SpiritWars Strategy Guide
by Xerin

Basic Strategies

Click the green Courtyard button periodically as you play, to check how many spirits you have left in your dungeon. Each turn, 1 spirit is fed from your dungeon into your courtyard. Think of your dungeon as your deck, and your courtyard as your hand. When your dungeon is empty, you will begin to suffer from castle neglect, causing 3 damage to your castle each turn.

The only way to avoid this is to keep a full courtyard. This means having 8 spirits in your courtyard, filling all the slots. If even one of these slots is empty while your dungeon is empty, you will suffer castle neglect. So you want to monitor your dungeon carefully, and be sure you have enough spirits to fill your courtyard once your dungeon reaches 0.

Sometimes you can roll the dice where castle neglect is concerned. For example, let's say you are down to 0 spirits and your castle is full. You might risk activating one of the last 8 spirits in your courtyard, if you have a Lowland Skeleton in the battlefield that you expect will die that turn. Since you get the chance to resurrect your Skeleton, he can take the place in your courtyard of the spirit that you activated, and you won't have to worry about neglect. It's always a risk though…if your opponent catches on to what you are trying to do, he may intentionally leave your Skeleton alive to force you into neglect!

Another way to fill your courtyard in a pinch is to avoid paying maintenance for spirits with the resurrection ability. By not paying maintenance on your Berserker, for example, you can resurrect him back to your courtyard to keep it full. Be sure to do this before you reach 0 spirits though, because the game checks your courtyard before it resurrects any spirits for whom you refuse maintenance. In this case, if you were already at 0, you would take 3 damage. Your Berserker would then be resurrected, preventing any further damage from neglect.

An obvious strategy for preventing neglect is to create a larger dungeon to begin with. I usually try to avoid very slim dungeons (around 30) unless I have key spirits which need to come into play fairly quickly. It is nice having a larger dungeon (38+), and on more than one occasion I have won the game due to outlasting my opponent.