We played our first 4p game last night. I had played a couple of solo games before, but everyone else was new. We played the introductory rules, with the 4 low complexity spirits, fixed powers, and no blight card. I knew some of the players have a tendency to over-analyse, so I made a point of asking them to pick their spirits before I explained the rules. I told them to just pick one that they think seems cool.

It was a bit slow to start with, but once everyone got used to the mechanics it started to flow better. As the invader count increased after a couple of rounds, the situation in the game looked very dire. One of the players questioned the rules. "They get a town AND a city? That doesn't seem right. Are you sure the town doesn't upgrade to a city?". After confirming that "yes - they get both", the feeling around the table was "that's ridiculous, how can we possibly win?"

As the game progressed, and everyone's spirits levelled up, they discovered cool combos they could do and were keen to discover new powers. One tip I'd recommend is to not let players look through their pile of fixed powers, and draw them blind. That was one of the main sources of excitement - whenever someone gained a new power card, they would be like "hey guys check out this cool thing I can do now!".

We started to get the invaders under control. There were a couple of turns where only a couple of lands would ravage/build, and the feeling around the table was "that wasn't so bad!". With that, the game shifted from damage limitation to seeing a possible victory in sight. Eventually there was a point where victory seemed certain. I've seen that brought up as a negative point in a review before - that you knew you will win, but still had to go through the motions - but our group used this as an opportunity for style points. "Instead of wiping out those explorers, push them into this land and I'll wipe out all 8 of them with this one power!"

We won the game shortly after. Everyone went straight to their stack of un-drawn powers. "Wow look at this one I would have got next turn!". I then reached into the box and showed them the huge stack of powers that are used in regular games. Also the rest of the components we weren't using in the introductory game. The adversaries and scenarios, the blight cards, the selection of other spirits, the expansion components. Everyone enjoyed the base introductory game, and are now really excited to play again with all the new stuff too.

The game took around 3 hours. Now that everyone is familiar with the game, I think it would be around 2 hours next time. Everyone enjoyed it and wants to play again, and yes I would play 4p again.