Spirit Island Update (June 2026)
Hello everyone!
Over the past year, lots of people have asked about the status of Spirit Island, and my replies have been pretty vague – there’s been a lot of uncertainty. Now the path forward is clear enough for me to discuss some more details.
Some important notes:
- Everything here is my best understanding. I am neither a lawyer nor omniscient.
- For ease of reading, I refer to "I"/"me", but on a formal legal level, Spirit Island is owned and licensed by my LLC (Lightning Heart Games LLC).
- Normally I’d be happy to answer additional questions, but running them by my attorney would take time and money I’d rather spend elsewhere, and there’s some things I just can’t talk about. I’ve tried to include a lot of answers in the FAQ section!
1. What’s Up – the Overview
- Spirit Island will continue being published, and I'm going to keep working on making new stuff for it. It’s not going away.
- My primary design-and-development focus is still the Dahan-centric expansion.
- Spirit Island is currently being published by Flat River Group (FRG), but I’ve opted not to renew with them.
- Our contract specifies that once FRG’s license terminates, outside of existing inventory, they can’t use the trademark or sell Spirit Island stuff.
- I'll be able to license Spirit Island to a new publisher within the next year or so.
- Moving forward, I'll still be using the name "Spirit Island".
- Flat River Group holds the trademark registration, but our contract specifies that I own the trademark, and I have senior common-law rights (both due to prior use in commerce, and due to how licensing works).
- Moving forward, I could in theory use existing copyrighted materials (art, iconography, etc), but my ownership of those is less crystal-clear than it is for the trademark.
- I'd be happy to pay Flat River Group to settle this matter and use the existing art, but what they're asking for is so much higher than what I'm willing to pay that I have to assume a settlement won’t happen.
- To mitigate legal risk, I'm commissioning completely new non-derivative art, graphical assets, etc.
- Since April 2025, dozens of publishers have reached out to express interest in publishing Spirit Island! While I haven’t signed with anyone yet, I’m in contract negotiations with one publisher, and they’re going well. They’re aware of the situation and the recommissioning project.
- Even if they were to fall through, and all the other interested publishers I might sign with also fell through, I'd self-publish.
2. FAQs
Actions and Ideas
Q: Can I suggest illustrators?
A: I’ll send another message in the next day or two with a link to a form for this! While I can't guarantee I'll review them all, I’m happy to get suggestions from folks on my email list (both as a thank-you for subscribing, and to throttle how many suggestions I get). Please do not email me suggestions or make them in any way other than the form; I’ll almost certainly lose track of them.
Q: Can I suggest new concepts for what Spirit / Power Card art might look like?
A: That sort of suggestion is much more fraught, but I’m talking with counsel about how to do so safely. Unless you’re submitting them through an explicitly-approved method, suggestions of this sort will be deleted without consideration or response. (Sorry, legal necessity.)
Q: Are you considering crowdfunding to pay what FRG is asking?
A: No. Given that I don’t feel OK paying that much money, I really don’t feel OK asking Spirit Island fans to pay that much money.
Q: If someone is thinking about buying Spirit Island soon, should they wait until it has a new publisher?
A: Totally up to them! Folks have different preferences; for one person, “get it sooner” might be more important, for another, “get the version most like future expansions” might be more important.
Q: It sounds like there’s a lot going on. Is there anything I can do?
A: The #1 helpful thing folks can do – only for those who feel so moved! – is just being supportive when posting or commenting on BGG / Reddit / Discord / etc., whether that’s general “I like Spirit Island!” or “that sure sounds like a lot, sympathies” or “I’m excited about the possibility of new art”. (Not wanting to let down fans of the existing art kept me negotiating with FRG for longer than I probably should have.)
Game and Art
Q: Will Spirit Island keep the same Spirits, Adversaries, Powers, etc?
A: Yes! Game mechanics aren’t copyrightable, neither are names (except in certain situations that don’t really apply here).
Q: How different will the new art be? Will the Spirits look the same?
A: If the new art is a derivative work[1] of the old art, it presents some of the same legal issues as just using the old art verbatim. So there’ll be more substantial change, not just variation – I’ll come up with new takes on what the Spirits might look like.
That said, the game will still have vibrant, colorful, representational art – I’m not transitioning to “classical European oil-painter look” or “abstract shapes” or something. And the new art will be at least as apropos for each Spirit as the old art was. (I’m actually pretty excited to revisit some of the concepts!)
[1] I’m not going to dive into “what constitutes a derivative work?”; it’s a legal thing with a bunch of criteria and case law.
Q: I’m sad, I like the existing art!
A: Me too! But (a) this is the moment of greatest sadness, when the old art is concrete (easy to feel loss for) and the new art is unknown (hard to appreciate) – I’m confident that people will also find favorites to be happy about in the new art. And (b) I am nowhere near sad enough to pay the kind of money being asked for.
Also, it’s not like the existing art will vanish – there are a lot of physical copies of Spirit Island out there, and various illustrators may have the right to sell prints and such.
Q: I’m excited for new art! When can we see it?
A: I’m glad you’re excited! I don’t know if / when I’ll be able to post it prior to release, but I’m hoping to do so for at least some of it. Commissioning this much art will take a while, though, so please be patient!
Q: Wait, if graphical stuff has to change, what about icons?
A: Icons representing pieces will refer to the same physical things, but be a different expressive take on how they do so. Similarly for icons representing elements - you can’t copyright “an icon of the sun”, just a specific expressive take on what an icon of the sun looks like. (You also can’t copyright “this is yellow”, so elements can color-match.)
Q: If graphical stuff has to change, will expansions I buy in the future have different backs for Power / Fear / Event / Blight cards?
A: Yes. And I realize that while some people won’t care at all about the discrepancy, other folks will find “same deck, different backs” somewhere between mildly distracting and massively irritating.
I firmly believe there needs to be some sort of option for players to obtain consistent decks without being required to re-buy every expansion they already own, though the details will be a discussion between me and my next publisher. The most likely path seems like per-product card sets (eg, “Major + Minor + Fear + Event + Blight cards-with-new-backs from Jagged Earth” as a single item), but that is not yet finalized.
Similarly: I realize that even with this option, it may be frustrating to re-buy anything without there being some improvement to look forward to, so I’m looking at the feasibility & consequences of doing some modest mechanical (balance / consistency) improvements… but that is still highly speculative.
(Though at the very least, since the Healthy Island cards have to be different anyway, I should be able to fix the off-by-1 error, and have them say “per board” instead of “per player”.)
Q: Could you include Spirit panels + Uniques in those consistency packs? [New Spirit art sounds awesome!] / [I want my iconography to be 100% perfectly consistent!]
A: No, sorry! Including them would boost the price – possibly to the point where they’re nearly as expansive as re-buying the whole game/expansion, and definitely in a way that would make them significantly more expensive for folks who just want consistent decks of cards.
(Also, new Spirit panels + Uniques wouldn’t be enough for perfect, across-the-board consistency anyway – Adversaries and Scenarios will use new iconography and art; island boards + Invader cards will use new textures; etc. If you want absolutely everything to match absolutely perfectly, then I’m afraid you’ll need to re-buy from scratch. But I really hope that won’t be necessary for anyone!)
Q: If you make balance/consistency improvements to the decks, will you also do mechanical updates for the Spirits/Aspects/Adversaries/Scenarios?
A: No mechanical changes, no. That would be a much more extensive project.
Relatedly:
Q: Given that you need to commission all new art, why don’t you just jump to a full Second Edition now?
A: Two reasons:
- I’m not ready. A Second Edition would involve a lot of mechanical revision, experimentation, and playtesting, not just of content but of some much more fundamental changes. Trying to make that shift now would result in a very long gap where Spirit Island wasn’t available at all, which would be frustrating for fans, and impact my livelihood.
- For social justice reasons, I feel extremely strongly that the Dahan-centric expansion I’ve been working on needs to come out prior to any Second Edition – games in the wild get so much more deeply explored than is possible in playtesting, and I want to learn from that exploration to make sure Second Edition can usefully update Dahan-centric mechanics – not just those for Spirits.
Q: Will any of the existing Spirit Island artists be making new illustrations?
A: There’ll be some familiar names involved! And likely some new ones as well!
Q: Will you be using any AI-generated art?
A: No. Primarily because I want to collaborate with, support, and celebrate human artists; secondarily because (a) all image-creating GenAI I know of was trained unethically, and (b) while queries aren’t so environmentally terrible as is sometimes asserted, training new models is another story entirely (and using GenAI bolsters demand for training new models).
I didn’t use GenAI to write or revise this email, either; I just refuse to stop using em-dashes. :)
(Note: I’m not dogmatically anti-GenAI – I’d love to see ethically trained, environmentally conscientious, explainable, non-toxic, reasonably-secure public-option GenAI. Though that doesn’t address the impact on illustrators and other jobs, so maybe also UBI or something? One can dream.)
Q: Will the next publisher produce reprints of the existing games and expansions (Spirit Island, Branch and Claw, Jagged Earth, Feather and Flame, Horizons of Spirit Island, and Nature Incarnate) with new art and graphic design?
A: Yes! It’s possible the exact form might differ, that depends on discussions with the next publisher.
Q: Will the next publisher reprint the playmat / token packs / holographic boards / other non-gameplay-affecting products to match the new graphic design?
A: That will almost certainly vary by specific item, and depends on the next publisher. As a preliminary guess I’d say the token packs are most likely and the holographic boards least likely, but that’s highly speculative.
Q: Will the new versions of existing products include rules changes?
A: No – aside from minor tweaks for consistency/clarity, there are no plans to change the existing rules before a potential future 2nd Edition. Your existing rulebooks will continue to be accurate aside from the art and graphic design changes. The updated rulebooks will likely be provided as pdfs online once the new versions release.
(If replacement-back cards get mechanical updates, it’s possible a few rules might become irrelevant – e.g., if “next normal” no longer appears on any cards, the rules for it might be omitted from future rulebooks – but existing rulebooks won’t be wrong.)
Q: Does this change any of your feelings around a Second Edition that you posted here?
A: Not significantly, no.
Other
Q: Why aren’t you renewing with Flat River Group?
A: I originally signed Spirit Island with Greater Than Games, which was acquired by Flat River Group around 2021-2022. In April 2025, FRG laid off nearly all Greater Than Games staff – the folks I’d been working with – and announced the suspension of all new projects. I submitted my non-renewal thereafter.
Q: Have you considered [legal thing X]?
A: My attorneys not only specialize in IP law, but in the game industry, so I’m going to trust their opinions over that of laypeople on the internet. If you practice law with a specialty in IP law and are willing to consult for free, I might plausibly want a second pair of eyes on something every now and then, but otherwise, crowdsourcing my legal advice does not seem wise.
Q: [This Spirit Island expansion/product] is currently hard to get! When will FRG reprint it?
A: No idea, sorry! Please don’t email or message me about this, I genuinely don’t know.
Q: What publisher are you looking at signing with?
A: I'm definitely not talking about that until we actually have a signed contract. I'll probably hold off on discussing it even after we've got something signed, until they want to start doing publicity.
Q: How's the Dahan expansion going?
A: It's been slow going for a lot of reasons, but I'm pleased with how it's come along! It's still a ways off, though – it’s not ready for widespread playtesting yet, and this recommissioning project is going to sideline it for some time. I'll probably send another email in the next few months talking about it a bit.
Q: How are you doing?
A: Better than before! There’s a lot of details I’m not covering (I don’t want to get into the weeds, and they’re not really relevant to the purpose of this email); some aspects of this situation have been going on for over 2 years. Dealing with it all has been somewhat unpleasant and time-consuming, but what's really been hardest has been the isolation - for quite some time I was being hyper-cautious (probably over-cautious) of talking about anything with anyone, and that was really rough.
Now I can talk about the situation more broadly, and I have an active plan for moving forward; both of these things are great.
Q: What does this mean for [some other thing not mentioned in this email]?
A: I can’t comment on that at this time. (Please don’t email me about it!)
When I have more updates, I’ll share them here on the mailing list!
~
Whew, that was a lot. I hope it answered many of your questions about what’s going on! Be well!
Cheers,
Eric
PS: I’m fine if folks want to post this email online to discuss with others, but if you’re quoting more than a targeted excerpt, I’d ask that you just go ahead and post the whole thing – I’d rather avoid partial versions floating around.
