Yay chess notation! I just started playing through. The first thing I noticed is that the very first thing I do every turn with BDN is reveal that Fear card; so I would have done that before gathering those Dahan.
Turn 3, I would totally have gone for the extra Major, especially given your energy situation. You would be very likely to earn two Fear cards the following turn, and two Fear Cards are much better at Level 2 than at Level 1.
Turn 4: Did you give yourself an extra energy? Didn't you destroy that explorer in the ravage in C5, or was there a reason you wanted to keep it? I'm going to continue assuming you destroyed it and forgot to notate that.
Turn 5: You have range 1 from every land, including c8, no?
Turn 6: I would not have been so aggressive with the Blight playing with Branch & Claw... You didn't specify the Blight card, but it's irrelevant.
What are the daggers? (Several times in Turn 6.)
Nicely done! That was a big hammer. You could have gone ahead and played The Land Thrashes in Furious Pain on Turn 5, and then used the 'Reclaim 1' option on Turn 6 to get it back--you really had plenty of energy, and didn't need that extra power.
Yup, many places where I could have gone different directions, and many places where there were judgment calls, possibly bad ones. :-)
Turn 4: I had an extra energy from the Belief Takes Root Fear Card on Turn 3. I Pushed the Explorer out of c5 prior to Ravage with Veil the Night's Hunt (that turn), because I only had Defend 4 in c5 and the Explorer would have upped the total Damage to 6. (I pushed it to c1, where it provoked the Dahan during Ravage and died.)
Turn 5: Right - my initial sacred site! I forgot about that while typing things up.
Turn 6: With Branch & Claw, I'd have been more wary of taking Poisoned Land, though if I *had* taken it I'd have used it similarly - the Ravage in c4 lets me see the the flip side of the Blight Card before I choose where to put the cascade Blight, whereupon I see I have a deep Blight pool and use it as above. (If it's a middlin' Blight pool, I don't cascade to c2. If it's a small Blight pool, I skip using Poisoned Land altogether; it was still useful for hitting the threshold of Land Thrashes.)
The Daggers are "I would have earned a Fear Card, but there weren't any left".
Playing Land Thrashes on Turn 5 way well have been a better call? I think given Blight state at the time it'd only have gotten me 5 Fear, though, which for 4 Energy is merely OK. But those 5 Fear at that time would have earned a Fear card and hit Terror Level 3, both of which would have helped keep the board under control. Then again, I wasn't much concerned with board control by that point, and if I'd been playing with the expansion / Events, the path I took would have been a bit safer from Choice Events (more Energy buffer).
It's effectively 1 Energy, since you would have gotten 3 from the other part of Call on Midnight's Dream (if I remember the board state correctly). Seems like a good tradeoff to me.
I'm really interested to hear other comments on that playthrough.
Getting new Power Cards is a useful technique for any Spirit to put off having to Reclaim. How good that is depends on the Spirit; Reclaiming really disrupts some Spirits' momentum, while it's easier for others to work around.
Focusing on the energy track for more energy and elements accepting that you were probably never going to play 3 cards
<nod> I think of Spirits as existing on a spectrum from "strongly prefers high-Play strategies" to "strongly prefers high-Energy strategies". (The spectrum actually goes to "exclusively prefers..." on each end, but I try to make sure every Spirit is playable both ways and/or hybrid, even if it leans more strongly / readily towards one path.) Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares leans strongly towards an Energy + Major Powers approach, though a Plays-first strategy is also viable.
I find the balance to be extremely compelling, because I tried to taks each spirit and figure out their best path, and all of them have at least 2 that work.
I just posted a pointer to this play-through in response to a request at BGG, but it's really pretty buried. Would it make sense to start a thread for play-throughs, and at it to the "helpful guides" post?