
Designers Sam Macdonald, Shem Phillips and Zachary Smith have worked in various combinations on a number successful games, but I believe Spirited is the first with all 3 at the helm. It’s also rather lighter weight than their typical output, such as Circadians: First Light and Paladins of the West Kingdom to name just a couple.
The Kickstarter page says: ‘From the halls of history comes a familiar tale of brave warriors fighting to leave their mark. With allegiances on the line, will you rise as one worthy to be followed? Forge great armies in your camps, construct wonders, and keep a watchful eye on the road ahead. Will you reign as the most spirited champion of the ancient world?’
Let’s take that a word at a time…
Warriors: 10 cards from each of 12 different clans (7 randomly selected per game), to be activated or played into roads, hands and camps.
Allegiances: each player can have up to 3 allegiances with different clans, won through collecting sufficient numbers of warriors of the clan, and which contribute to scoring and abilities.
Camps: one of the 3 places (the others being roads and hands) players can place their cards, but each player can have a maximum of 2 camps in total.
Wonders: 12 cards players can take if they have one warrior from every clan, granting bonuses and abilities.
Road: the third area where clan cards can be placed, but beware that too many of one clan can cause a revolt.
Spirit: the name for points in the game.
So… How does it play?
Setup
To set up Spirited, select 7 clans and place their discs on the main board alongside a drafting area with 3 wonder cards; place the clan allegiance cards below the board (I have to wonder why both discs and allegiance cards are required—surely the latter would be sufficient). Assemble the time track according to the number of players and place the hourglass token at the start—the game is over when this reaches the end. Shuffle all the clan warrior cards for the selected clans together and place facedown as a draw deck.
Each player takes a city board along with varying numbers of spirit tokens and cards depending on player order: the first player takes no spirit tokens and draws1 clan card into their hand, along with 2 faceup on their road (the area above the city board) and 1 faceup in their camp (the area below the city board); player 2 takes 1 spirit token and otherwise the same as player 1; and the third player gets to draw a second card in their hand, and so on.
After all players have drawn their initial cards, the 3 ‘passing of time’ cards are shuffled into the deck—more on those later.
Turn Summary
One each turn, players first perform a ‘road check’—if there are fewer than 2 card stacks in a player’s road, more are drawn from the deck to bring the number up to 2. Note that cards from the same clan are stacked on top of each other rather than spread out (this applies to the camp area too). If a clan on the road has 3 or more cards (allegiances can increase this number—see later), the player must take sufficient cards from the road into their hand to get below the limit. Next, the player has 3 choices, play-scout-summon, build-summon, or march-regroup, which I’ll now look at in turn.
Playing a card is optional, but if you choose to play one from your hand, you take the action indicated on the card’s text—different clans have different effects—which might allow you to take a card from another player, for example, or remove a card from your road (perhaps to prevent overrun). Scouting means taking a card from the road into either your hand (rallying) or into your camps (recruiting). Summoning is similar to the road check operation, in that 2 cards are drawn and added to the road; if this causes one or more clans to exceed the limit, you have to resolve an overrun which pretty much means discarding all your clan cards. However, actions marked with a red skull (found on allegiance cards and city board slots) are performed at this stage, which can, e.g., recover some of those lost cards.
To build a wonder, you need to discard cards belonging to all 7 clans from any combination of road, hand and camps (so, clearly, you can’t follow this path unless you’ve managed to collect warriors from all the clans in play), then take one of the wonder cards on the main board (replacing it with another from the wonder deck), gain the indicated amount of spirit on the card and perform whatever action is indicated on it. After this, summoning happens as above.
Marching gains you an allegiance: you discard 2 or more cards from your camp of the same clan to gain the allegiance card of that clan (if it’s not been claimed yet), which you place in the next available slot in your city board, gaining spirit, a ‘medal’ which includes a modifier for your overrun level and a clan-specific effect. The amount of spirit and medal type depend on how many cards you discarded: value 2 medals (bronze) reduce your overrun limit by 1 and value 4 medals (gold) increase it by 1, while value 3 ones (silver) have no effect on the limit. If another player already had the allegiance you want to claim, you need to discard 1 more than the number on that player’s medal. Regrouping means discarding your road and camp cards, then drawing 2 new cards onto your road.
Passing of Time cards were mentioned earlier. If one of those is drawn, the hourglass is moved a step along the time track. If this happens to land on a space with a sword graphic, a battle will occur at the end of that turn, in which all players resolve actions on their city board and allegiance cards marked with the same sword. Medals can be scored, taking their value as spirit and turning them over to their ‘exhausted’ side. Any previously exhausted medals are replaced with bronze medals (the lowest scoring ones).
Play continues until the hourglass reaches the final space on the time track, with the clan card discard deck being shuffled to form a new draw deck when it’s empty. The winner is the person with most spirit at the end.
A note on card effects: these can let you draw cards or steal/switch cards with another player, but a couple of the more interesting ones involve playing a card facedown—such a card in the road acts as a ‘shield’ and can prevent overruns from happening regardless of how many cards are in a stack, and below the city board, it acts as a wildcard which can be added to any camp.
Wrap Up
There is quite a lot happening in Spirited, but once you get used to the iconography, it’s pretty simple to get going.
It is, however, a game you’ll need to play a handful of times to fully get to grips with, exploring the clan actions and—more importantly—how they interact with each other. Given that there are 12 clans for you to select from, there’s plenty of variation (and plenty to learn), making this a highly replayable game.
Actually, 12 isn’t the limit: there’s already a Spirited: American expansion, which adds 4 further factions and more wonders. It looks like another expansion will be revealed when the campaign hits 1,000 backers.
The game also supports a solo mode, in which your opponent will take the build-summon action on its turn if possible, or failing that, march-regroup, finally falling back to play-scout-summon if the other options aren’t possible. In that final case, a die roll determines the specifics of the action sequence.
This is a fun-looking and attractive game, with really nice artwork by Patri Balanovsky, Mihajlo (The Mico) Dimitrievski and Sam Phillips.
Finally, the game is available on BoardGameArena, including an interactive tutorial, so give it a spin to find out more. The campaign page includes links to the rulebooks and many playthrough and review videos too.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
