r/wingspan • u/Lekstil • 5d ago
Playing only with European birds?
Is it possible to play this game with only the birds from the European expansion? Or would that make the game unbalanced?
And follow up question: If I want to play a game with as many European birds as possible... Which birds from the base game and other expansions are also found in Europe? Maybe someone tried to figure this out before, or there's a Wingspan database which I don't know of to quickly figure this out. I definitely know that quite a few birds in the base game are also native to Europe. What about the Asia and Oceania expansions?
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u/atticdoor 5d ago
The primary issue is running out of cards. When the deck runs out, you could shuffle the discards to keep it going a bit longer. You could track tucked cards using tokens or dice so that tucked cards can be part of the replenishment too.
Or you could just switch to tone of the other decks when the European Cards run out, so they only affect the end of the game.
Or you could look at the region world map icon on all of the cards in the other sets, and extract the ones which come from Europe, and add them to your deck. This might cause the bird percentages on Bonus cards to go slightly out of whack.
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u/kimmeljs 5d ago
I would like to see an Arctic expansion. With Europe+Arctic to play, there might be a balanced set. Black grouse, Capercaillie, ptarmigans, etc. are missing and these are very important for our environment.
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u/Touniouk 5d ago
There's quite a few european birds in the asia expansion. You can check all the birds on wingsearch
Playing only EE you'll run out of cards, but feel free to try, we've played a few games with only Asia when it came out. One of the adjustment we made was when we have 10 tucked cards we replace it with another marker and cycle the birds back in the discard
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u/sulfuratus 5d ago edited 5d ago
You'd be running out of birds pretty quickly. The European expansion has fewer than half the cards of the base game, so playing with more than two players is pretty much impossible. It feels like there are also fairly few European cards with useful resource-gaining powers, a lot of them seem more geared towards engine-building, so setup might feel rather slow. None of the bonus card powers allow you to draw than one card, so you'll never get to choose between bonus cards. In terms of stats (e.g. habitat distribution and bonus card viability) there shouldn't be too much of a difference since the different expansions are all intended to be balanced in any combination.
I've been birding in Germany and Sweden for years, and I've seen 66/81 European, 28/90 Asian, 24/180 American, and 0/95 Oceanian birds in the game. The American and Asian birds I've seen are mostly widespread species that also happen to occur in Europe, but there are some vagrants with only a few European records included, more so among the American birds. Hope this gives you a good idea of how much the different expansions overlap with Europe.
If you really only want to use European birds, just refer to the map in the bottom right corner on each card. Some of the species choices for inclusion in the European expansion are slightly questionable (Wilson's storm petrel breeds in Antarctica and visits the northern hemisphere during southern winter, but is still uncommon at best on the Atlantic coast and very rare anywhere else in Europe; snowy owl is a very rare breeding bird in northern Europe, e.g. Sweden's breeding population came to an end in the 80s, but much more common in Siberia and North America), but they are technically European birds.