My nephew is twelve and he’d been asking about the game with the “cool nature spirits fighting the invaders” since he saw the box on my shelf over the summer, and I should have known better than to let a kid’s enthusiasm talk me out of my own advice, the same advice I gave in my actual review of this game, which is start small, one spirit each, skip the power progression cards, let the core loop click before you add anything back in.

Instead I got excited. He was excited, I was excited, and excited people make bad teaching decisions. I set up two spirits each, full power cards, the whole works, because I wanted him to see the game at its most interesting right away instead of a stripped-down training version, and about forty minutes into explaining icons and fear tracks and how the invader deck escalates, I looked up and he had that specific glazed expression kids get when they’re being polite about something that stopped being fun a while ago.

We finished the explanation. We did not finish the game. He asked, gently, if we could just play something shorter, and I said yes immediately, because the alternative was making a twelve year old sit through a cooperative loss in a game he’d already checked out of, which is exactly the kind of first impression that turns someone off a whole category of games for years. We played a quick trick-taking game instead and he was delighted within five minutes, which told me everything about where the actual problem was.

What gets me is that I know better. I wrote the review. I know the fix is to start smaller than feels satisfying, and I ignored my own advice because I wanted to skip ahead to the good part, the same mistake I’ve watched other people make handing someone a doorstop fantasy novel as their first fantasy novel because it’s the one they love most, instead of the one that’s actually going to hook a beginner.

He still asks about Spirit Island sometimes, which means the door isn’t closed, just delayed. Next time I’m doing it properly, one spirit, no progression cards, and I’m not skipping ahead for my own sake again.