Wingspan: Oceania Expansion

My reviews of all the content-adding Wingspan expansions are basically the same: if you have played and enjoyed the base game experience and want a wider pool of birds, bonus cards, and abilities and don't mind paying what amounts to the price of another base game copy, you should get the expansions. Specifically to Oceania, I had mixed feelings about the changes to the board and addition of nectar as a sixth food resource. I enjoyed the non-expansion strategy at the beginning of the game of deciding to keep a powerful but expensive three-food bird. Because of the limited resources you start with, keeping a bird like that (especially one that had two of a specific type of food cost) ended up slowing down your ramp-up phase in a way that made the cheapest birds more valuable because they were the only ways to get your engines started. Now, with a wildcard food type and ways to get around the need to have at least one bird in every row, a three cost bird - and thus engines generally - are a lot easier to get off the ground. With that said, I have been playing with the new alternate board and the side game of trying to play enough nectar to get the 15 bonus points at the end of the game and have no desire to go back. The additions here outweigh the strategic thinking I had at the beginning of the game enough where I don't feel like I'm missing out on it any more. One final thing to note for all the expansions: if you like playing the automatic online multiplayer, you cannot go back once you've purchased an expansion. It locks you to playing with all the expansions you have purchased, which means it becomes impossible to play with just the base game or a specific expansion, which is a disappointment. I would love to be able to disable my expansions to have the option of going back and playing some games without all the added new mechanics.

Overall Oceania is very good. I hope the developers come out with an Africa expansion too, with ostrich, white-necked raven, lovebirds, African penquin, etc.