Birdwatcher Review: Bad Birding Advice, Pretty Good Game

Recently, the board gaming hobby has seen an explosion of nature-themed games. One of the most popular of those games has been Wingspan. After playing and enjoying Wingspan, seeing another game featuring beautiful artwork and bird theme in Birdwatcher stoked my interest.

However, Birdwatcher is certainly not a Wingspan clone. While it does involve collecting birds, the mechanics are completely different. Birdwatcher is a set-collection game where you are trying to fill up your “photo journal” with sets of birds and “publications” that can provide endgame scoring bonuses based on different objectives.

Setup is simple. Each player takes a tree tableau that doubles as a player aid with action descriptions and end-game scoring rules. The middle of the table has the Academy row that contains the publication cards, the Jungle, and the Clearing. At the start, each player is dealt four bird cards to their tree and three cards are added to the Jungle. The Clearing starts empty but has four spots for cards as the game progresses. That means cards can get buried and potentially never seen again.

Players can take any combination of three actions on their turn with two exceptions. The basic actions are taking a photo of a bird in your tree, performing a bird call which allows the player to take all matching birds of a single type from the Jungle and the Clearing and place them in their tree, and you can run into the Jungle to move the three birds into the Clearing, causing three new bird cards to flip out. A player can also use two actions to either use a Zoom Lens to take a picture of a bird from another player’s tree or to publish a publication.

One of the interesting thematic pieces of Birdwatcher is the consequences of taking a photo. Each time you take a photo, you startle a bird from your tree into the clearing. When you use your Zoom Lens, the bird you startle actually goes to the player whose tree you took a bird from. They also get to draw another bird from the bird deck near the jungle if they have room in their tree. 

The majority of the bird cards in Birdwatcher have point values assigned for how many you add to your photo journal consecutively. This requires you to plan carefully and ensure you have a steady supply of bird cards you aren’t as concerned about getting into your photo journal. The most common birds are not worth as much as some of the rarer birds.

There are of course birds that don’t necessarily follow the basic set-collection parameters. One type of bird, the Black Sicklebill, may not be worth all that many points by itself, but the player who has the most receives a seven-point bonus while the player with the second-highest number gets three extra points. 

A second type of bird that doesn’t follow the normal conventions is the Imposter Nestling. These birds allow you to copy whatever type of bird comes directly before it in your Photo Journal. If you’re struggling to complete a high-scoring set, a well-timed Imposter Nestling can make all the difference. There are also Rare Hybrids which have a high score but do not form sets. 

Some bird cards also have an insect token icon. When you take a photo of that bird, you also take the corresponding insect token. You can keep the tokens you gather for an end-of-game scoring bonus based on the number of unique tokens you have, or you can turn two tokens in to take a bonus action on your turn.

The game continues until one player has filled up their photo journal with the required number of cards for that specific player count. Then play continues until each player has had the same number of turns. When the game ends, players calculate how many points they earned from the various avenues with help from the scoring rules printed on the Tree boards and scoresheet. 

The basic gameplay for Birdwatcher is for two to five players. There is also a solo mode which uses an automated opponent referred to as “the Crew”. The rules for the Crew are drastically different from the player rules making for gameplay that the instructions call challenging. Even at level 1 we found this to be an understatement. The Crew disregards all the rules that the players follow; most notably they are able to place multiple birds in their journal as a single action, and they do not have a limit to how many birds they can have in their tree at one time.

Unless otherwise stated, the product in this article was provided for review purposes.

Jeremy is a freelance writer covering multiple subjects from board games to sports to barbecue. He lives outside of Charlotte, North Carolina with his wife and their three kids. They love to play boards game together, ranging from Qwixx and Azul and Splendor to Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth.