And it feels like a heavy disadvantage if you’re saddled with a bonus card oriented toward egg laying and your opponents aren’t. On the surface, it seems to heavily discourage egg laying at all except as minimally needed for playing more birds. But I’m not convinced that weakening the egg laying action row was really a good idea. We didn’t feel any pain in the reorientation away from egg laying because we played our games with only the new round goals and the new bonus cards (none of which focused on egg laying) to get a good feel for the expansion. This may have been done to address concerns with egg spamming in the base game– a powerful, late game strategy in which players spend their last few turns laying eggs in order to capitalize on the point value of the eggs and the bonus cards that focus on egg production. There’s been an overall shift to more food and more cards while scaling back egg production. The new player boards provided with Oceania also make it possible to refresh the dice in the feeder, refresh the cards in the face up draw pile, and have changed the resource quantities harvested when completing actions. I found that playing with nectar changed the emphasis of my actions to acquiring and spending nectar as much as possible in order to get the bonus points at end game for most nectar spent per action row. Elizabeth also provided a detailed explanation for the reasoning behind including nectar in the expansion rulebook and I thought that was a nice touch. Along with the nectar comes new dice with nectar depicted and new player boards with spaces to hold spent nectar. Nectar is both more useful than then other types of food (it can be spent as a wild food, substituting for other foods in most cases, and putting spenders in line for end game “biggest spender” point awards in the process) and more restrictive (any nectar left in your supply at the end of a round must be discarded). Guild’s Finch (performing at the Copa Cabana nightly)īeyond my expectations, this expansion also introduced a new type of food - nectar. Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo (this badass will totally steal your lunch money) The exquisitely beautiful Many-Colored Fruit-Dove Here are some of my favorite new birds, based solely on appearance: New bird cards from the Oceania range (some with spiffy game end powers)Īs in the base game and previous expansion, the artwork is stunning.Instead, I expected another subtle shift in the mechanics and a widening of the bird inventory, both of which we did get. Taking a lesson from my experience with the previous expansion, I assumed when opening the box that the designer (Elizabeth Hargrave), wasn’t likely to include any major disruptions in the mechanics that would upend the game as we know it. That might be, at least in part, because my expectations have evolved for the series. After several games, I’ve taken to this expansion much more than the previous one. More recently, Wingspan: Oceania Expansion, was released in 2020. It took me awhile to warm up to it, and I wasn’t sold on it as a must-have item. It proved to be more of a subtle change to the footprint of the game versus a turn-everything-upside-down-and-wow-you kind of addition. Later that same year, the first expansion ( Wingspan: European Expansion review here) was released. The game romanced me with its beauty, mechanics, and unique subject matter (see my review here). It's a compelling board game that detours far far away from the usual themes of conquest or agriculture. When Wingspan was released in 2019, it caused quite a stir.
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