Birdsong

Birdsong is a Roll-and-Write game that immerses you into a role of a birder in a specific location spending a week spotting, listening to, writing about, and photographing birds unique to that area.

THEME

Travel to Glacier Bay, Alaska in search of Puffins.

Or head down to Big Bend, Texas to snap a prize photo of a Painted Bunting.

Maybe you just want to take your equipment and a taxi down to Central Park to listen to starlings as they return, heralding a new season.

You can also choose to search for ibis and spoonbills in Florida's Everglades.

Two of the international birding locations are the Galapagos Islands and New Zealand.

Each location sheet is different and has birds native to the area. Each individual bird is a scientific illustration, beautifully painted -- The game sheets themselves can even double as birding checklists for the specific locations.

MECHANICS

Birdsong has four different play modes:

Competitive

Solitaire

Cooperative

Team v Team

In competitive play, players colored draft dice one at a time to allocate to three different areas of their unique player board (bird spotting, preparation, and research). Some areas require a specific color. Others require a number, and some might just require any die of any color. In this mode it's important to see what dice are beneficial to your opponents as well as to yourself. After each player has allocated 18 dice, the game ends and points are tallied from the different sections to determine the winner.

In solitaire play, the player allocates a die and then the next most valuable die disappears. Their task is to gather as many points as possible in 6 3-die rounds.

In cooperative play, everybody is working together to score as many points as possible for the lowest scoring player. In this mode, players will collaborate and give up dice to other players to keep the scoring gap small.

Team v Team play is a variant of cooperative with the exception the players can give/trade dice with their teammates in order to keep the gap small. Everybody on the player with the lowest score at the end of the game loses.

-description from designer