Fans of Wingspan will be delighted to discover the fun and colorful birds present in the second expansion for the base game: Oceania. 

These colorful birds all hail bring with them a host of new components to enjoy and strategies to employ! In this review we’ll break it down and give you our thoughts on it all!

This is a review for the second expansion to Wingspan. This is not a standalone game. You MUST have the base game Wingspan to play the Oceania Expansion. To read our full review of Wingspan, click here.

What is new in the Oceania Expansion?

In the Oceania Expansion, the most notable new elements players will be able to enjoy are the 95 new bird cards, 15 yellow eggs, 5 new player mats, 5 new wooden dice, and the new Nectar food tokens. Along with these items comes a handful of new bonus cards, goal tiles, a fresh score pad, and everything you need to play the Automa (solo) version.

What Do We Think?

This is my favorite expansion for the base game yet! While I loved the European expansion – especially some of the new bird powers and strategies that were introduced – I find that Oceania adds just the extra bit more to keep Wingspan feeling fresh and getting to the table. 

With Oceania Comes Flexibility

The new player mats bring in two new abilities that will please fans looking for more flexibility in Wingspan. On the mat is the ability to spend food to either reset the bird feeder or reset the bird tray. We absolutely loved this addition to the game. Often you can find yourself stuck with some poor options in the food tray that no one wants. In a game like Wingspan where all of your turns matter greatly, it’s pretty uncommon for someone to spend one of those turns to take food from the feeder they don’t need. 

Similarly, this can happen with the bird tray as well. Sometimes birds are out that no one wants. Having the option to refresh this bird tray is a great addition to the game. Not only does it allow players to see more birds when the ones out just aren’t working for them, but it keeps the game moving along and players don’t feel stuck between having to take a bird they really don’t need or having to take a different action that really won’t help them. 

It’s a great addition to the game! 

An important thing to note: These new mats do not replace the original mats. Do not discard them! You may still wish to use them in future games, especially if you were to remove the oceania birds and play with new players. You can choose which mats you want to use when playing the game. 

Nectar: The Sweet New Food

Similarly to the mats, the new Nectar food type also brings in a bit of flexibility as well as some fun strategy. Nectar can be used in place for any of the 5 other food types when playing a bird, discarding food for a birds ability, or upgrading an action. (It cannot be used in place where a specific food type is required to activate a bird’s power.)

I loved this because, as mentioned above, sometimes the bird feeder just does’t have the food you need. This led to a frustrating feeling of being stuck. Sometimes you needed to roll a rat to play a bird yet you never rolled one. Nectar helps players out of these difficult situations and makes it more likely that you’ll have the chance to play some of the more higher cost birds. 

However, the catch with the Nectar is that you can’t keep them in your personal food supply at the end of the round. You have to use it during that round or you lose it. 

Because of this, you now have a special “spent nectar” section on your player mat where you’ll place the nectar you spend during the round rather than placing it back into the supply. 

The player who has the most nectar token in each habitat at the end of the game is awarded points. So not only does nectar bring a bit of flexibility for players with their food tokens, it also provides a bit of strategy as well. 

We found that we were always going to the nectar when it was available in the feeder – it’s too valuable to pass up and we sure didn’t want anyone else to get it! Yet making sure we used it during the round was an important part of that equation so that we didn’t waste a turn being greedy for nectar only to lose it because we didn’t plan well enough to use it during the round. 

The nectar points can be a huge help at the end of the game, so they’re definitely something you don’t want to sleep on.

End of Game Bird Powers

Oceania introduces new game end powers to birds. Birds with these powers will have that power in yellow. Wingspan is a lot about being able to plan ahead and build your engine. So these birds add to the overall spirit of the game in a fun way. I found that they helped change how I thought about playing birds because a bird with a yellow power would’t be able to be utilized until the end of the game, so if possible, it was best if I found a way to hold off playing that bird until the last round of the game so I could focus on birds that would provide benefits to me during play. 

It’s little additions like this that help keep a game feeling fresh, fun, and exciting!

Any Complaints? 

Overall, we don’t have very many complaints with this expansion. The main drawback we see is that the amount of content for the game has greatly exceeded the base box’s ability to house it all. This was our main frustration with the European Expansion as well. I am not a fan of carrying around multiple boxes for a game – it’s too easy to forget one when you’re brining it to a friend’s house (this may have happened to us before.)

Currently as it stands, we house all of the player mats (original and Oceania as well as two neoprene mats we purchased,) eggs, food, bird feeder, and rules in the base box while keeping all of the cards in the European expansion box. There is slight box lift but it can’t be helped. It’s not ideal, but it works. 

Knowing that there will most likely be future expansions, this will become an increasing problem. Stonemaier Games is aware of this and has mentioned that a big box to house the game is in the works so help could be on the way. Fingers crossed they call it The Aviary. 

Summary

When it comes to expansions, we aren’t always the first to run out and get them. If we’re happy with the base game, we keep it that way. More often than not, I find expansions to just add more stuff but not really bring anything valuable to the play experience. It either changes it too much making it feel like a different game, or it just increases the play time by making players to more and more things. 

That is not the case with the Oceania Expansion.

If you are a fan of Wingspan, we highly recommend checking out the Oceania expansion. Not only does it provide a huge supply of new, gorgeously illustrated birds to enjoy playing with but it also brings new and exciting strategies to explore. 

While this is the second expansion for Wingspan, there is no reason that you couldn’t start with this one if you only have the base game. If you already have the European expansion, these cards will integrate beautifully with your current set up. As always, you are free to customize as much or as little as you’d like; shuffle all the cards together or mix up whatever combination of expansion to base game cards as you’d like. The world of Wingspan is yours to explore!

Pick up a copy of the Oceania Expansion here.
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A special thank you to Stonemaier Games for sending us a copy of Oceania for review. As always, our thoughts and opinions are our own. 

Game Info:
Title: Wingspan Oceania Expansion
Designer: Elizabeth Hargrave
Artists: Natalia Rojas, Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, Beth Sobel
Publisher: Stonemaier Games

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