Wingspan: Oceania Expansion Review - with Tom Vasel

[Music] [Music] and now it's time for another dice tower review with tom vassell hey everybody i'm tom vassell wingspan one of the most popular games come out in 2019 still very very much played i'm sure if you're watching this you enjoy the game otherwise why would you watch a game about its second expansion this expansion is bigger than the first one uh a longer box that's because it adds new boards to the game it adds new dice to the game it adds new stuff it's not nearly as much as you might think i mean it's pretty easy to integrate but before we get into that i'm just excited about the fact that it's oceana i think oceana has really cool birds i was excited about this one a lot just because i want to see all the new birds in this expansion the north american birds are cool but i see most of them in real life uh the european birds they're neat i guess but man oceana that's really cool so that's probably the thing i was most excited about this set but it also adds stuff let me show you okay so the first thing that this expansion changes is it changes the boards it includes five new boards for players and you say well what has changed besides the look of it so you'll notice here on the bottom that the actually the whole thing has changed so now when you take a food on the top one you can also turn in a card for more food and so this increases faster and also adds in a spot where you can change in any food to re-roll the dice in the middle spot you'll notice there's also some changes here instead of getting two eggs in the first one you get one egg and then you can discard a card or a food to get an egg and that changes as time goes by and then on the bottom one here you get the cards and you can turn in eggs or wild nectar food to get cards so there's some changes there you're also noticing over here some game and scoring so that has to do with the new food nectar so nectar is essentially a wild food token now sometimes a bird like this one here requires nectar exactly although you could pay two nectar for this bird instead of the fruit you could pay two nectar to put this bird out and there's gonna be cards like for example this activation card here for this bird it says if the player to your left has a nectar and a personal supply gain and nectar from the general supply so there's things like that and in fact as a side note there's a lot of special abilities that have to do with what other people are doing there are new dice included that will be giving you this nectar so you'll see that it's on two of the sides of the dice now so nectar or wheat or nectar and fruit and you might be saying why would i ever take the thing that's not wild because at the end of a round you lose all your nectar that you have so you need to spend it in the round you get it when you do spend nectar to put out birds or pay other costs regarding birds you're going to instead of putting it in the supply you're going to be placing it on the row that you spent it in and at the end of the game that's what these bonuses are for whoever spent the most gets five points and then two points for second place so that's what nectar does there's also yellow eggs because hey that's a color that's not in the game yet it doesn't mean anything they're just more eggs this is all the birds in the game thus far but hey why not add more to that pile you're never going to go through all the birds but there is a lot of birds added to this particular expansion as you can see some of them require nectar costs but there's more there are new abilities yellow abilities on birds now and these happen at the end of the game but they're not points they're just things you do which are essentially points like for example here lay one egg on every bird in the water including this one for every two eggs in your water lay one egg on this bird k ship to five food from your supply and this bird so these are things that you can do they only activate at the end of the game and there's quite a few of them in this although realize that if you mix these birds with the birds from the original wingspan you will come across them much less often but i did test the game out with just the birds from oceana and that seemed i mean if you want to see them more often you'll see them there there are a lot of cards the new bird cards that affect other players i mean look at this one when you activate this take a card from your hand tuck a card and if you do everyone else gets a nectar here choose another player you both get a feather from the supply reset the bird feeder and get a rodent if there is one you can give it to another player if you do you put three eggs in this bird here gain all the feathers that are in the bird feeder keep half and then choose how to distribute the remainder among the other players choose another player they get an egg you get two cards choose another player you both draw a card from the deck so if you wanted more player interaction this is definitely here i struggled a little bit with these because it was always like well which player am i going to help and i kind of just would try to pick the player who i thought was in last place and you'll probably find yourself doing that unless they have a bird who can help me maybe we can make some sort of deal and there are more birds and more birds and more birds now i think the oceana birds are really beautiful overall you know i said that that was something i was excited about like earlier i showed you the emu which is neat and a penguin like when this one shows up uh people are going to want to get that one just because it's a penguin but you know i think birds are pretty in general but the oceania birds may be the prettiest ones i mean look at these they're gorgeous and of course they have special abilities that's the other thing too so you know keep that in mind i'm not just showing you to show how pretty the birds are but it doesn't hurt i don't know why those birds suddenly flipped upside down there's also new bonus cards new bonus tiles a new score pad by the way this is one of my favorite new bonus styles beaks pointing left or beaks pointing right and you might say well what if the bird's kind of looking straight on they actually mentioned that in the rule book it mentions each one but here we got cubes on play a bird or birds that are worth or less than three feathers bigger than three feathers i like that sort of thing you know having more of these in fact there's even one that says no goal although we usually would just reshuffle that back in and draw another one because we like having goals but you know there's just more of this stuff and then of course there is a full rule book that not only explains how to play the game but also tells you about every bird and their powers like always [Music] component wise it's nice to have the new eggs the everything else is great the artwork's great on the things it is a little weird if you like me and have upgraded your game then to have nectar along with your upgraded food pieces although most of these companies that make the upgraded food pieces are probably rushing along you have these new dice so kind of you need to keep both sets of dice i mean these replace the original knives i guess you could keep these if you're playing without nectar and just ignore nectar when you roll them but i do want to emphasize that if you are using the nectar i mean if you're using these new birds you got to throw nectar in because several of the new birds refer to nectar so you can't ignore nectar and so that brings us to the new board now the new board is definitely a more gamery board there's more actions and possibilities on it and people who love wingspan and our heavier gamers are going to love the new board and the actions it takes i will say that i am not in love with the look of the new board don't get me wrong that's a very pretty picture that's easy to put you know i put up on my wall or something but it's i think a little harder to read the stuff and it's a real strong contrast to this very cheerful light board from the original one this is a minor quibble i'm just saying here it's really easy to see all the symbols on the new board i found it slightly more difficult this is a very slight problem also uh you're not going to get this stuff in the original box it's just not going to happen so don't even think about it [Music] now i want to start out at the beginning by saying i like this expansion because i'm not going to be overwhelmingly positive but i don't want people at the end to be like it was a negative review it's not it's fun i'll gladly play with this expansion but there's a couple things first of all and this is not a a negative thing but this is just a thing i attempted to teach some new people this the wingspan with this expansion thrown in that doesn't work very well this is just a lit i felt like it was a little too much to throw people in with that extra stuff at it it's a lot easier to teach people wingspan and then add in the ocean expansion to that end i think gamers are going to appreciate this expansion more than other people i love the new birds i love the new goals and the new secret mission cards i like you know the new yellow abilities at the end of the game i think they're fantastic all that is super fun where i'm kind of dragging my feet a bit and i'm not as keen on is the nectar now if you watch me when i do different reviews of games i tend to want my games to be easier rather than to be more difficult this makes it easier everyone even starts with a nectar at the beginning of the game but the fact that you can grab wild is a pretty big incentive you know why would you not grab wild you can say well your food goes away between rounds yeah but at the beginning of a round when you know you're gonna have several actions and you'll be able to put a bird out you grab the wild especially since it counts for those area majorities now maybe they added those area majorities in because the game wasn't balanced i don't know enough about the balancing of the game to be able to talk on that regard i just tell you that i that's the one thing about this expansion i did not like it just felt like this extra thing thrown in there like whenever you spend nectar then it's pot on the board and whoever has the most at the end of the game gets extra points like okay i'm suddenly playing a weird area control game i just thought that was weird and i could have that could have been gone for all i care the nectar felt a little too easy almost like i can now i can build these birds that require three fruit that's pretty hard oh well whatever now i can just use wild nectar to get to that amount so i don't know i don't know that i like that direction of the game but i like everything else but like i said you got to play with everything or nothing you know you can't play with just the you can't ignore the nectar you can't ignore those end game area majority bonuses i don't think you can anyway and i still like it i like the extra eggs i like the extra birds i mean i could add a gazillion birds a wingspan and always be happy just give me more birds that's what i want the next expansion recall just give me more birds uh i don't know that they need to keep adding new things all the time the ratios i'm assuming are the same i didn't count the cards but they've done a pretty good job of that in the past i went online and saw people say this made the game more gamery and the new board definitely does that there's more decisions and i think the new board is fine with all the different things it allows you to do and it definitely maybe there's one of them that you run up to the end on uh more than the other again i'm not like a wingspan super expert player i've played it a lot but i just play and the way the birds come up the way it is you know i just work with them but maybe they needed to fix that board a little bit i don't know that that was necessary but it does give more options and is fun uh but i can also play in the original board doesn't matter to me this is not an expansion i'm going to play with all the time i will european expansion i just threw in who cares it's just all mixed in it doesn't matter this is one that you got to keep separate because sometimes you want to play with the nectar and sometimes maybe not the yellow eggs i can use those you know why not the more colors the merrier but anyway that's what's in here like i said please don't leave this thinking i didn't like it because i did i don't know that i liked it as much as my initial throw at playing the game i mean wingspan is a game i love it's fantastic this expansion is good because it adds more things which i like but the nectar felt like it kind of changed the tenor of the game to something that wasn't as exciting as the original one but i'll still play it and still enjoy it so that's my review i'm tom vassell we'll see you next time dice tower judgment approved [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 46,272

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10

Id: y8sHqNApuOg

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 03 2021