Food & the birdfeeder

Food buys birds and nothing else. It is worth zero points at the end of the game unless a bird power cached it on a card. Everything below follows from that.

The dice, exactly

Five custom dice live in the tower and land in the tray. Each die has six faces: invertebrate, seed, fish, fruit, rodent, and one dual invertebrate/seed face where you take one token of either type, not both.

Food	Faces	Chance on one die
Invertebrate (worm)	2 of 6	33%
Seed	2 of 6	33%
Fish	1 of 6	17%
Fruit	1 of 6	17%
Rodent	1 of 6	17%

That dual face is the whole story. Worms and seeds show up twice as often as anything else, and the deck is built to match: seeds and grubs appear 2.5 to 3 times more often as a bird’s food cost than the other three types. 83 of the 170 core birds, right at half the deck, can be paid for with only invertebrates, seeds, and wilds. Those are your early plays.

The rare foods will not be there

On a freshly refilled feeder of five dice, expect about 1.7 dice offering a worm, 1.7 offering a seed, and only 0.8 of each rare food. The absence math is worse than it feels:

A specific rare food is missing from a fresh feeder about 40% of the time. Two times in five, the fish or rodent or fruit you need simply is not on the table.

Rodent and fish are the real bottlenecks, with fruit just behind. This is why a hand full of gorgeous raptors is a trap: Golden Eagle costs three rodents, and three rodents is not “three food,” it’s three or four forest turns of waiting while he builds.

The 2-for-1 rule unsticks almost everything

When paying a bird’s food cost, you may spend any 2 food tokens as any 1 food token. It applies to the play-a-bird cost only, nothing else.

So a bird needing 1 fish is never worse than 2 worms. Every rare-food bird has a hard price ceiling, and it’s cheap. Beginners sit on a card for three rounds waiting for a fish die that a 40%-absent distribution was never going to reliably supply. Pay the two worms and get the bird working.

The reroll is a lever, not housekeeping

Two separate rules, and the second is the one people leave on the table:

1. If the tray is ever empty, throw all 5 dice back in. Mandatory, immediate.
2. If the dice in the tray all show the same face, and you are about to gain food for any reason, you may first throw all 5 dice back in. Optional. It works even with one die left, and the dual invertebrate/seed face counts as its own distinct face.

Rule 2 fires for any reason you gain food, bird powers included, not just the gain food action.

Look at the tray before you choose your action, not after. A monochrome tray full of food you don’t want is a free reroll, but only if you spot it before you commit the cube.

The flip side matters more at two players than anywhere else: whatever you leave in the tray is what he faces. Taking dice down to a single face hands him a free reroll. Leaving a mixed tray with nothing he needs does not.

Two players means the feeder stagnates

With one opponent the feeder cycles far more slowly than at four, and it cuts both ways:

• More control. Only one person can disturb what you leave, so planning around the tray actually works.
• Less churn. A bad spread persists for turns instead of getting shaken out. Nobody is going to fix it for you.

Net effect: that optional reroll is a much bigger lever at your table than at a crowded one. Learn to reach for it.

The forest is scaffolding

An empty forest gives 1 food per cube, a miserable rate when a typical bird costs two. Two birds gets you to 2 per cube, and that’s the bar to clear. The full mat is in The action economy.

But food scores nothing, so once you can afford the birds you actually want, stop investing there. The forest is right when your hand is full of birds you can’t cast, or when you hold powers that cache food on a card, since cached food is 1 point each and turns the forest into a real scoring row. It’s wrong in round 3 when you already have the food for your remaining plays.

Don’t over-collect

Food in your supply at final scoring is a receipt for wasted actions. Strong players finish with about 1.5 tokens, and the ones who win finish with slightly fewer, because they converted theirs.

1. Take the food-to-egg conversion whenever you lay eggs from an interior grassland slot. Zero points becomes one point. See Eggs.
2. Don’t gain food in round 4 unless you’re spending it that same round or a power caches it.
3. The only other use for leftovers is the tiebreak, which counts unused tokens in your supply, not cached food. Never hoard for it: a guaranteed egg beats a tiebreak you probably won’t need.