Originally from Discord.

So here are my thoughts on Birdscaping (Joe Klipfel), which are long and not the most complimentary, and I am not an experienced game designer but I think about games a lot.

So first, Birdscaping is in many ways seems to have a goal of capturing Wingspan (Elizabeth Hargrave), a very good game even if it’s not for me save for the exquisite bird theme, in 18 cards.

This might have been a mistake.

Or it might not be; what I do know is there are a lot of rules and individual rule cases can be somewhat forgettable.

I’m going to speak on the solo side of things because I cannot get this game in front of a second bird lover because the ones I know are not gamers, love Wingspan, and will prefer playing it over something new they have a hard time coping with the rules over.

So here is what is tough about Birdscaping, and the thing is I love what it’s trying to do but not how it’s doing it. I can tell it was made by a fellow bird lover because the bird text powers all generally make sense. Where they go in your tableau makes sense. What they each eat makes sense.

We start to get into trouble pretty soon because Birdscaping is trying to fit a lot of Wingspan onto the cards themselves. I don’t know about others who’ve played it, but Birdscaping really made me appreciate that Wingspan had egg and food tokens, and that it was easy to get food because it comes via dice, and those components and mechanisms in Wingspan are not directly tied to getting specific cards.

In Birdscaping, without access to tokens or dice, all of that goes into the cards. And that creates a complex web of resource interdependence on top of bird special powers.

And this web of resource interdependence depends on extensive rules on how they work.

And at this point it made me sad because I wanted Birdscaping to work for other bird lovers in my group because I want to introduce so many games to them beyond Wingspan and induct them into the board game cult have them expand their horizons on what board games can do.

Birdscaping was not it.

And the thing of it is… it taught me a very important design lesson, which was it’s totally possible to take mechanics that are simple and all-skill-levels friendly and make them really hard and complex by joining them together into one component type.

And that when it comes to successful “big to mini” games like the deck builder in 18 cards, At the Helm; or even the 18 card Mage Knight inspired Dragons of Etchinstone; a TON of game design and development went into adapting in ways that fit the new format.

And that art is a difficult one. Every such game that succeeds in this is a gem because they have to be to carry off what is in reality a huge and complex idea:

How do I take a big box experience and make it fit in a pocket?

It sounds hard and turns out it’s way harder than it sounds it is.

I don’t actually know what to take out of Birdscaping to make it work. I feel like it needs to be redesigned from the ground up. You need to ask: what is ACTUALLY vital about Wingspan that fits in 18 cards and two pages of rules?

And that’s tough.

That’s my more coherent thoughts on Birdscaping.

I guess my other thought is that maybe if you need to spend two pages explaining why you made these thematic decisions that don’t entirely make sense, that’s not a great sign of approachability. I mean, it is true that you technically don’t need to know that part to play the rules – but without knowing that part I couldn’t make the rest of it begin to hang together in my head.

Such an important lesson on how theme helps and how the wrong approach can cause theme to hinder instead.

the end

Addendum for a specific side of solo: it felt like a second thought for this game. There are several expensive birds whose cost only makes sense if another player exists. This makes the solo a bit dead for me outright.

Okay, now the end 🙂