Wingspan: Oceania Expansion DLC Review

06.03.2024 - 14:29 / boardgamequest.com

If the European Expansion wasn’t enough for you and you’re looking to enhance your Wingspan digital experience further, Oceania adds 95 bird cards, 5 bonus cards, 4 goal tiles, new player mats, and a new nectar food type.

Wingspan: Oceania Expansion is a DLC for the digital adaptation of Wingspan and is a tableau-building game for 1 to 5 players that takes about 60 minutes to play. The best experience is with 4 players for more opportunities to trigger card powers without adding much to overall time investment.

The Oceania Expansion does not change the general structure of gameplay, though it does add one additional step to discard any unused nectar and a new player mat action called Reset. Nectar can be used during the game as a wild food and at game end, the player who has spent the most nectar tokens in each habitat receives 5 points with second place receiving 2 points or splitting points between tied players. Reset is found in the forest and wetland rows, allowing a player to discard one food to reset the birdfeeder or reset the bird tray, respectively. Other than those two additions, there are still four rounds with end-of-round scoring opportunities, and a diminishing number of actions every round to gain food, lay eggs, draw cards or play birds.

As the name suggests, birds from this expansion can be found in Oceania and feature a variety of new abilities, like game end powers, flightless birds, adjacency, and nectar-specific activations. For example, the Red-Winged Parrot, when activated, allows the player to give 1 nectar from their supply to another player. If they do, the player can lay 2 eggs on the parrot or gain 2 food dice from the birdfeeder.

The most exciting refresh to gameplay for me is the addition of Reset actions on the new player mats because it resolves my two biggest pain points in Wingspan. The ability to move the gameplay along in your favor instead of waiting for other players to make progress is a welcome change. The addition of this action is also useful for the new bonus cards which require you to seek out very specific bird cards by the end of the game, ranging from set collections to organizing wingspan values.

Bird cards with When activated “player to your right/left” powers encourage you to pay attention to other player’s tableaus, if that wasn’t something you normally did in your strategy with base Wingspan or European expansion. This gives you a natural reason to incorporate it into your Oceania strategy and serves as a reminder to check in regularly. There are also other direction-based bird cards, such as those that look at orthogonally-adjacent birds and consequently require the player to plan ahead in other habitats.

Game end powers were useful for some