Spirit Island: You are playing the spirits native to an island that is being invaded by colonists. They keep coming (and building towns and cities); your goal is to drive them off the island before they taint too much of it. It's a cooperative game, with each spirit having some different abilities and some different action cards. We had four players and that worked well; I'm guessing that you remove map segments with fewer players so the balance should stay about the same, but I think it would play differently on a smaller map.

Yes - the game scales down to solo play, and up to six players with expansions, and works pretty well at all sizes, but it's definitely somewhat *different* at different sizes. Some of that is due to map size and layout (different amounts of coast vs inland affects the spread of the invaders, and can affect some spirits). Also, having fewer Spirits around can somewhat limit your options, since you don't have as much opportunity for synergies between Spirits.

You can also mess around with the map layout, so long as the result is legal. We've playtested various weird options that have proven fun, like the "volcano" layout with a big hole in the middle of the map.

Note that there is a big expansion coming next year -- that Kickstarter ended some months ago, but the Updates are fun to read, giving pretty in-depth discussions of all of the new Spirits...