Board Game Arena

I recently played a game with an unobvious start against a strong opponent and decided to try something I had never done before - to play the game "perfectly". The game is over and I think I've made it, I haven't found a single mistake in my game. But the author always likes his works, so I decided to put the game on the public judgement.

At first, I planned to describe all my decisions in the game, but I realized that it would take too much time, so I will only describe the starting hand.

It was obvious that hummingbirds and purple martin should be kept and longspur is too expensive to keep. Two cards are clearly not enough, since there are no birds in the water and there is nowhere to spend all the starting food . It remains to decide what to keep from the woodpecker and the migratory bird. I note that many of the possible lines suffer because of one thing - the opponent can take the only available worm \ wheat, also with such a hand you want to go for grassland engine, so the woodpecker is a little less valuable than usual.
If you keep only the woodpecker (and the worm/wheat from the food), then there will be nothing to put in the water and there are no water birds in the tray, except for one more migratory bird. But if we take it from the tray, then it would be more profitable to keep the one in our starting hand, since it has more places for eggs and almost guarantees victory in the goal of the first round. Waiting for the second round to reset the tray is also not an option - there is nowhere to spend 8 actions, and you don't want to lose the goal of the round. If you leave all 4 birds and open with a hummingbird\ woodpecker, the opponent can pick up the worm and make the distribution of food from the hummingbird and woodpecker temporarily useless.If you take the food at the beginning and put a hummingbird from it, it turns out less effectively than in the next option. And the last option is to take a migratory bird and wheat / worm from the food. The first action is to either take food or play a colliery, depending on the chance that the opponent has taken the worm.

I will say that at the end of the 3rd round, I accidentally let my opponent take from the feeder, although I planned to start first.It was just a miss click

The most impressive moment was on the 3rd action of the 4th round, when I decided to lose the egg now instead of the last action in order to get a small chance for better bird (2 out of 116), and I did.

If you think that I played incorrectly somewhere, please write about it, preferably with an example of an alternative move and a justification for why it is better than mine. Or you can just ask me why I made such a decision at this moment.

Game itself: https://boardgamearena.com/archive/repl ... s=91503907;

I'll take a look. I already disagree with one play, and I am not past the starting hand yet

(It's quite possible the opening I picked is sub-optimal. This one is not easy to evaluate.)

I'm not sure I'm a fan of how this was played in round 1. You have a migratory bird, and a hummingbird, and yet you did a "gain food" action in which you gained only one food, and then you activated the hummingbird to take a random food that you don't need. Eggs were laid before the Purple Martin was played, which seems suboptimal with a migratory bird and a hummingbird in the starting hand.

I'm not sure the Golden Eagle is a good R1 draw. It doesn't help with any of the goals or bonus cards.

A second grassland activation before the Purple martin is placed there. I'm not sure I understand the plan here. Why is it taking this long to get the Purple Martin in play?

FrankJones wrote: ↑20 January 2026, 01:04 I'll take a look. I already disagree with one play, and I am not past the starting hand yet

(It's quite possible the opening I picked is sub-optimal. This one is not easy to evaluate.)

I'm not sure I'm a fan of how this was played in round 1. You have a migratory bird, and a hummingbird, and yet you did a "gain food" action in which you gained only one food, and then you activated the hummingbird to take a random food that you don't need. Eggs were laid before the Purple Martin was played, which seems suboptimal with a migratory bird and a hummingbird in the starting hand.

I'm not sure the Golden Eagle is a good R1 draw. It doesn't help with any of the goals or bonus cards.

A second grassland activation before the Purple martin is placed there. I'm not sure I understand the plan here. Why is it taking this long to get the Purple Martin in play?

Thank you for your reply. Here are my thoughts on the points you mentioned (with assumption that you will keep same starting hand):

Taking one food when there is a hummingbird doesn't sound good, but if I had played it before, I would have been left without food for a migratory bird and I wouldn't have been able to get it with the help of a hummingbird, since it wasn't in the feeder, I would have had only one good action - to put the egg down and distribute the food But after that, I have nothing to do. I could have played purple martin, but then I would have been left with one useless food and only 4 places for eggs, which is definitely not enough to effectively play a migratory bird.

It's the same with martin - there's no point playing it until migratory bird, because I'll run out of room for eggs and I have nothing to cycle. I would've played it before second grassland activation if i had right food

Even if there is no food in the feeder that I need, with one bird producing food in the field, I have to take whatever food I can

The Golden Eagle, although it does not have many places for eggs, is one of the most effective birds in terms of the number of points that it can give if you do not overpay for it. The ideal card for me would be birds that produce food in the field, preferably not hummingbirds and cheap birds with a larger nest capacity, such as carolina wren, some wetland birds with card draw\cycle powers, birds that allow additional birds to play in the forest. But the probability of such a card is low, so I took the eagle. Moreover, given the number of remaining places for eggs, I probably won't be able to play for a long time without a forest. In games where you have to go to the forest, you want to do it as early as possible, but playing effective birds. After a couple of trips into the forest, it is very easy to play the eagle and optimize the remaining field activations (of which there will be many ) for 6+ points. In addition to all of the above, there is another important reason - the opponent most likely wants to take it himself, as can be seen from his previous actions.

I would not have kept the migratory bird.

You scored 104, so it's difficult to nitpick.

But, only seeing it from your perspective and not your opponent's, I couldn't figure out WHAT your 530 Elo opponent was doing. Ether horrible hand or horrible pays. What waw up with just constantly grabbing cards and having 10_+ cards Why?

I thought for sure a "tuck and lay egg" was coming out, but no.

And, yeah, when your opponent lets you get 19/22 EOR goal points, you're going to win.

What was with the play of Say's Phoebe with only 3 bowel nests. WHAT ??????

I have no clue what the opponent was doing. Zero clue. None.

What would you have kept? Regardless of this particular game, I always try to leave at least one, even a weak, water bird, if there is no good one in the tray.

FrankJones wrote: ↑20 January 2026, 06:14
What was with the play of Say's Phoebe with only 3 bowel nests. WHAT ??????

I didn't watch the game on opponent side, but say's phoebe is a good move allowing to win EOr goal, but my opponent didn't lay enough eggs. I suspect that he knew that he had already lost and didn't really try to optimize his moves. And his cards were not good.

I agree that we want the purple Martin in the grassland, so in this case, keeping the migratory bird makes sense.