I’m not saying the expansion makes the game harder, just that it makes learning take much longer because there are so many more things to think about. If you aren’t winning consitently at the basic difficulty level, it probably means there are core strategies you haven’t fully grasped yet. With enough experience, you should eventually be able to win much more consistently, if not 100% of the time on easy difficulty. If you find the game more fun with Branch and Claw, then by all means keep playing it, just be aware that the game may take significantly longer to get the hang of if you do.
Oh yeah, I definitely agree the game is generally easier with Branch & Claw, especially for newer players, but IMHO that's a good reason *not* to play with it.
In the base game, the Blight cards are extremely punishing and you really, really want to avoid flipping them. That's good practice for when things get harder and you can't avoid it anymore.
Also, the better you are, the worse Events are. If you're already winning, then added randomness only hurts you, but if you're losing then they can provide "miracle saves". But you should get used to playing when things are more predictable so that you get used to the flow of the Invader cards and anticipating the use of your Slow powers. Events can muck that up, for better or worse, and the less predictable the flow is, the harder it is to grasp.
Hmm, don't entirely agree with you on Events being nicer the better you are - if the Blight card has been flipped, some of the Blighted Island Events are horrible, like the "instantly destroy a bunch of Presence" one. Sometimes Events can sare you, though, like a timely Canny Defence in a Dahan-filled land that was about to Blight in an upcoming Ravage, or some Beasts generating Fear enough to earn a Fear card which similarly might help you out during the upcoming Invader actions. Sometimes the Events can screw you over, that's cetainly true. But sometimes they can save you ;).
It's the opposite argument. If you're good, the more things go to plan the better it goes, so the randomnes of events will tend to disrupt your plans and thus make things worse.
If you're not good, the randomness is more likely to sdave you because your plan wasn't so good it would do it without the event, so the randomness is more helpful.
Events are never always helpful, some are just plain bad, as you say, but the better you play, the more likely they are to be disruptive to your plans, and hence negative.
But if you're really good, you design your plans so they can potentially accommodate a wrench thrown in the works. The intention is for Events to be difficulty-neutral but to reduce the tendency toward AP by making elaborate, just-barely-works plans likely to go sideways (so you might as well just pick the most important goals and make sure those happen).
I highly recommend that new players not use anything from Branch and Claw until they are thoroughly comfortable with the base game and have a difficulty level where they can win most of the time. A big part of learning to play the game is understanding how the Invaders behave and anticipating their actions so you can prevent them. The materials in Branch & Claw do a lot to mess with Invader behavior, which makes it more difficult to learn. Here is a FAQ entry on the topic: https://querki.net/u/darker/spirit-island-faq/#!.7w4g8nx
Also, the base game Blight cards may seem brutal, but are actually pretty tame. Your blight pool is larger than playing without a Blight card and most spirits can usually handle losing a presence (or a power card) every turn. Losing presence may seem scary at first, but it's actually not that big of a problem most of the time.
Agreed. Since placing presence is really good, losing presence might sound equally bad at first. But most of the benefit of adding presence is unlocking your presence tracks, with a smaller side benefit of better targeting. So when you lose a presence, you’re only losing a smaller portion of what the presence gained you in the first place.
Depends on the number of players and how early it happens. Some of the B&C Blight cards can strike in round 2 or 3 and it's fine. That's death with the original cards, especially in a 4-player game since you'll have extremely limited reach.