Songbirds review

"This is the voice"

Yes, Chaps and Chapettes, welcome to the finals of THE VOICE. Where we are searching the finalists for that one perfect, loudest song in all of the forest. And all we have to do is coach them, hinder their rivals and bet on them to win, to win yourself!

So, will it be the Red Robin? The Mountain Bluebird? The Green-Finch? Or the Long-Tailed Tit?
It's you that decides in Songbirds ...

Songbirds is a small, compact classical style card game that can play up to four players or even solo. With a premises so simple, anybody can understand. Back the bird that sings the loudest. 

But even with this simple game, players stumble over the first obstacle...How do I play to win?

The game is simply playing a card from your hand into a five by five grid. Your card needs to be adjacent the starting card in the middle or another played card. On the outskirts of this grid (the forest) are some randomly placed score tokens. There is one for each line horizontally and vertically. These you are trying to win for your bird by having the values of that coloured bird being higher than the other birds in that column. 

It's simplicity in game play, a math game where each suit of card is added together to see how has the highest score, is actually quite difficult in a few aspects. Difficult to teach so players see the objective and difficult for players to see a strategy that will win them the game.

But coming from a card playing background and when I say that, I mean of the 52 deck variety, players should find it a walk in the park. Your dealt a hand of cards and you play them to the best of your ability's, in competition with the other players. Same as a trick taking game. There is card counting and math...

There are many things you can do with your cards. Playing a card that will help one of the suits have a higher total in a column is one. In the image above, Red win 12 points with a total of "8".

But also playing a card that make the totals of the highest suit equal the same, will cancel these two suits out of the chance of scoring. Imagine the Red "1" was Blue. Blue and Red would be eliminated from the running's of winning the 12 points, so it falls to the next highest suit. Which in this case is a number "2". But both Green and Grey have a total of "2" meaning that no suit wins the 12 points. As I said, mathematical. And done on a 2D grid, so your not just effecting one column with your card, but two.

On top of that, you need to be calculating which suit is in the running's to win lots of points, keeping a card of that suit in your hand. But do you keep a high number, giving you more points or do you play the high number which gives a better chance of winning points.

Decisions, decisions...and all in a small little card game.

With some cute, but non essential art and a few variants for solo play and team play, this is a board game for all those who like small little classical style card games. Not really my "cup of tea," but a game I don't mind playing.

Technical score 8/10
My BGG score 6/10
Combined score 7/10