So two friends and I played a game with the Scenario "Guarding the Isle's Heart", against level 3 Sweden, involving Spread of Rampant Green, Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds, and Lightning's Swift Strike. Despite STARTING with a city in the inner lands, we won so handily, Sweden never put down a blight. It got a little too ambitious about hitting jungles and wetlands, and as Green I was like "lol really", using my growth to basically shut down its actions on my board, while my powers let Keeper get out extra presence (which Keeper obviously really liked) and with my starting bonus minor power, let Lightning get extra minor powers (which Lightning obviously really liked). Lightning made Keeper fast quite often, so they both were able to handle their own threats before they became problems and slap wilderness and (through acquired powers) disease and strife everywhere, and when we finished the game (in terror level 2 no less) all of us had our full essence tracks, and not only had we prevented any blight from being added but we also actually managed to remove ALL the starting blight.
What's the best game you've played?
So you had to kill that City during turn 1 to avoid an insta-loss? Sweet!
I feel like Guarding the Isle's Heart is difficulty -1. The extra presence and power cards are *SO* strong. Occasionally you'll have to deal with an inner land immediately and not get any powers that can do it, but most of the time it's a lot of upside.
Had a River, Bringer and Shadows game at level 2 England where everything went our way, events, power cards, everything was perfect and we won terror level 1, had all blight off the board, and didn't lose a single Dahan (added a few as well).
It was crazy.
I've had one or two Terror Level 1 victories, once as a solo spirit and once with a team of four. Can't remember if the team game had a adversary or not.
I had a solo Thunderspeaker game today against England level 6. By the time they got to Stage 2 they alternated between having no buildings on the board and having one built-up land (since they'd build in one land, and then the escalation would have them build again.) Which I would then crush. Repeat until we hit terror level 2. It was a satisfyingly decisive win.
Egads! How'd you clear the 4 starting buildings so quickly?
Yeah, AND starting with no towns really hurts the invaders because it's a lot less threats early on, where you can just plink or even push a single explorer to make the land safe for an entire cycle of invader cards. I could see how with certain other spirits and adversaries could be much rougher, though. But in that specific case, especially with those spirits, yeah, it definitely helped a lot more than it hurt.
(Except for a few Event cards that put towns down where we were like "Oh, huh, that… could easily have killed us if the situation was slightly different. Yikes!")
Copious use of Manifestations of Power and Glory, mostly.