Spirit Island is my favorite board game in both theme and gameplay. It is a cooperative strategy brain-burner about nature spirits defending an island from colonists. This is a page of my custom content.On the right are my presence tokens and reminder tokens. Along the bottom of the image are the six colors of presence tokens that come with the game. Along the top are six more colors that I ordered from a game supplier, colored wooden discs slightly larger (15mm x 4mm) than the originals. In the middle are reminder tokens in all twelve colors, which I made from 20mm unfinished wooden discs, colored with Copic markers and inked with black pens (except the white on black which was black sharpie and white out) then coated with clear satin spray. This was my big project in the winter of Covid.
They're all two sided, with three each of four icons distributed on the twelve sides: shield for defend, lightning for damage/remove, arrow for gather/push, and circle for everything else. I made reminder tokens because I like to play multiple spirit solo games, and the more spirits I'm juggling, the more I need the tokens to keep track of what they're all doing.
I've also designed three custom spirits. All three have been heavily tested and revised. This is a YouTube video with all of them playing a complete game, and also explaining the rules to Spirit Island as far as necessary: Spirit Island: Three spirit solo game with custom spirits.
The boards and cards were made with Gudradain's Spirit Island Template, which converts html into images, and physically made with the color printer at the library. If you want to play them, the links below are zip files with printer-ready images of spirit boards and cards. To mount the spirits I recommend the thin cardboard that comes with calendars, and a glue stick.
Space spirit: Sparkle of the Bottomless Void
Fungus spirit: Mycelia Swell Like the Sea
Giant lizard spirit: [redacted]
Sparkle of the Bottomless Void is a high complexity space spirit, partly inspired by the space spirit in the official game, Starlight Seeks its Form, which also has mix-and-match growth options and the wonderful reclaim half mechanic. But where Starlight can become any kind of spirit, Sparkle is locked into its identity as a strong defensive spirit with low energy. This is my favorite spirit to play, and the one I've tested and revised the most. It has highly mobile presence that appears out of the darkness and slides into lands with invaders. Its only damage comes through Dahan counterattacks, so it has to carefully manage the Dahan, and it has one killer card to do it. This is actually the strongest of these three spirits. In a solo game it can consistently beat mid-level adversaries, but will get overwhelmed by England level four or higher. All the images are by European artists.
Mycelia Swell Like the Sea is a mid-complexity fungal spirit that's good at corralling invaders and removing blight. All of its powers are things that fungus can really do. Its main power, Ergot Dance Plague, gathers invaders to compulsively dance instead of building and ravaging. It can grow psychedelic mushrooms in the path of explorers, who give up on colonization or even go native. And its scary power is something I thought was fictional when I made the card, but it's real, a "fungal storm" where a great wind carries spores that make people sick. Three of the card images are by my favorite artist, the Spanish painter Remedios Varo.
I don't want to flag the copyright bots, so my third spirit will not be named in text. It's a giant lizard that roams the land in a single stack of presence, doing massive damage to invaders. It can also go into and out of oceans, summon a giant moth to take out distant towns, paralyze whole lands with a fearsome roar, and blast invaders with an atomic breath that gets more deadly with blight. This is a low complexity spirit that's lots of fun to play, but weaker than the other two in one-spirit games because of all the blight. Images of the famous monster are pretty boring, so I decided to use anime girl images. All of them are by Japanese artists, and were found on the Danbooru image board.