The setup choice

You are dealt 5 bird cards, 5 food (one of each type), and 2 bonus cards. You keep five things total, and every bird you keep costs you one food. So your options are 5 birds and 0 food, 4 and 1, 3 and 2, 2 and 3, 1 and 4, or 0 and 5.

Most players spend fifteen seconds on a decision that shapes the next 26 turns. Spend two minutes.

The split

Every source that discusses this agrees on one thing first: never keep five birds. Five birds and no food is five cards you cannot play on turn one.

• Standard keep: 2 birds + 3 food. Two cheap birds with useful brown powers, and the food to actually put them on the mat.
• Weak hand: 1 bird + 4 food. If nothing in the hand is cheap or useful, keep the one playable bird and the food. Better birds come from drawing.
• 3 or 4 birds only when they are genuinely cheap, meaning one food or zero, and ideally including a one-cost forest bird that starts producing food immediately.
• The draw gambit, if you like variance: one card-drawing bird and four food. Play the drawer turn 1, then dig with the wetland action for a cheap food producer.

Keep birds you can actually feed

You keep one of each food type, never two of the same, so a bird costing two fish cannot be paid from your starting food at all.

Worms and seeds are on 33% of die faces each. Fruit, rodent and fish are 17% each, and on a freshly filled feeder of five dice there is roughly a 40% chance a specific rare food is simply absent. Counterweight: 83 of the 170 core birds, 49% of the deck, can be paid using only worms, seeds and wilds. Those are the ones to keep.

The escape hatch applies only when paying a bird’s food cost: any 2 food tokens count as 1 food of any type. A bird needing 1 fish is never worse than 2 worms. What it is not is a licence to keep a 3-rodent bird and hope.

Keep the bird you can play on turn 1, not the bird you love. A gorgeous 8-point card you cast in round 3 is worse than a boring 1-food card you cast immediately.

The three checks before you commit

Do all three while the cards are still in your hand. All three are free.

1. Look at the tray. Three birds sit face up on the table. As first player you get first refusal on them, which is effectively a 60% increase in your card pool. Do not discard a decent bird from hand while ignoring a better one lying face up. If you are going second, assume the obvious face-up bird will be gone and plan the keep around that.

2. Look at the birdfeeder. Which dice are showing right now decides whether your keeper is castable on turn 1 or four turns from now. This is the check almost nobody runs.

3. Read both bonus cards and all four round goals. All face up, all free, and they break every close decision for the next 26 turns. Count how many goals point at one habitat or nest type, and how many need eggs. Three or four egg-flavoured goals and you already know your engine is the grassland. Then choose your bonus card last, so you are picking against a hand you have already decided to keep. Bonus cards covers which one to take.

The side of the goal board

The one board-level choice in the base game, and it happens here. Green is the default and the competitive side. Blue removes the competition and is the honest handicap if you want a closer game. The counter-intuitive part, worth reading before you assume blue is the gentle option, is on Round goals.

First player

The token alternates every round, so you each lead twice and neither seat is a large edge. Two things follow at setup:

• Going second means the best face-up bird is probably gone before your first turn. Do not build the keep around it.
• Whoever starts round 1 takes the final action of the game, because the token alternates them into second seat in round 4. The endgame explains what to do with it.

Before you flip your first cube

• Both bonus cards read
• All four round goals read, especially round 4
• Tray checked, feeder checked
• Two birds you can cast in the next two turns, three food
• A first turn already chosen

Now go play the first turns.