Advert: We were loaned a prototype copy via the UK Board Game Review Circle in exchange for a review. All opinions are ours and our reviews are always honest. Components and gameplay may change.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s actually a bird in a fancy hat! Whole flocks of them in fact. Time to twitch Fetching feathers!

👥 2 to 4 players
⌛ 25 minutes 
🧠 10+ years

(You may ask, why are they wearing hats? Where did they get their tiny hats from? A tiny hattery? But it’s probably best not to ask, because this review will not answer.)

Game overview:

In Fetching Feathers, players collect location and bird cards in pick-and-pass fashion (think Sushi Go!) to build sanctuaries full of fancy point-scoring flocks.

Each round has 4 phases: draft cards, place cards, score, and change the season. To start, everyone simultaneously picks 1 card from their hand (a mix of mainly birds with a few locations) and puts it face down in front of them, and passes the rest of their hand to the next player. Then they pick 1 card from their new hand, and pass the rest to the next player…and so on until all the cards have been picked.

Now it’s time to set up your sanctuaries by placing and arranging your cards (face-up) in front of you. Each location card shows what food is available at that location, and they can either be placed as new locations or tucked behind a current location card to add more food types to that location. Birds can be placed either side of a location, forming two separate flocks, but the birds are persnickety:

• they can only be placed at a location that meets their food requirement (some are trickier to satisfy than others)
• a flock can only contain 1 specific type of bird (e.g. all puffins), and
• each flock has a maximum size limit (denoted on the bird card).

Once everyone is happy with their placements, it’s time to score up! Each bird is worth a certain number of feathers (points). And many give you bonus points if you meet its bonus requirement, e.g. vultures give you bonus points if they are in a flock of 3, kingfishers give bonus points if the location has extra fish, or hummingbirds give bonus points if they share a location with puffins.

The game continues over 3 rounds, but there is a twist! At the end of the first 2 rounds, the season flips – summer becomes winter, winter becomes summer. Each location card is rotated to show the new season, and any tucked location cards stay on the season side that they were placed. While you don’t lose the current birds in your locations, when it comes to the next placement phase you’ll likely have a lot of flocks flitting around as you try to keep them happy – as well as trying to find space for the new birds you’ve drafted that round!

If there’s ever a point where you’ve placed all you can and still have birds without locations, they get passed to the next player who has a chance to home them (if they can without moving their current flocks).

At the end of 3 rounds, the player with the highest score wins!

Our first impressions

• These are the prettiest, fanciest birbs I’ve ever seen! The gorgeous and colourful designs make it a pleasure to have out on the table (the locations are a bit meh in comparison though!).

• I was surprised by how much this game burned my brain! I was expecting it to be light, and it sort of is (especially in picking up how to play). But there’s a lot of puzzling to do: pick the best birds, get the right location resources, and place them all in the most optimum way to trigger the most bonuses and get the most points. All while keeping in mind what the changing season will bring. And because you keep the birds from each round, more and more birds accumulate who you want to keep happy if you want to keep your point! By the third round, my brain was melting! SO MANY BIRDS!

• Fetching Feathers takes the Zuuli blueprint and makes it better (this is my opinion based on my one play of Zuuli where I lost terribly haha). One of the improvements is dealing out the locations separately to the birds so you always start with some in hand. This means everyone is guaranteed a chance to draft more locations if they choose (in Zuuli there is one deck of locations and animals, so there is a possibility you won’t see a location in a round). Plus, every bird having a bonus ability/score and the changing seasons add an extra layer of complexity. So I personally prefer Fetching Feathers

• While the game is portable, it’s an absolute hog! There’s no way it would fit on a table in our local coffee shops, so it’s not really a game we’d take out and about.

Final thoughts:

Light as a feather but packing a puzzly punch, Fetching Feathers is a gem of a card game that’s simple to pick up but really scratches the brain – in a good way! If you like Zuuli (or Moving Wilds), you’ll enjoy this step up in both gameplay and aesthetic.

P.S. I have to mention that birds in hats is a well loved trend, with dedicated pages and videos showing off our fancy feathered friends. Here’s the Reddit r/birdswithhats for your enjoyment!