About Spirit Defenders:
I can unconditionally recommend this game to almost anyone interested in strategy, particularly tabletop-based strategy. As you probably know, Spirit Island is a cooperative tabletop game with deckbuilding and engine-building elements. Its core mechanisms revolve around area control and card-driven battles vs. a bot-like deck of enemies. The tabletop is unsurprisingly a huge success, currently ranking number 10 overall on boardgamegeek despite its hefty complexity (BGG rates it at 4.05 out of 5, which is quite weighty). The theme is fantastic as well: You (and your fellow spirits) attempt to work together with indiginous peoples to drive capitalist colonial invaders from your island before they destroy it. This is not easy: The enemy is numerous and the invaders come in a seeming never-ending stream, their populations increase over time if left unchecked and they may “blight” (ruin) the land, destroying the native population and your spiritual presence there. There are three distinct loss conditions and two win conditions: You can win by frightening the invaders away or by destroying them, and you can lose by having the land blighted, by having your spiritual presence removed (which usually comes as a consequence of blight) or by running out of “time”: there is no clock, but the invader deck is limited in most games to about 16 invader cards, and one of these gets uncovered and played each turn to determine where the invaders next explore (and subsequently build, and then ravish the land). This means that the game ends at the latest in 17 turns, and it will end in defeat unless you stop it.
