Visiting Birds Nests, and Explore the River

Back to the Visiting Bird Nests game.  The other games in those Odhams Press books were mostly roll-and-move or pick-a-card-and-move games but this one looked like it was a little more crafty.  First, it needs a score sheet with the 10 different birds you're trying to collect eggs from.  So I put the names on blank sheets.  I want to do a neat PDF design with the pictures of the birds in the boxes.  

We quickly saw that the rules in the little available space were not really complete enough to play a round.  First off, only 8 of the bird circles actually said they gave you eggs, not ten.  But, assuming the Cuckoo gives an egg, the Moorhen gives you an egg and lets you "retain" it, and you get to keep the Kestrel egg (which the circle doesn't list but the paragraph rules do include), that gives 10 different birds with eggs. 

 

Skimming the rules, it sounds like there are no choices at all at first, just draw cards and give or take eggs.  But since you draw two cards each turn -- unless you have the rat showing which limits you to one card -- the main choice is which order to play the cards in.  Let the Kestrel (Ace) take back a heap of eggs THEN play your other card to get some eggs back, that makes sense.  The funniest choice was when I drew the Rat AND the Owl at the same time.  Nobody in their right mind would play the Owl first and keep the darn Rat; you would naturally play the Rat, steal an egg, and use the Owl to remove the Rat, done.

An interesting loophole in the way the rules are worded: when the Rat steals one egg, it feels like you should be stealing from another player, not the Rat stealing from you and giving it back to the birds.  Same with the Cuckoo "take all eggs from any one nest" -- the fun way is to take them from another player, an important choice; odds are they have some eggs you need to complete your own collection.  

One annoyance was that the bird circles were not given in numerical order so you spend each turn looking for the matching numbers for the umpteenth time, which was maybe meant to simulate bird watching, but ended up being eye strain.

There was no clear definition of when a "round" is over.  The rules say to draw cards, give/take eggs, and put the card at the bottom of the deck, but "the round ends after all the cards from a deck have been drawn", but if you put them back at the bottom, the deck can never be drawn down to nothing.  We put the used cards into two discard piles, so they didn't cross-contaminate each other.  

Anyway, this set of rule fixes and stealing eggs from each other made for an enjoyable time, although it was a bit chaotic.  We used actual chips for the eggs, but after a while it felt like there should be a maximum of 5 eggs in any nest of any player's scorecard, since we were starting to run out.

We later ran through the Explore the River game from the same book, which is just drawing cards and trying to get from Ace to King using the picture as the scoreboard.  I did look at both of these in a post from January, but that was just a solo look and idea of how to improve the play.  

Again, there were obvious downsides as written.  First, the list of cards with special effects was a random suit for each number, which was just a bore to look up.  My version: spades have the special effects.  Change all the effect cards to spades, so you only have to check the list if you draw spades. 

I figured it would still feel pretty silly just drawing cards until we each get the number we need, so I added 4 "action cards" per player, which could have been pennies as easily.  I figured it would be fun to burn an action card to ignore a negative effect, or to draw an extra card.  Then, if you draw the card of the space you're already on, you get a new action card to spend.  

It was still pretty simple, but it was pretty funny picking up little stones for each "lose a turn", but there were times when both players had multiple lost turns and we would just take turns throwing the lose-a-turn stones back into the heap until somebody got to move again.  Actually, it was the Dungeon game that gave me the idea of having actual tokens for losing a turn.  Though we routinely forgot we had lost turns in front of us, which could also get funny.

Most of these no-decision games can be improved by quick little hacks like these.