People from "Antarctica"

[Meeplelowda]

Wow.

Nice analysis (truly, I really enjoyed reading that, just to see a strong player's take on a Wingspan game).

Agreed. It is also frustrating and sad when a cheating allegation is actually an "I got outplayed" story.

[FrankJones]

I'm not even sure it was a loss. BarnardsStar and I both reviewed it from each player's perspective, and our scorecards don't quite match. One of us has it as a tie, the other as a loss by 2 points.

The replay is difficult to view because Wingspan replays are glitchy for some games, and the concession (literally as the game was about to end and neither player had a move left) adds to the mess of the replay.

[Meeplelowda]

I'm not even sure it was a loss.

Regardless of how that game ended, the cheating allegations were based on how games began, which was with good play by one person and poor play by the other as discussed above.

To be clear, it doesn't excuse the other player for acting like a jerk or trying to circumvent a ban (it that's what was going on). Those are separate issues.

[tbhp]

That's like asking "why do small countries like Jamaica win so often at the Olympics?"

Maybe people from Antarctica are just really good at board games. After all, they have to find a way to spend all that time.

[FrankJones]

Also,

So what if the opponent wins all 4 end-round goals? Find other ways to gain points. Maybe the opponent is playing sub-optimal cads or making sub-optimal moves just to win the E-O-R goals.

Here is a game in which I lost the End-round goals by 3. So, let's do worst case scenario:

https://boardgamearena.com/9/wingspan?table=820672423

Swap the cubes for round 2 end round goal, and move my R2 cube from a tie to a loss. That means instead of being minus 3 on the EOR goals, I would be minus 12. So what. I still win by 3.

1) Have a plan.
2) Get 2 birds in the forest.
3) Try to do the wetland activation as infrequently as possible, because without Oceania, we cannot easily convert extra junk cards into points.
4) When choosing what to discard for various reason, always hold onto a potentially big card. By holding the star nest 7-point forest bird, I had a 10-point play ready. On I could play by gaining cherries for free that help me but didn't appear to pose any risk giving to my opponent (Since my opponent didn't have an odd number of birds in the grassland to convert the extra cherries into eggs by using the board ability).

Notice, I would have tied the R1 EOR goal by playing the star nest tuck-draw bird - but I didn't have a bird I wanted to discard for a tuck-draw, and I preferred to get the cherries.

Don't throw away big points later by fighting over 3 points early.