Designed by: Yuo
In Birdie Fight (also published as Songbirds) is a card game where whichever card you don’t play scores you points.
Play is rather simple. A deck of numbered bird cards are dealt out to players who then lay out, turn by turn and card by card, their cards into a 5×5 grid on the table. At the end of each column and row is a randomly-dealt berry that represents points. When the grid is complete, the bird type that scores most in each column/row claims the berry, with any tied birds cancelling each other out. You are always left with a single card in your hand, and you gain whatever points the matching-coloured bird claimed. (In a four-player game, the central card in the grid is always the evil crow, who devalues the highest-scoring cards in the same row and column)
After two rounds, the player with the most points is the winner.
I think I played this only once or twice before trading it away. If I remember rightly (sorry, it's been a while), it seemed almost random; almost but not quite. I think we played with four, and it's likely that lower player counts would give the players more ability to skew things in their favour. I liked the visual style of it though, and the simple set-up and structure of play.
A fair bit. Although you can never be certain what players are going for (and tactics can change) you can certainly get a sense of it and play accordingly by 'spoiling the pot'
Moderate. Although the rules are simple, the decision-making is not.
Random playing of cards is highly unlikely to win you this game. It's a balance of furthering your own cause whilst hampering what you perceive to be others' plans. And be able to change tactics doesn't hurt either.
It can be slow-going with four, and perhaps best as a 2-player game. Not exactly a frolicsome game, but rather neat and for the right players, potentially very moreish.
1-4
Players
8+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
A game whose theme could have been about anything (or nothing) as the birds are entirely irrelevant. Toasters, buildings, various interpretations of a historically contentious geographic boundary - it wouldn't matter, as the only thing that's relevant here is the numbers. The cards do look nice though, and the play is rather deft: one very clever aspect of Birdie Fight is that there's no such thing as a bad hand. But it's a game that suits two players best; or three at a push, because the more players there are, the less agency you have and as a result the game is less engaging. So: a song for two, a tweet for three, but a bird bumping into a patio door with four.