I stopped by Lucky Duck Games to check out their Paper App Dungeon, of which I’d heard good things. It has a reprint soon. I stuck around to look at Nestlings, a very pretty game of trying to feed your baby birds, filling in a little pie flower as you feed. Quartz: The Dice Game is a roll three times and take the actions shown to mine/steal/give away your gems. Captain Obvious is a party game where you try to make a sentence so obvious that you could fill in missing words. Finally, Tranquility: The Ascent is a stand-alone sequel where you cooperatively play square cards in a diamond orientation trying to build them up into a 9 layer mountain shape before you run out of cards. The catch lies in the fact that you often have to discard cards in order to play one.
Nestlings
Nestlings is a dice placement, resource drafting game where players are birds trying to gather resources over four different biomes. Each side of the board is its own biome, complete with stacks of colored discs (matching the biome) displaying various types of food. Players are trying to feed their nestlings but each nestling can only be fed by specific types of food – bugs, worms, seeds, et… During play, players roll their biome dice and then take turns placing them onto one of the four biomes on the board. Once all dice have been placed, the biomes are resolved. The player with the most dice at a location (ties broken by who got there first) gets to take one of the food disc there AND they get to discard one – possibly getting rid of something the next person wants. If they are locked out of what they really want, a player can put dice into the center area which allows them to pick food up from anywhere on the board – but only after everyone else has gone. When a bird is fed, a player will get a little pie “wedge” to add to their flower-looking wedge-tracker. Filling up a complete section of your tracker will grant a bonus while filling up the entire tracker awards 12 points at the end of the game. Meanwhile, during the game there are some shared goals. The first player to reach them scores points. Later players can also score that goal but for fewer points. After four rounds, the game ends. Players also score points for sets of resources gathered and points based on the progression of their pie pieces. Players are also assigned a secret nest goal for more points, which is revealed at the end of the game.
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