Top 5 most eggscelent games for Easter

Each turn you may draw up to 3 dragons, which naturally changes the rule on the spellbook as you flip cards over, but then you are allowed to put back a number card, colour card, or both to set the rule, then play those dragons. If the rule is “Play 1 Blue” for example, the reward will be 1 piece of a magical amulet and a crystal that can be used in the future to draw a 4th card in a turn.

However, you might not want to set the rule as easy to meet a “Play 1 Blue”, because whatever you leave the rule as at the end of your turn, you and everyone else at the table can fulfil the rule to earn the reward.

Set the rule to “Play 4 greens” and in doing so, not only will you be rewarded with an amulet piece, but you’ll also be rewarded with a dragon egg to look after. Whoever collects the biggest brood gets to hatch one of their 4 point eggs into a 16 point hatchling, which could be a game winning move.

Ultimately though, you could win this game without even any eggs, so for today, that’s only worth 5th place.

Briefly mentioned in My top 5 dexterity games - Gulo Gulo was an old family favourite as the game seems custom made to handicap in favour of toddlers with their tiny hands. You see, along the way to <checks notes> rescue a baby wolverine from a swamp vulture nest that the got stuck in, the family of wolverines needs to steal eggs because they’re so tasty as to be irresistible, and it is so easy to get distracted by food when your youngling is missing. 👀

Mmmmm…. eggs.

What was I talking about?

Oh yes, how to play Gulo Gulo. So, you move along the path revealing tiles which tell you which coloured egg you are particularly hungry for today, from the massive blue eggs down to the tiny yellow eggs. To succeed in your turn you must steal an egg of the appropriate colour from the nest without tripping the egg alarm. In the picture above the alarm is the wooden stick pointing out of the nest - there’s a weight on the end of it, and if it hits the ground the swamp vultures catch you with egg on your face in your hands. Succeed and you move forwards, fail and you move backwards, but careful selection of which coloured egg to go for can catch you up after any fail.

In the end game you finally find Wolverine Junior and must fetch him from the nest to win. Even smaller than the smallest egg, it’s definitely a challenge for those with large slippery fingers, but you can do it. Yes, I’m egging you on.

It’s probably possible to create a chocolate version of this game - so long as you can find small enough eggs of varied sizes to steal and eat. Now there’s a thought I wish I had had a week ago!

Bonus Eggstra kids memory game mention:

Wingspan. I’ve talked about this game before when I covered Wingspan Asia in To Duel or not to Duel - Part 2

Wingspan is a fantastically thematic ‘engine-building’ game that you can play with bird lovers who have never heard of an engine building game. There’s a huge deck of birds to play, and that only gets larger with each expansion that you add, the artwork on the cards being gorgeous representations of real birds from around the world, complete with flavour text telling you more about the species.

One of the key mechanisms is the laying of, and hatching from eggs. The game is limited in the total amount of actions you can take, 8 in the first round down to 5 in the final round. Playing a bird costs an action, but to play a bird you need to have the bird card you want to play in hand, have the relevant foodstuff on hand for it, and once you’re out of the the first few birds, you need eggs to hatch from². That’s precisely what the other three actions you can take are - gain food, lay eggs, and draw cards.

Anyway, the point is that birds have different capacities for holding eggs in their nests, and some are positively overflowing with egg carrying capacity. The most upgraded “Lay eggs” action has, as a baseline, you lay 4 eggs with the option to spend 1 food to lay a 5th, and that’s before you factor in the abilities of the 5 birds in the egg-laying row that you’ll also get to activate.

With eggs being worth 1 point each, often games of Wingspan end in the ‘obvious’ move of repeatedly taking the lay eggs action to fill out your birds nesting capacities. Now, this is affected by which bonus is in play for the end of the round and whether you have a particularly valuable bird in hand still to play, but even so the fact that playing a bird late costs 2 eggs, so that’s 2 points, makes it difficult for any bird to match the point-scoring capability of laying more eggs.

Some people take this as a flaw in an otherwise excellent game. Personally, I don’t see the issue with the end of the game having an obvious-looking final few moves. There’s still plenty of game to be had in the 3 rounds of the game leading up to that position. There’s also plenty of tournament play that suggests finishing with egg-laying is not even always the best plan as there are plenty of setups that work even better.

But I’m not here to argue about the ending of Wingspan. Not today. Because today is Easter and eggs are glorious. Lay them all!

Just look at these eggs from Finspan, a fish-themed game from the Wingspan family. Just as tasty looking but equally not edible at all. Little bit squishy though. Certainly bouncy. If you’ve played Everdell these are close in flavour texture to the berries in that game that you certainly cannot eat. Today is not your day though Everdell, as whilst you may find the odd Easter rabbit there are no eggs to be found in Everdell.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that Finspan is merely Wingspan but with fish instead. Whilst there’s plenty of mechanical overlap, Finspan is much sleeker game and plays more quickly, in large part because of an overhaul to the food system. You see in Finspan, eggs are the food. Well, sometimes it’s cards and other fish, but the point is that there isn’t a separate food resource to negotiate, each fish can only hold 1 egg at once, and the point of the game is often to hatch those eggs into young then move those young together to form schools. Presumably that’s where they learn that fish are friends, not food.

There are no face up fish to draft from, everything is drawn directly from the deck, so no agony of choice there. Sometimes to play a fish you must discard a fish, but you’re not locking yourself out of playing that fish ever, as often you can draw cards back from your own personal discard pile. Still, strategic thinking is not lost, as timing when to play your fish, and searching for fish to combo together in the end game for points, is still a big part of this game’s play.

So if you’ve ever played Wingspan and wished it was a little smoother, a little quicker to play, with a little more emphasis on end-game scoring combos and less on finding precisely the right food at the right time, Finspan just might be the game you were looking for all along. And of course it comes with those squishier, rounder eggs, which just melt in go nowhere near the mouth.

There’s only one game that could beat it for forbidden egg.

This game is hard¹. If you want a deckbuilding challenge, assemble a few friends and take this on.

Thematically, this game is absolutely spot on, you feel like you’re exploring the ship and taking on the bad guys, building deck and staying on top of things.

Then you scan an Egg.

Oh big deal, it’s just an egg, how bad can it be? It’s Easter! Let the egg live a bit! It doesn’t even do anything as it cannot move nor strike until you draw an event card and there’s not that many of those in the deck, and the ship is swarming with alien drones that you need to deal with, so attack those instead, right? Right?

My friend: You Just Lost The Game.

Because that event card is coming. Before you know it, that egg is a Facehugger, which you must deal with that turn or next. No no, not two rounds of the table, just your turn, and the player on your left’s turn.

And the egg just hatched near the end of your turn anyway.

You look to your left, begging to see some sort of weapon. They don’t have an aggressive deck? Or they do have an aggressive deck, but this turn is the turn they drew all their economy?

Oh dear.

Because it’s not the Facehugger you needed to worry about. It’s put a Chestburster in your discard pile.

Tick tock.

You just shuffled your discard pile into your deck.

Tick.

Tock.

You draw the Chestburster, suffer extreme pain, and die.

Happy Easter!

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