Spirit Island

We think Spirit Island is the best cooperative board game ever made, and we also think it will destroy your group the first time you play it. That tension is exactly why it earns 5/5 Pandas and 2/5 Bamboo from us. The ceiling on this thing is enormous, the first few plays are a beating, and almost everything we have written about it exists to shorten the distance between those two states.

The review makes the full case, including the part where we tell certain groups not to buy it. If you own the box and keep losing, our strategy guide covers the five principles that explain why beginners lose, and our ranking of the spirits sorts them by how forgiving they are, which matters far more early on than how powerful they look on the card.

After that it becomes a question of dials. The difficulty chart walks through what each Adversary does and how to calibrate a challenge your table can actually beat, and the expansion ranking covers the four major boxes, Branch and Claw and Jagged Earth and Nature Incarnate among them, with an order to buy them in.