I absolutely love Spirit Island!

As someone who owns both the board game and the Steam adaptation, I still prefer the board game. I find that the PC game is great, and it’s reasonably polished. It’s good for when I want to get straight into playing the game without fiddling with the setup/teardown and turn upkeep.

That said, you don’t get the same experience as the board game. The charm and production quality of the game and its components don’t translate seamlessly into the virtual variant. The mechanics & rules may be the same, but I find that the PC and board game present themselves as distinct and separate products.

I find that it gets really difficult to teach a game that’s more complex. Watching videos ahead of time helps mitigate that, but my group always has moments where we need to role-play as lawyers in a courtroom to dispute the rules.

5-minute Marvel is unsurprising a similar theme, but it’s frantic and chaotic.

By the name of the game, it’s “5-minutes or game over”. I switch away from a countdown timer to using a stopwatch when I teach it and simply have a leaderboard of “how fast can you beat the game”. That way the game doesn’t get disrupted in the middle and it doesn’t kill the momentum when the timer goes off.