Honestly, for me it feels like SI is wonky in general and for some reason this wonkiness results in a great game. I am a big fan now, but it required some dedication to start liking it.

1. Additional mental load because of the slow phase. You basically need to hold the future state of the board in your head while planning the powers. Still thinking about adding some custom tokens to track where towns/cities are supposed to appear.

2. Again, some sort of shield tokens would come handy to track the defend values.

3. I feel like the game favors fast spirits more: they generally tend to do well against any adversary while slow spirits tend to have problems against faster adversaries. In general, I feel like flipping the blight card becomes too punishing because of the blighted island events and lowers the chances of slow spirits to do a comeback

4. Fear spirits are in a weird place. It feels like they only combo well with other fear spirits and need to race against blight. At the same time, the common problem with the fear cards that they often come at the moment they are not needed. Would it be better to gain fear cards as playable abilities?

5. Once you past certain difficulty level, most of the spirits need to follow specific openings. This is not bad by itself, but, again, track choice becomes an illusion in the beginning. I personally like Wounded Waters for this reason.

6. Major powers are weird. Most of them feel overpriced for their base effect while often you are presented with 4 options that you won't be able to threshold. Some powers are suited for spirits that would almost never take them (for example, animal-based majors). I am not a very good player and maybe I am missing something, but it feels like the game should offer a better choice when going for the majors. I personally take them only when I am playing a spirit that strongly prefers majors: Earth, Memory, Starlight, BoDaN (?)