I was extremely excited to grab this game upon release as my son just got a Switch, so I was eagerly awaiting the moment to download it. Being extremely familiar with the board game I have played it dozens and dozens of times, possibly closer to 50 games. Two expansions have been released for the board game so far; the Europe expansion and the Oceania expansion; which includes birds from Australia (my home country). The Switch doesn't cover these two expansions yet. I have played five games on the Switch so far and knew what I wanted to include in this review from the completions of game #2. The last three games i played really cemented mechanic knowledge. In the first game, you really are hit with difficult controls. Although you may be familiar with the board game and I know it inside out, there were some bizarre implementations of game mechanics. By the end of the first game, I was finally getting confident with some of the finer UI mechanics on the Switch; an example being a really swift way to check a particular habitat for each of you opponents, in a very easy way. In the last few turns I was definitely confident to play vs strangers on line (my first game was with a friend who introduced me to the board game and even he was struggling with some of the controls. If you can get over the hurdle of your mindset going with "play a bird; pick a habitat" and instead go with "pick a HABITAT; play a bird" you will do so much better in the long run. One really cool feature that I noticed is that illustrations of birds in your hand and in the bird tray are static; once you play them into the different habitats, they animate to life. They also have unique birdsong if you tap on them and during the game the are always moving within the confines of their individual card; that's pretty awesome. One other feature that I loved was that the score card shows you ahead of time just what other end of round goals will score for you in later turns and that makes strategy much easier. There are really great attentions to details throughout the game that open up as you play along, and with each play, I find more and more. I think that this is a great port of the board game onto the switch; i just dont know if its a great board game port onto the Switch since this is my first time playing a board game port. I currently cannot put the Switch down, since it scratches the Wingspan itch during a time (Covid) when I cant get the game out to play with friends. I hope that the two expansions are developed for the Switch really soon. I urge you to pick this up ASAP, but realise that there is a bit of a learning curve for the mechanics. That being said play some birds and feed them today!
