I was playing Metazooa recently – a taxonomy game – and excited about the different species at our bird feeder, and I figured, “There has to be a bird identification game out there, right?” And, shock of shocks, there is that!
Birdle is, as the name would imply, Wordle-esque, in that there’s a daily target and six guesses for the user, with indicators for partial success. Of course, Birdle has slightly different objectives than Wordle, being an identification game – that is to say, each daily bird comes with photos of it and possibly a range map. Your goal is to guess its name – its common name – with a dropdown to help, so if you type in “yellow” it will offer you every bird with “yellow” in its name, applicable to that area.
Area-applicable is, of course, only important because of another feature – not only is there a bird-of-the-day for the world, but there are also birds for each of the continents! Excepting Antarctica, because Antarctica, but including Central America and, as a treat, the contiguous US. I have a guess as to where most of their user base is.
Once you’ve guessed, the screen will display that bird’s order, family, genus, and species, grey for wrong and green for the ones that you’ve gotten correct. For some birds this is more useful than others – songbirds are now the bane of my existence, even though I love them and they’re adorable – but in all cases, after your third guess, it will offer to tell you what the correct family is, and then after the next guess the genus, and after guess five it will offer you the first three letters of the bird’s common name. Depending on how expansive the genus is – and whether or not you’re using Wikipedia – this can still leave some room for error, but its clear that the true objective is for you to learn. And check out some gorgeous bird photography. And if nine birds-of-the-day aren’t for either of those enough, there’s also a practice function, where you can plug in geography and/or family of birds and get photos with multiple choice!
The pictures are from eBird and the range maps are from Birds of the World, both of which are comprehensive. And the game aspect adds a certain motive-to-process, as it were. Why else would I remember that some ducks are called pintails? (And why are some hummingbirds called hermits?)
These are the itty-bittiest dinosaurs you’ve ever held in hand. Lying them down and standing them up again on the boards is a minor dexterity exercise. And they’re so cute. You’ve got stegosaurus, brachiosaurus… allosaurus, velociraptors… the purple ones… I’m getting ahead of myself.
Inside of this very compact box is a sprawling board of actions, Ranches, player mats, research and contract centers, and the desperately important Medical Leave, whose board also houses the round tracker, a phase guide, and end-game scoring on the back. Each player’s Ranch is unique in arrangement and therefore where Barriers need to go to stop dinos from escaping, where your freebie enclosure starts, and which resources are where! Resources become more difficult to acquire the more dinos you need to provide for with them, as you use land to house stegos instead of to grow food. Luckily, you can also gain resources during the Assign Ranchers phase, which is also where you get Barriers, Research benefits, Contract fulfillment, and dinos.
Dino-wrangling is, to nobody’s surprise, incredibly dangerous, and often results in injury. You can shill out Supplies for someone to do that for you, of course, but that gets expensive, so your other option is to pick a dino and roll the Wrangler die. Most of the time, nothing happens. You net the critter without incident, move it to your Holding Area and move on. Sometimes, there’s an incident, and both your Ranger and the dino are wounded and sent to Medical Leave – you still get to keep ’em, but any plans that depended on them being where you’d expected are shot. And sometimes, very occasionally, there’s a different kind of incident, and you wind up with a second dino. This sounds fantastic and I was absolutely delighted when it happened to me… until I realized I had neither the Barriers nor the food for it. Extra dinos are not always a good thing. And being wounded isn’t always so bad! I had for myself a plenty functional build in which being wounded got me a bonus action and wound up rather disappointed when wrangling went without fanfare.
All your ranger actions handled and all your stuff now being yours, you now move on to arranging your Ranch, dealing with runaway dinos, feeding your dinos, dealing with more runaway dinos, and breeding your dinos, at which point there are – you guessed it – more runaway dinos. Now, to be fair, you will not necessarily be dealing with them three separate times, so much as the possibility of them three separate times, depending on what you don’t have enclosures for before breeding them, what you don’t have enclosures for after breeding them, and what you can’t afford to feed. Even the gentlest of herbivores will crash through your Barriers rather than starve to death, which is what the escaping ones do, and jailbreaking carnivores will eat your other dinos instead. (They can, however, eat your other escaping dinos, if that tidies up some problems.) So there is a strong incentive to be sure you can maintain what you’re acquiring, certainly.
There are two other problems, if problems they are, to do with opportunities and the challenges thereof. The first is Contracts, which are both a primary way of earning points and the most difficult one. Seven spare dinos, anybody? A Public Contract only takes three, but your Private Contract needs four, and can only be fulfilled when a Public Contract is also. Talk about steep terms. Especially because, unless you spend a Supply and an action, there’s no way to acquire a dino and sell it in the same round! And, as previously established, feeding them gets expensive. The ones worth more points in both Contracts and on their own are, naturally, the ones that need to eat more. And then there are the purple ones.
“The purple ones,” for which every little figure is unique, are products of the Research division and each come with their own special effects, food requirements, and more lenient habitation rules. They’re hand-raised and unlikely to run off on you, more or less. An excellent example is Gallimimus, an omnivore requiring either one Plant or one Meat, which lets you pick an adjacent dino that does not need to be fed. If that dinosaur is, say, Tyrannosaurus Rex, which needs three Meat in a round (or even just Allosaurus, which needs two), you definitely see returns. Also, Gallimimus is worth two victory points at game’s end, so there’s that too. The non-animal Research cards, like the Mobile Barriers (allowed to be rearranged), also have point values attached.
All in all, this one is very mechanics-crunchy, needs a lot of space for gameplay and very little for storage, and, again, has tiny little dinosaurs you get to profile-match to their pictures and zookeep in a format where they don’t bite. And then you get to sell them to the Jurassic Parks of the world, and they’re no longer your problem! Flawless. Replayable ad infinitum. Have at least one player with steady hands and decent eyesight.
Ecosystem: Coral Reef is a closed-circuit deck-passing game, by which players use the dwindling supply of available cards to build a 5 by 4 grid of marine life! Everyone will wind up with their own completed ecosystem, but the particulars will grow harder and harder to orchestrate, leading to some… very strange placement. Coral floating at the surface, anyone?
Instead of having each organism’s effects on the cards, each player gets a cheat sheet, which will lead to a lot of cross-referencing in the early stages of the game. Each life form has a different bonus, most of them points-based, many of them in relation to the organisms they share rows, columns, or adjacency with. A couple of them have actions, like the octopus, who lets you move another card! Very important, as once cards are placed you can’t move them anymore. And sometimes you thought you knew what you were doing, and then your neighbor handed you a shark. Y’know, a normal problem.
Regardless, this one was a lot of fun, with point-stacking mechanics everywhere and an additional bonus for your least points-yielding type, be they producers, prey, or predators – which, being based off the point total of that variety and not merely the number of organisms, can be a hell of a bonus! This is definitely a ‘write down your math’ kind of game. And isn’t it gorgeous?
Because what everyone needs is to collect dragons and visit them! No? Is that… not the takeaway of the game?
It is, more or less. Wyrmspan is about excavating caves for dragons, inviting them in, and exploring, picking up resources as you go! Despite sharing a system with Wingspan, it is quintessentially a dragon game, a process I had hardly considered the difficulty of until I was staring the results in the face. There are a lot of little shifts between the two sets of rules, ones that alter the internal balance while still coming out with the same results!
Crunchy bits aside, Wyrmspan approaches its material with the same enthusiasm as its predecessor, presenting dragons of different sizes, temperaments, and abilities, a booklet all about them, and a guild track for rewards! The little adventurer pieces, visual design and so forth are stunning, and if you like dragons and lots-of-moving-parts mechanics, you should definitely check it out.
Designed by people who have been to all our National Parks, Trekking The National Parks features a comprehensive map, fun facts and pictures, and plenty of replay value! With many different ways to score points, it’s anyone’s game.
Cards are used both for movement and to claim Parks, depending on whether you’re using the number or the color/symbol; Parks have the matching symbols next to their point value. The more cards they take, the more points you get! To claim a Park, you have to be on that space on the board, and play the right cards – and this is a separate action from movement, which is terribly important! Because you only get two actions per turn, and sometimes your buddies will Sorry-style bump you back to Start. Our own games got progressively more competitive and Munchkin-esque the more that we played.
Beyond claiming Parks (which I’ll admit may have involved some favoritism, especially towards ones that I’ve already been to), you can also score points by camping at Major Parks, picking up stones, and having the most stones of a given color. Stones are laid out randomly at the beginning of the game, and picked up the first time someone visits a Park; Major Parks are selected, three of the six for each game, and have an effect when or after you camp there. Yellowstone, for instance, lets you draw a card off the top of the deck when you claim something. This is especially useful because drawing takes up actions, one per card, and is the main factor slowing down your tourism. Camping is done the same way claiming is, except Major Parks accepts multiple campers!
As a nature and travel nerd, this game is a delight. Most of the National Parks have cards, giving you incidental exposure to Cool Things The World Has To Offer, and the parks that aren’t on the cards are in a little booklet to the side. You can tell that the creators truly love the subject material, and that they were careful to weight the mechanics so you can revisit it again and again.
(Note: my understanding is that the “claim” mechanic is called “explore” in the third edition, and that it adds rules for solo play. What I played was the second edition, so that’s what the post’s about! Very excited by the possibility of playing as the bear, though, which is usually the First Player token.)
I was perusing the game library at a convention recently and happened to stumble upon Seikatsu, a gorgeous gardening game that makes excellent use of perspective!
All players share the same garden, enhancing the view from their color-coded pagodas by populating it with bird/flower combos, scoring points for matching adjacent birds as they do. Once the garden is full, they score again, this time for flowers! Flowers are scored in rows instead of clusters, still by type, and the rows are determined by the perspective of each player’s pagoda. I adore this mechanic – the use of shared space combined with directional scoring parameters? The dance of scoring points now and later for yourself, without also helping your opponents? Absolutely fascinating. And the koi of course can pair with anything.
It’s always a delight when a game can multitask! Wingspan is one of those strategy games with lots of moving parts and several ways to earn points. We’ve played it four times now and I haven’t used the same strategy twice! It’s also an educational deep-dive into the birds of North America.
It’s essential that the core mechanics are simple – everything else is as complicated as you let it be, and as informational as you let it be, but the actual pattern all play follows is pretty straightforward! Each player has little colored cubes and a player board. Each turn, there are four actions available to them. The first is to play a bird in the leftmost open space in one of their three habitats, marking the column with a cube. After the first column, playing birds costs eggs.
The other three actions are specific to those habitats. In each case, your cube starts in the rightmost open space of the habitat, on the habitat’s ability itself, and then moves left, giving you the choice of activating each bird it passes over, provided they have a “When Activated” ability. (Also possible are “When Played” and “Once Between Turns.”) The habitats themselves are the forest, which lets you gain food – necessary to play most birds – from the birdfeeder; the grasslands, which let your birds lay eggs; and the wetlands, which let you draw more bird cards. A round is over when all cubes have been placed, and one is then used to mark end-of-round scoring. The result is that your number of actions each round goes down as the number of things each action does goes up. The game has four rounds. Scoring is a tally of the point values of your birds themselves, end-of-round goals, bonus cards (you pick one at the beginning of the game and can draw more later), eggs, food on cards (bird ability), and tucked cards (also a bird ability). Like I said – many ways to earn points!
And then, of course, there’s the technical aspects. The educational aspects. The part I’m nerding out over the most. Including the swift-start, the cards cover 180 North American bird species, including: their common names, Latin names, their habitats, what they eat, the continents they live on, nest type, wingspan, and how many eggs they lay in a year – that last one was brought down to scale. Some of these are just neat – continents, Latin names – and some are mechanically relevant! Various cards and end-of-round goals are dependent on nest type, or number of eggs in a particular nest type. (There’s a wild type that counts as everything, and in reality they have non-standard nesting habits. Like black terns, which apparently nest on water.) How many eggs the species naturally lays determines the limit for how many they can have in the game. Wingspan is relevant specifically when certain predatory birds are preying on the top card of the deck – if it’s below a certain wingspan, it’s edible. There is so much love and care and research permeating every inch of this game; it’s palpable and contagious. I expect the same is true of the expansions, too, which feature other continents! Someday…
Meeple Party is, in fact, a game in which Meeple throw a party. Who knew? Better yet, it’s cooperative, so you’re all throwing a party together! As parties generally should be.
There are, by default, five Roommates throwing the party. Players each pick one to play and the rest are NPCs. All players can move all Roommates, just like they can move all guests, but certain Surprises will give or take Stress from specific Roommates, which is the only time your specific character matters. The backs of the character tiles double as rooms – those rooms specifically are optional, but there are a certain set required in the house, namely a Kitchen, Living Room, Dining Room, Bathroom, Bedroom, Door, and Outside. Rooms are arranged however the players want.
Each Roommate’s turn starts by welcoming a new Meeple to the party. This means drawing one out of a bag, and then placing them in a room of your choice and activating their effect – each color of Meeple is a different personality type, with can draw Meeple toward them or push them away. The exception is the white Meeple, which cause a Surprise and then disappear back into the bag, to cause more later! In the photo below, we drew The Conga Line as our Surprise – it moves all Meeple in the room with the most to the room with the least, which is how we wound up with five in the Bathroom. You then move a Meeple of your choice to an adjacent room and activate their effect. The goal is meet your Photo criteria!
We’ll get to Photos, but first – Disasters. The difficulty level you chose at the beginning of the game will determine whether you get individual or communal Disasters, or both! Disasters list criteria you must not meet, lest you gain Stress. If all players get three Stress, the party ends prematurely because you blew up and kicked everyone out. If you have individual Disasters, they only trigger on your turn.
After that, you get to check for Photo opportunities! Everyone has two Photos in hand that they’re trying to take, with either a minimum or exact requirement. Sometimes these clash painfully with Disasters, like when I needed exactly one Flirt and one Jerk in a Bathroom, and also couldn’t have Jerks and Flirts in the same room without incurring Stress.
The good news is, 3, 6, 9, and 12 o’clock on the Clock refresh Disasters! The Clock activates after you check for Photos, and after you move it up one space per Photo you completed this turn. There are a few different effects, some more inconvenient than others. (*cough* laying down Meeple *cough*) (Laying down Meeple can’t be moved until you’ve taken a turn to stand them back up. They’re napping, sick, etc.) You then replace any Photos or Disasters you triggered this turn.
The length of the party is also determined at the beginning of the game; in the (out-of-game) photos, we were playing Casual, or a 12-Photo goal. The objective is to reach the end of the party without completely stressing out!
This one has a colorful and entertaining realism (which is not a word I thought I’d assign to Meeple) and the mix of cards, chosen room arrangements, chosen difficulties (in multiple ways), and optional items and pets (each with their own mechanics) all combine to give Meeple Party a whole lot of replay value! We haven’t played the alternate game modes yet, but I look forward to trying the Hot Tub Party, where you aim to get as many Meeple into the Hot Tub before stressing out.
Capitals has, unsurprisingly, the same basic mechanics as the original Globle (post with those here), with two changes. One, you’re deducing national capitals instead of the nations themselves. Assuming the average person knows more countries than countries’ capitals, this is inherently the harder game. The second difference makes it a bit easier; an arc appears between each guess and the previous, and like the capitals themselves, the arc is color-coded! This is especially useful if the correct answer falls somewhere between your entries.
Unsurprisingly, I like Capitals for the same reasons I like Globle (and Metazooa, and Metaflora). It’s a low-pressure deduction game that teaches me more about the world every day! And this world is such a fascinating place.
I’ve mentioned the game Globle before – a sort of Wordle offshoot centered around geography. I recently discovered that the same group behind Globle, Trainwreck Labs, also had an animal game! That game is Metazooa.
My favorite part of Metazooa is that each wrong answer gives you the common order, class, etc. that your answer and the correct one share, so each guess fills out a sort of family tree. From a game perspective, it’s useful to extrapolate what this isn’t more closely related to; from an aesthetic perspective, it looks cool; and from a life perspective, I’m garnering a much more detailed understanding of the animal kingdom than I knew before.
And the same is true for plants! Metazooa has a sibling game, called Metaflora, which is similarly fascinating. As it’s harder (for people who don’t study plants), Metaflora gives you 25 guesses, while Metazooa gives you 20. In both games, you can trade three guesses for a hint: the next taxonomic rank down. They also have practice games if the one plant/animal daily isn’t enough for you!
I’m clearly fond of both of these; if you love these branches of science, or just want to understand them better, then this is probably the fun, educational game for you.
