Spirit Island. What a game. R. Eric Reuss’s masterpiece has been around long enough that it’s become a staple of the discourse, a counterpoint to all those colonial settings that dominate game store shelves. Seven years ago I called it the anti-Catan. It’s still that and more besides. Nowadays I think of it less as a subaltern revenge fantasy (although it qualifies) or a deified avatar of conservationism (it’s that too) and more as a lament. If only there were gods, it cries. Even if they were gods that didn’t think much of us and might trample over us in their enthusiasm to preserve their creation, there would be comfort in knowing that some power, any power, cared enough about the trees and the beaches to keep them around a little longer.

Reuss’s latest iteration of the game, Horizons of Spirit Island, is a downscaled version that swaps plastic for cardboard and lowers both the player count and the complexity. It’s Spirit Island for book stores and Target, in other words. Even in a reduced format, it’s fantastic.

This is what happens when you let one ant into the kitchen.

This most recent play, it was the clutter that got me. Spirit Island is a crowded game. There are three forces at work on the island, each significant in its own right. To some degree, the relationship between those forces is the game’s defining quality.

There are the colonists, less explicitly white Europeans in Horizons than in the original game, but still bedecked in conquistador morions and planting flags that denote ownership of the soil itself. Perhaps peace could have been struck, once. Some Half-Earth agreement, partitioned between the wild and the cobblestones. Perhaps. Not anymore. Not now that they’ve filled every stretch of the island with their towns and cities, displacing everything and everyone in their path.

Those displaced are the Dahan, the natives, scattered and harmonious — harmonious enough that they don’t present an existential threat to the island, anyway — and also caught in the middle of the game’s conflict. They can fight back, but against the invaders’ steel and germs and insatiable hunger they’re fragile and paltry.

And then there’s you. The spirits. Not gods, the game insists, although that’s some nonsense. You’re as much gods as most gods that were ever worshiped, patrons of mud and rain and living energy that makes one’s hairs stand on end before the lightning takes them. These are old gods, towering and wild beings, like the creator found in the Atra-Hasis and later Genesis, who grew irritated at mankind’s buzzing and decided to rinse them down the drain.

Added together, what a mess they make. Spirit Island brims with pieces in collision. One can imagine a time when the spirits drowsed on the beaches and in the deep woods, when the Dahan tended to the rhythms of life without intruding into those sacred places. But those days are gone. Now the tokens pile together, sometimes spilling over the map’s boundaries the way the cities have spilled past their walls, the way Europe’s shores have spilled forth. Now the Dahan flee and the spirits rouse from their slumber. So the game clutters. Early on, it’s easy to become disheartened at the sight of so many ships on the horizon, so many new walls being thrown up, so many flags planted in the earth. Just as it’s easy to look at a graph of the ocean’s temperature or a statistic about extinct species and grow disheartened. Maybe the struggle is lost.

Fathomless Mud of the Swamp, the god of tracked-in dirt.

The relationship between those three sides has been the issue of some criticism. You are not the Dahan. Nor do you really care about them. Oh, certainly, you’re free to sympathize with their plight, and more than one spirit directly interfaces with them, whether protecting their villages, rallying them to war, or using them as kindling for your awakening power. But they aren’t tied to victory. Losing villages is a side-effect of the land becoming polluted, but it isn’t undesirable on its own. If you succeed without any Dahan villages on the board, it’s as much a win as if you’d preserved every last one of them.

So the argument has been made that because Spirit Island doesn’t turn history on its head, it cannot qualify as a decolonial fantasy. What a lack of imagination. Decoloniality has never been defined solely by its relationship to human beings. That, too, is a consequence of suborned thinking. The task is to expand one’s sphere of empathy. First to those who were overlooked, who were dispossessed, who were designated abhuman. This is a long process, extended incrementally and imperfectly, but it remains only one aspect of the broader spectrum. The sphere can also extend beyond one’s lifespan and even beyond one’s own species. To give voice to generations dead and yet to spring into existence. To the creatures who are like us, thinking and feeling. Then to those who think and feel less like us. Then to the trees, the soil, the rivers, the seas. To learn how to speak for biospheres and worlds.

And through that process we loop back around to where we began, to terrain staked out by holy books but largely abandoned by modern religion. To the garden and the inchoate alike. To the injunction to tend, to steward, to name. When some of these people tell me about heaven, what I picture is not pristine and clean. I imagine greasy rivers and tallow-soaked hillsides, skies that flake ash, angels whose trumpets issue black fumes. The animals there are caged and we labor at the wheel for eighty hours a week until on the sabbath we are made to pound our chests and say what good people we are. I understand the fantasy, puffy clouds and unspotted linens and families clasping hands in a great chain. But the way most of our churches have gone, I can’t make the leap.

“Discard” is right.

Spirit Island doesn’t go that route. It doesn’t invest its faith in people. Not in its invaders, obviously, but not even in the Dahan. They’ve both failed, albeit in different ways and with varying degrees of culpability. The invaders could have chosen to not invade. To stay home. To say no. The Dahan… well, I’m not interested in victim-blaming. Their failure has little to do with anything they chose. I think of the Dahan the way I think about most of us, little people who have tried boycotting bad businesses and carpooling to work and seeding their yards with local flora, only to realize the invaders own all the businesses and have bribed the chieftains into silence. If only the absence of fault were a shield. Theologically speaking, the link between human goodness and human suffering is hardly the default mode. More often than righteousness, the old gods required placation.

Because the invaders didn’t exercise conscience over power, and because the Dahan couldn’t exercise any real power at all, we get the game’s proposed third solution, the lashing-out of these spirits and the natural world they represent. I wonder sometimes if it’s more or less what we’re going to get. The spirits that have been roused by the invaders’ pillaging are not so distant from the ravages of an abused planet. Rains that wash away the good and the bad alike. Lightning that sparks continent-spanning wildfires. Oceans awash with rotted feed. That Reuss assigns a will to these phenomena is a balm. I’m reminded of the seedbanks in the Svalbard Archipelago, much touted as one of humanity’s arks against these troubles of our own making, and the climate flooding that reached the vault doors a few years back. Tell me that doesn’t sound like the warning volley of a trickster god.

Here’s the thing.

Spirit Island doesn’t settle for fatalism. Instead, it offers a new perspective, the inanimate animated to fury. And rather than beating you over the head, it’s a joy to turn the tables on these invaders. The cardplay is straightforward, if sometimes hard to parse. The system governing the invaders is harsh but fair. It also produces moments of glazed-over desperation, when its tangle of intersecting tokens blurs together. How can anyone solve this mess?

But you do solve it. In this incarnation, Spirit Island isn’t so difficult, especially sans the optional invader nations that constituted the original game’s hard mode. There’s a reason this thing is widely considered one of the best cooperative board games out there. I’m sure somebody could contrast these spirits with those in the original box and the expansions. I don’t have enough experience to say anything other than that, yes, these seem to provide an easy entry point.

Despite being more accessible than the original, Horizons of Spirit Island still poses a challenge.

Easy enough, for instance, that my ten-year-old was able to tackle its card system with only a few reminders and plenty of suggestions. More pertinent was the conversation we had afterward, about the long history of colonialism and the demulcent fantasy the game presents. Because of Spirit Island, this conversation was neither difficult nor somber, but a natural topic, something easily broached. There are heaps of board games that provide a springboard for further discussion, but not many of them are this approachable, not to mention this time-tested. Even after all this time, it’s refreshing to return to the company of these gods and find that they’re every bit as fierce and untamed as I remember them.

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A complimentary copy was provided.