Nestlings is the first game from Tangerine Games. I got a demo of Nestlings at TantrumCon 2023, shortly before the game was launched on Kickstarter. At the demo, I found a few small issues with confusing iconography. Those issues have been fixed. Overall, I found the concept and gameplay intriguing. Has the published version held up to my expectations?
Nestlings is a set collection game. Each player is a different bird. The characteristics of the bird are not important, except that each one is from a particular biome. Each of these biomes - savanna, alpine, fresh water, and desert are represented on the main board. There is a fifth biome - grasslands - which is used as a wildcard to round out the harsh edges of the game.
The game lasts four rounds. Before each round, each player rolls five dice. These dice have images representing each of the four main biomes on each face. One face is blank. The sixth face has a second image for the home biome of the player’s bird. On a player’s turn, they may reroll any of the dice they have not yet placed. They then place one of their dice on the biome matching the symbol or on the grasslands biome. A blank-faced die can only be placed in the grassland. Play continues until all players have passed. A player cannot pass if they have more than one die remaining. If they pass with an unplayed die, that die is used during the player’s next turn, giving them six dice to use.
After all dice have been placed and beginning with the starting biome, players collect resources in priority order. Resource collection priority is determined by how many dice a player has played on that biome. Ties are broken by giving priority to whomever placed a die there first this round. The grasslands biome is resolved last. Players who placed dice on the grasslands get to pick from the resources not claimed in the main biomes.
At the start of each round, each biome had been populated with flora and fauna from that biome. These are the resources used in the game. Each biome has five types of resources available, plus one wildcard worm. Each round, discs representing each resource are drawn from a bag until the number of unique resources assigned equals the number of players, plus one. If duplicate discs are drawn, they are stacked, with a maximum height of two.
A player can use a collected resource in one of two ways. They can place it below their board. Below-the-board resources are used in several ways. The first time a player collects a particular type of resource, they place a wedge representing that resource into a pie with slots for all resources from all biomes. These resources can be used to form sets that fulfill conditions on Gathering Goal cards. Each player who meets the conditions on one of these cards discards the resources used to meet the condition, places their token on a space beside the card, and gets the bonus token from that space. The first player to match the card gets the most victory points (VP), the second player slightly fewer VP, and so forth. If the player does not use the bonus (which can be a wildcard resource, a free pie slice, etc.) by the end of the game, that disc is worth 3 VP. The third way to use below-the-board resources is to get VP from a player-unique Nest Goals card. Each of these cards has one resource from the four main biomes. A player who collects a pictured resource gets VP. The VP are the highest for the first round and go down from there. The final way to use these resources is end-of-game scoring. Each set of three unique resources is worth 3 VP. (It is unclear whether “unique” refers to the pool as a whole or to resources in each set. That is, if a player has a pair of the same resource, can one of the pair be used in one set and the other used in a second set? I assume not, but do not know for sure.)
The second way to use a collected resource is to feed the baby birds in the nest on the player board, the nestlings. Only resources collected from the player’s bird’s native biome can be used for this. Each resource used this way gets the player 2 VP, plus one VP for every filled in slice of the pie for one of the biomes.
That is about it for the rules. There are a couple of miscellaneous rules that might come into play in a multiplayer game, but not in the solo game I played. A player can burn two unplaced dice to reserve a single resource. A player may also give up a VP to change the face of a single die or to reroll any number of dice. These capabilities could be useful in a close game.
For a solo game, the player uses two AI players. The Basic AI player’s primary function is to prevent the human player from gathering some resources. The resources the Advanced AI player gets are placed on the AI board. Filling rows on this board gets the AI victory points. Filling column on this board acts like a player meeting the conditions on a Gathering Goal card. The AI play is simple and quick.
The components are top notch. The rulebook is good paper. The cards are good quality. (I will sleeve the cards used in the solo game. The decks used are only a few cards and need to be shuffled a few times per game. Sleeves make that easier.) The boards are thick cardboard. The player boards are dual-layer. The other pieces are wood, with the resource discs being nice and chonky.
There is more plastic than necessary. The version I got came with both a plastic mini for each player, used to reserve resources and all the same except for plastic color, and a set of wooden meeples shaped like and painted to look like the player birds. The meeples are much more appealing than the minis.
There are also plastic organizers for the components. They are better designed than those for many other games. They fit together well in the box. Where each type of component goes is fairly clear. However, I find only the pie slice organizers useful. Those organizers make it easy to find the slice you want from a set of eighty slices. Otherwise, the organizers are marginally useful. I have plenty of games with dice and VP tokens in bags, and there is nothing wrong with that.
The player boards and the plastic organizers fit into the game box neatly. After that, I cannot tell if there is an appropriate way to store the bags of resources and the rest of the boards. The bags are a little tall to let the remaining boards lie flat on top of them. The component organizers fit in the box in two rows. Those rows end up not being exactly the same height, and only one of the boards is the same width as either of the rows. I ended up stacking the boards as best I could, which left the lid of the game box slightly raised. It just seems odd that the bottom two-thirds of the box is well organized, but the upper part is not.
The last component to talk about is the rulebook. Most of the rulebook is great. Plenty of examples, many with illustrations. Rule edge cases discussed and adjudicated. Great book. Until you get to the solo rules.
One of the key components to the solo game are the biome decks. Each of the main biomes has a deck of six cards that are used to determine which resource the AI chooses. The instructions for how to do this are summarized as “consult the Biome Deck”. Unless I’ve missed it during several readings, the rules never explain what this means. I interpreted it as, “turn over cards in the deck for the selected biome until you find one of the available resources and select that resource.” I also chose to shuffle a deck when all the cards were flipped. Those seem to be the probably rules. But it could be that, if the player turns over a card and it reveals a resource that is not available, the AI does nothing. Instead of shuffling, the player could just turn a used deck back over. The player could even need to shuffle the unused cards before each flip. There could be a rule that I have not thought of. In a rulebook that uses five paragraphs to explain how the AI selects resources in the grasslands, not explaining how it selects resources in the other biomes seems to be a major omission.
There is one other, not quite as significant, problem in the solo rules. The AI board has five spaces for resources in each biome row. I think that the AI can only place a resource of a type not already placed in an empty slot. This is not made explicit. There is a mention of the AI stacking duplicate resources. It is not clear whether this rule applies to pairs of resources gained in a single round or duplicates gained across rounds. The rules for grassland collection also make a point to gather resources not already placed on the AI board. I’m pretty sure my interpretation is correct. It should be made more clear.
Is Nestlings any good? The game is quick. It is a set four rounds. During a round, each player takes a maximum of six turns. Each turn goes quick. The resource collection phase does not take very long either. There is a lot of luck, between resource selection and dice rolling. But there is also a lot of luck mitigation. There are decisions to be made. Which resources do I try for each round? Do I feed my nestlings or not? Do I go to the grasslands or not?
First, the decisions are not that hard. A lot of points come from meeting the conditions on the Gathering Goal cards. These goals are fairly generic - three of a kind of single resource, a pair of resources from two different biomes, a resource from each biome, and so forth. Not hard to meet these conditions. The goal is not to meet the conditions, but to meet them before the other players, to maximize your VP. An alternate strategy is to be as diverse as possible, get the most pie slices, and get points from feeding your nestlings. Again, you have some flexibility. Unless it is late in the game and you have been very successful in filling the pie, you probably have several equally good options for the resources you select. Generally, it seems like you do not have to fight for a specific resource. The game is not as tense as many other games in which you do.
The multiplayer game might be pretty lightweight. The solo game is seriously flawed. I almost doubled the AI’s score - 64 to 33. I did not even try very hard.
The AI has two primary ways of getting points. One is to fill up columns on the AI board. That means getting resources in all four of the main biomes. The issue with that is that the AIs all have native biomes. That means that their dice are more likely to come up with that biome. When the blank side comes up on an AI die, it is placed in the grasslands. For the AI, grassland resource selection starts in its native biome. Not all biomes are collected at the same rate. The Advanced AI’s native biome will be collected much more often than any other. That makes it hard to fill in the columns on the board.
The second way for the AI to get points is to fill in rows. Great for the row for the Advanced AI’s native biome. Not so much for the others. The requirement to fill in each available space with a different resource can also cause problems. Towards the end of the game, the AI may only have one or two spaces free on a particular row. If the needed resources are not drawn for that biome for that round, the only way of replacing a missing resource is through a wildcard worm resource. It is very hard for the AI to get a worm. There is no card for the worm, so it must come from a grasslands pick. If the player had an opportunity to go to a biome with a work at all, they would have and picked the worm. In my game, the AI did get a worm, but the odds of that are very long.
Even if the needed resource is available, actually selecting it is not assured. If the player goes before the AI, the player could selected it to keep it out of the AI’s hands. If it is still there when the AI makes its selection, the AI still has to get the right card from the Biome Deck. If a card for another available resource is flipped first, that resource is selected.
It seems very hard for the AI player to get a lot of VP. Probability is against it filling up many columns. Filling up rows requires getting specific resources, when the human player does not need to be very specific. The difficulty of the game is put on the AI player, not the human. It should be the other way around.
Will I play Nestlings again? As with any game where doing something first matters, playing with other people might give a completely different experience than the solo game. I might try it out at a game night with less experienced players. For the solo game, there are options for a harder game. Nestlings does not take very long to play, so I would not be investing that much time in trying it out. But there are so many other, more challenging solo games to play.
Den of the Red Wolf 