Event Deck — Risk Profiles per Expansion
The Event deck is introduced by Branch & Claw and expanded by Jagged Earth and Nature Incarnate. Each Invader Phase, after any Blighted Island effect and before the Earned Fear Cards resolve, you draw and resolve one Event (Branch & Claw rulebook). On Turn 1 the Event is drawn and discarded without resolving; it is public in the Event discard (Jagged Earth rulebook p.12). A typical card has a main Event that branches on the Island’s health, the Terror Level or the Invader Stage (or is a Choice Event), plus a Token Event and a Dahan Event. The rulebook calls the two main branches “both bad” and the Token and Dahan Events “potentially good”.
Pool size + per-game draws
The pool counts only Events still in use. Nature Incarnate drops three Branch & Claw Events (Outpaced, War Touches the Island’s Shores, A Strange Madness Among the Beasts) and replaces War Touches the Island’s Shores with Far-off Wars Touch the Island (NI rulebook p.5). Slave Rebellion is added only against France, so the pool column below includes it and the “without France” column doesn’t. The all-expansions pool matches the Steam game’s (61 + Slave Rebellion; data/references/rules/open-questions.md Q15). The deck is not reshuffled during a game (the Steam engine never does), so draws are exchangeable, not independent.
| Combo | Event pool (incl. Slave Rebellion) | Without France | Events drawn / resolved per 8-turn game |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base only (Horizons + Base game) | 0 | 0 | 0 / 0 |
| Base + B&C | 23 | 22 | 8 / 7 |
| Base + JE | 30 | 30 | 8 / 7 |
| Base + B&C + JE | 53 | 52 | 8 / 7 |
| All expansions (Base + B&C + JE + NI + Promos) | 62 | 61 | 8 / 7 |
| NI additions only (delta from JE) | 9 | 9 | 8 / 7 |
An 8-turn game draws 8 Events and resolves 7. The Jagged Earth rulebook keeps the Turn-1 draw to keep the timing right for France and as a reminder, and notes that not resolving it makes the game “very slightly easier” on average.
Spirit-favoring vs. Invader-favoring hits
Heuristic regex classifier counting pro-spirit vs. pro-invader phrasing in each Event card’s full text: every branch of the main Event plus the Token and Dahan Events, although only one main branch resolves. Every phrase counts the same, so a count is not a measure of how much an Event helps or hurts. The pools include Slave Rebellion (1 spirit hit, 0 invader hits); without France, subtract 1 card and 1 spirit hit from each row that includes B&C.
| Combo | Pool | Spirit-favor total | Invader-favor total | Net favor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base + B&C | 23 | 19 | 17 | +2 |
| Base + JE | 30 | 38 | 22 | +16 |
| Base + B&C + JE | 53 | 57 | 39 | +18 |
| All expansions (Base + B&C + JE + NI + Promos) | 62 | 68 | 43 | +25 |
| NI additions only (delta from JE) | 9 | 11 | 4 | +7 |
Top 5 spirit-favoring + invader-favoring events (all expansions)
Most spirit-favoring
- Dahan Trade with the Invaders (Jagged Earth) — spirit-hits 3, invader-hits 0 (net +3)
- Numinous Crisis (Jagged Earth) — spirit-hits 3, invader-hits 0 (net +3)
- The Struggles of Growth (Jagged Earth) — spirit-hits 4, invader-hits 1 (net +3)
- Far-off Wars Touch the Island (Nature Incarnate) — spirit-hits 2, invader-hits 0 (net +2)
- Harvest Bounty, Harvest Dust (Jagged Earth) — spirit-hits 3, invader-hits 1 (net +2)
Most invader-favoring
- Farmers Seek the Dahan for Aid (Branch and Claw) — spirit-hits 0, invader-hits 2 (net -2)
- Wounded Lands Attract Explorers (Jagged Earth) — spirit-hits 0, invader-hits 1 (net -1)
- Tight-Knit Communities (Branch and Claw) — spirit-hits 0, invader-hits 1 (net -1)
- Thriving Trade (Jagged Earth) — spirit-hits 1, invader-hits 2 (net -1)
- Resourceful Populace (Jagged Earth) — spirit-hits 0, invader-hits 1 (net -1)
Interpretation
Events were designed to be slightly negative on average, to offset the Disease and Beasts the players start with (designer darker, BGG 2506650). The Branch & Claw rulebook describes most cards’ two main branches as “both bad” and the Token and Dahan Events as “potentially good”.
- The keyword classifier reads every Event pool as net pro-spirit, which contradicts the design intent above. Read that as a limit of the classifier, not a finding: it sums phrases from both main branches and from the “potentially good” Token and Dahan Events, and it gives every phrase equal weight.
- In the simulation (7 resolved Events plus the resolved Fear Cards per game, Slave Rebellion excluded), the net keyword count is +1.25 for Base + B&C, +5.07 for Base + JE, +3.33 for Base + B&C + JE and +3.83 for all expansions; NI’s cards alone give +6.79. For scale, Fear Cards alone (the base-only row) net +1.50. These rank the pools by phrasing, not by how hard the Events make the game (see Deck Expansion Impact).
- The Turn-1 Event never resolves, so plan Turn 1 around the board, not around the Event.