Fetching Feathers is a lively drafting and set-collection card game for 2–4 players, where a clever season-changing mechanic adds an extra layer of strategy!
Played over a total of three seasons, players are drafting cards to improve locations and attract migrating birds. Birds can flock together, so it’s useful to collect sets where possible. As the seasons change, the available food also changes, so planning and adaptation are required to gain new birds and avoid losing existing ones.
Fetching Feathers is a lively drafting and set-collection card game for 2–4 players, where a clever season-changing mechanic adds an extra layer of strategy!
Played over a total of three seasons, players are drafting cards to improve locations and attract migrating birds. Birds can flock together, so it’s useful to collect sets where possible. As the seasons change, the available food also changes, so planning and adaptation are required to gain new birds and avoid losing existing ones.
Ready to fly
Setup is nice and easy.
Take the Season card and set it to either Winter or Summer. Each player starts with the same three location cards, rotated to match the current Season.
Place the location cards and bird cards nearby, and… well, that’s it! You can stack locations vertically and/or horizontally, depending on table space and as more locations are added.
No really, that’s it
Traditionally, the next bit would be how to play, but not this time. In order to better understand how to play, it’s better to explain the cards you’ll be playing with first.
If you want to get ahead, get a hat
The artwork in Fetching Feathers is excellent, slightly whimsical, and of great quality. It also includes really easy-to-follow iconography that requires just a few rules to understand.
Yes, they’re wearing hats. No, I don’t have an explanation. Yes, I now wish birds wore hats like this.
Here’s how the birds work:
Top left is the food they require to stay with you. Going through each of the above examples, the first requires a leaf or a meat, the second requires a leaf, and the third requires two fish.
Top right is the base points you score for each of these birds in your habitat.
Left is the maximum number of these birds you can stack as a flock in a single spot in a location.
The white dots on the right is the number of copies of this bird in the deck.
The bottom is the bonus (or, in the case of the third example, the penalty) that can be triggered for this bird. First scores an extra point if it’s summer, second scores two extra points if Puffins are on the other side of its location, third scores two less points if you have a flock of two of them.
Every bird is some permutation of these or similar rules, relying on their own flock, other flocks at the same location, or the current season. Just in case you need a reminder, there’s a summary of the bonus types conveniently placed on the back of the rulebook.
A nice place to live
Location cards are plain but still pretty, and are perfectly clear on their purpose. They have a Summer side and a Winter side that are obvious to see. On each season change, you rotate the location to the relevant side. A single flock of birds can be placed to the left and another to the right of each location.
You can add location cards together; however, when you add to a location, you must choose which season you’re adding to. This is locked, so when the season changes, the location is rotated as a whole.
This location has a leaf and a fish in winter, but a leaf and two meat in summer
Right, let’s play
Each round, players are dealt 2 cards from the location deck and an increasing number of cards from the bird deck. On the first round it’s 5 birds, then 6 birds, and finally 7 birds.
We now draft cards, taking one card from your hand of cards and placing it face down, then passing the remaining cards to the next player. The season card shows the current direction to pass your cards, clockwise in summer and anti-clockwise in winter.
Once everyone has drafted a card, flip your drafted card over.
If it’s a location card, you must either add it to an existing location or use it as the starting card of a new location. These cards are then locked in place and can’t be moved.
If it’s a bird card, you do not need to place it yet, but it’s often really useful to place it temporarily in a location so you can keep track of what food is going to be needed and where it may be available. You can keep making changes during the drafting phase.
Continue to draft, reveal, and possibly place cards until all of the cards have been shared out.
Now it’s time to make sure all of your birds can be fed (if possible). Birds can be placed as a single bird or a flock of identical birds up to their maximum flock size. You can have multiple flocks of the same bird.
In order for them to be placed, the food available on that location’s current season must match the bird’s requirement. This is not per bird or per side, so if you have a flock of three birds all require a leaf on one side, and a single bird that requires either a meat or a leaf on the other, all are fed by a single leaf on that location.
Do this for all birds each player has. After everyone has placed everything they can, any birds that could not be fed are passed to the next player (using the same direction as the drafting for that season). Without changing their current layout of birds, that player can add any of those birds that they can feed. Any birds still left over are discarded.
Score all of your birds and add it to the scorepad.
At the start of the next round, flip the Season card over. This changes to the opposite season and reverses the direction that cards will be passed.
Sidebar: Season’s Greetings
Now it’s time for the thing that really shifts the level of strategy required. Rotate all locations, keeping all upgrade cards on the season they were added to. This will usually completely change the food that will be available for this season, so you will often find that birds are no longer eligible to stay in that location. This has no immediate impact, as migration will only be locked down at the end of the round, but it’s a good idea to spend some time either temporarily reallocating flocks to locations that can feed them or moving them away until you have created locations that you can later add them to.
Using the above example, the birds allocated to each location were correct during winter. In summer, the left location has no fish, and the right location only has one meat, so you’ll have to make changes to be able to feed everyone. The good news is that you can move all the birds to the other location, and the food will be enough to keep them. The only problem is that the eagle in the third flock has a bonus that the flock size increased by +1 during the winter. In summer the flock will need to be split up, as the maximum flock size will be back down to one. If the second eagle can’t be placed on another of your locations by the end of the round, it will get passed to the clockwise player to see if they can feed it.
Now, back to the gameplay...
A second round of drafting is next, running as before with the only difference being an extra bird card being drafted and the cards being passed in the opposite direction. You can upgrade locations or start new ones, and birds can be added to existing flocks or kept separate.
After drafting is completed, you must again place birds and flocks where you are able to feed them. Any you cannot feed are passed to the next player to see if they have space remaining to feed them; if not, then they are discarded.
Scoring is repeated, the season is flipped one last time, and the final round is handled the same as above. Final scoring is calculated by adding up the scores for each round; the player with the highest total wins.
An easy game to pick up
Fetching Feathers is a small box game that doesn’t feel too small. The entire game is managed with cards, with the exception of a scorepad and a small pencil. While it doesn’t seem a big thing, the pencil makes this extra portable and is emblematic of how much this game is trying to help.
The manual is excellent; it has illustrated explanations of all of the rules (including examples) and includes a handy guide on the back of the page. This has the number of cards dealt for each round, the turn structure for each round, and an explanation of all of the iconography used for birds’ bonuses. This is excellent; you can keep the guide nearby and not usually need to open it again after the first game. It even has a QR code on the back to watch a how-to-play video.
That’s not to say it’s a simple game. There’s a really interesting escalation of resource management as the game progresses. Each round an increasing number of birds are added to the draft, but the same two extra location cards get added. Combined with the way the available food is changed each time the season switches, making sure you have the food to keep all of your birds gets increasingly difficult. Set collection to make flocks as large as possible is often vital, as it adds to your score without needing extra food or locations. You may find that you want to add location cards to the inactive side of a location to prepare for the next round.
I can easily recommend Fetching Feathers. It’s a reasonably quick game to play (maybe half an hour play time), with simple rules but a decent level of strategy. The cards are great-looking and do a good job of creating a large variety of scoring interactions with each other.
Great fun, and a nice alternative to other lighter drafting games like Sushi Go.
