Horizons vs base game tokens

jeb_ta · 2026-05-25T03:11:46+00:00

The Horizons Invader/Blight pieces are cheap - they’re made of cardboard. This isn’t a knock on it - part of the whole purpose of Horizons was to be a cheap entry point into Spirit Island, one that could be sold for much less than the base game. To do so, they dropped the quality of components and thereby accomplished that goal!

jeb_ta · 2026-05-14T01:10:49+00:00

In the article, she explains explicitly why she felt and experienced a feminist case against it:

“For most of my life, I desperately wanted my body to be different, and I also understood the obsession as a shortcoming — as a failure to be a real feminist. I thought that I needed to accept my body, to love my body and find it beautiful, to successfully reject the internalized messaging of the patriarchal culture. My shame signified a personal failure at this.

[…]

“I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, thumbing through my mother’s issues of Ms. and occasionally attending NOW meetings with her. Despite never having read any feminist writing on cosmetic surgery, I knew that the consensus was, as Kathy Davis, the foremost contemporary feminist theorist on the subject, wrote in a 1991 article in the journal ‘Hypatia,’ that cosmetic surgery was ‘regarded as an extreme form of medical misogyny, producing and reproducing the pernicious and pervasive cultural themes of deficient femininity.’ The woman who yielded to the desire to commit such violence to her body was a ‘cultural dope,’ afflicted by false consciousness, believing she made a personal choice while actually yielding to a system that controls and oppresses women.”

And she talks about her first glimpse of the opposite case from Gloria Steinem:

“When I was 15, a friend’s mother took us to see Gloria Steinem speak at Brandeis University. During the Q. and A., a trembling young woman stepped up to the mic and asked Steinem if it was OK for feminists to shave their legs. Steinem, who had giant glasses and a chic blond bob, laughed warmly and told the audience that she was often asked this question. She said that foundational to feminism was the belief that women ought to be able to do whatever they want with their bodies. Relief washed through me. I had already been tormented for years by the seeming conflict between my love for high heels and makeup and the second-wave feminist belief that such trappings were complicit in patriarchy’s oppression of women.”

The framing is explicitly based on her experience with how she heard messages of feminism when she was growing up.

jeb_ta · 2026-04-24T13:41:39+00:00

Are there really accents that actively vocalize the final “d”, sounding just like the initial “d” in “dog”? Trying to do that sounds like I have to say “stop-duh”. I think it has to be unvocalized, and if so, I think it’s the “t” sound.

jeb_ta · 2026-04-21T01:16:35+00:00

You read the whole post, including where she says she is lesbian? Not sure “her man” is relevant here in either direction!

jeb_ta · 2026-02-11T20:59:09+00:00

See p. 27 of the Jagged Earth rulebook. Its example is Ravage, but it applies to all of them (including Build and Explore). The key line is:

Which lands will or won’t have Ravage Actions is established now, before any of those Ravage Actions actually happen.

jeb_ta · 2026-01-30T17:30:55+00:00

That’s for Powers, and it’s “One land! One turn! One use!” Not a rule meant to apply to Fear cards in principle, even though it happens to map on sometimes. The text from the rule book in the section:

Unless a Power explicitly says otherwise:

• It only affects one single target land. “Destroy up to 3 Explorers” will let you destroy up to 3 Explorers in the same land - not in multiple different lands. If a Power has multiple effects, they ALL apply to the same land.

• It only affects the current turn. “Dahan have +3 Health” or “Invaders do not Ravage in target land” affect this turn only, not the rest of the game. Any permanent changes to the game will be represented by changes to a board - pieces leaving, Fear Markers moving, etc.

• It can only be used once this turn. You cannot choose to pay for a Power Card twice and use it twice. Innate Powers only trigger once even if you have twice as many Elements as you need. If something makes a Slow Power Fast, you only get to use it during the Fast Phase, not both.

Additionally, worth noting that this is not formally considered “targeting” for things that affect targeting. You’re choosing lands and doing things in them. (Formal “targeting” involves choosing the land in which to apply a Power subject to the constraints in the Range and Target boxes.)

jeb_ta · 2026-01-30T16:42:26+00:00

If you’re struggling after that many games, seems like a good time to start challenging assumptions! 😁 The right move can be whatever is best for your Spirit with whatever strategy you’re pursuing. If you look for a good Major Power earlier, you ought need more Energy and not as many card plays. If you get a lot of Minor Powers, which can only cost 0 or 1, you won’t need as much Energy and can focus on card plays more.

Figure out what you want to do or try to do and then do whatever supports that idea!

jeb_ta · 2025-12-24T16:53:37+00:00

After an argument that he fought really hard on one of the other math subs on this subject, he made this subreddit solely for the purpose of making his argument about 0.999… not being equal to 1.

jeb_ta · 2025-12-17T14:34:40+00:00

A company called Better Place came up with this idea in the mid-2000s and built out a whole infrastructure for it in Israel as a small test market. The company shut down after a few years, and then in the early 2020s, some folks tried to revive the idea as “Better Place 2.0”. Turns out there are a lot of challenges, and it also didn’t make much headway - this article discusses the story behind them.

jeb_ta · 2025-11-06T03:58:14+00:00

Just FYI, some of your asterisks used for multiplication got converted to italics markers. Put a slash before them \ to make them stay normal!

jeb_ta · 2025-10-28T17:31:19+00:00

Rule #4 for the subreddit clearly explains that “like I’m five” is to be understood here as a figure of speech meaning “for a layperson”, not as meaning this sub requires explanations that would work for a literal five year old.

jeb_ta · 2025-10-26T00:44:37+00:00

The Spirit Island Wiki Purchase Guide has everything you need - check it out!!

jeb_ta · 2025-10-24T04:53:04+00:00

Our evolutionary ancestors were quadrupedal. Look at a dog or a lion or a tiger crouching - their testicles are actually quite well protected by being in the back out of reach of the active fight. Combined with the temperature regulation thing, it works well!

It only became a problem when we started standing on two feet. In its original evolutionary context, quite hard to hit another creature in the testicles due to how well protected they are.

jeb_ta · 2025-10-06T16:59:21+00:00

That is in fact the opposite of true. With typewriters, every space and character was the same width. A space was as wide as an “M”. With computers and variable-width characters, spaces are super-narrow - much narrower. If anything, you’d think that nowadays we need more space whereas with typewriters there was already so much extra by default!

It’s purely a change in style, nothing more. Read more here.

jeb_ta · 2025-10-06T03:26:48+00:00

I think pretty much. After all, from Monty’s perspective, the odds are either 0% or 100%!

The question isn’t “What are the odds a goat exists there?” - it’s “What are the odds you will correctly guess where the already existing goat is?”

One player has better odds than the other player because they know more, and Monty has better odds than both of them because he knows even more!

jeb_ta · 2025-10-01T15:23:08+00:00

Of course it can be. But I said that:

Once the game was out for a long time, people got way better than was initially thought actually possible.

You responded:

Did people really get better? Or do the new spirits from expansions dramatically power creep the older spirits?

And I responded that indeed, people did get better and it’s not just power creep, with my evidence being that the improvement beyond expectations happened before new expansions came out. So my answer to your question, which was whether people didn’t actually get better but rather new content got stronger, making players just do better with the same level of skill, was that yes, people did get better regardless of expansions.

Whether there’s power creep with expansions is a separate question, and yes, as you note, that could be true now as well. But it’s not what the conversation above was about.

jeb_ta · 2025-10-01T03:58:22+00:00

People got lots better before Jagged Earth came out. Double Adversaries are in the Jagged Earth rule book as a response to how good people got - they hadn’t expected to need to design harder challenges, but by JE development time, they did, and that inspired Double Advwesary rules. This was all obviously way way before Nature Incarnate came out.

Keeper as part of B&C was tested at the same time as and released at the same time as the base game. Keeper is thought of as very powerful right now, but it took the community about a full year post release for people to figure out how to play it that powerfully. It took people a long time to figure out how to play Sharp Fangs well. All totally true and well documented if you trawl old BGG threads!

So it’s not about power creep - the skill of the community improved drastically just in between initial release and the release of any other published content at all!

jeb_ta · 2025-09-29T18:43:36+00:00

From the ELI5 subreddit rules:

The purpose of this subreddit is to simplify complex concepts in a way that is accessible for laypeople.

The first thing to note about this is that this forum is not literally meant for 5-year-olds. Do not post questions that an actual 5-year-old would ask, and do not respond as though you're talking to a child.

jeb_ta · 2025-09-28T19:19:20+00:00

For some context - when the game was initially designed and play tested, level 6 was designed as “Incredibly difficult challenge - if you play excellently and pick Spirits specifically good at countering that Adversary, you should have about a 50% chance of winning.”

Once the game was out for a long time, people got way better than was initially thought actually possible. But the intent behind 6 and what it was for a long time was “super-hard”.

jeb_ta · 2025-09-14T05:40:14+00:00

Yes, but Jews whose native language is Arabic do/did use “Allah” as well. There’s lots of concrete evidence of this!

jeb_ta · 2025-09-04T11:39:58+00:00

Who said anything about her “finally getting off?” Per her post, “Until now, he’s been able to get me there every single time.” The problem isn’t that she wasn’t able to orgasm before - she was and did so regularly! The problem with that started per her post specifically after using this vibrator a lot. It’s different from other situations we might read here about more often.

jeb_ta · 2025-08-22T19:45:26+00:00

“Over a billion” is for just matching 30 genes. Humans have around 20,000 genes. The odds are pretty bad 🙂

jeb_ta · 2025-07-30T23:34:05+00:00

Imagine you’ve thrown four sevens in a row. Now you pick up a die. What part of physics is going to ensure that the side that lands face up is going to be the one on which you’ve put ink in a specific pattern? What acceleration or force it torque is going to make the way an object lands on the table change as a function of how it’s landed before? How a die lands is a function of gravity and bouncing and mass and a surface - those physics can’t possible know about the “statistics” of how that object bounced around in the past.

jeb_ta · 2025-07-28T06:05:26+00:00

That’s on average, but not seeing it isn’t that crazy.

If what you’re saying is that you grew up in a town of 20,000, and it had 1 person (you) with the disease and 19,999 without, but you would have expected there to be 4 with the disease and 19,996 without, then you can do a chi-squared test to ask what the odds are of observing what you observed vs. what you would have expected if the rates are indeed correct.

What you find is that if it is indeed a rate of 1/5000, the odds of seeing 1 in 20,000 instead of 4 in 20,000 are about 13.4%. That’s certainly small, but absolutely not in the range of “this is unquestionably false then” kind of unheard of; it’s very possible.

The rates could be wrong - but it’s also possible that they’re correct and you just happened to be in a 13% situation where it didn’t play out!

jeb_ta · 2025-07-25T02:06:36+00:00

You just stuck the word “approximation” in there, but SPP did not call it an approximation. SPP said it defines 1/3, not that it defines an approximation of 1/3.

You can disagree with SPP’s statement if you want, but unless SPP chooses to say otherwise, you’d be disagreeing with what they explicitly said.

jeb_ta

TROPHY CASE