As a die-hard board game fan, your first thought at seeing Flockers (from the publisher behind Feudum and Fled) might be “Hey…. looks like Odin’s Ravens.” That’s certainly what i thought. And while, yes, both games have you racing bird tokens across evolving terrain, the interesting tableau-bulding in Flockers sets it well apart. Take a gander!
Honk if you love games about avian migration!
Hi. It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table.
Here’s how you play F-BEEP-ers. …
That’s weird. Here’s how you play
F-BEEP-ers. …. Here’s how you play this game.
Honk if you love games about avian migration!
You and your friends play f-BEEP-cks – okay,
groups – of snow geese racing across wintery
climes as the temperature drops, bound for
sunnier skies. You’ll travel by constructing
a tableau of cards shaped like a flying V.
The player whose geese fly the
furthest, the fastest, wins the game.
Everything you see here comes with the
base game except this neoprene playmat,
which is a lovely little add-on. i’ll be
playing with the mat because i’m fancy.
You begin the game with a handful of five cards.
A single terrain card sits at the left edge
of the 10-card play area, with more terrain
cards up here, along with a selection of
additional geese cards you can acquire.
This is the shape of your tableau: you’ll
eventually have one lead bird at the front,
and up to three more birds on the two
different branches of your V. On your turn,
you play one of your cards to this tableau. You
have to follow on from what’s already there.
So if you don’t have a lead bird yet, that’s
where you put your first card. On your next turn,
when you already have a lead bird, you can
place your next one either here or here.
The next turn after that, you can place
your next bird here or here, and so on.
Each bird card usually has one of five actions up
here in the corner. Some birds have a landscape
icon below that, and some have a bonus action
at the bottom that we’ll look at in a bit.
When you first place a goose in your
tableau, you can activate its action.
Then, you fill your hand back up to 5 cards by
choosing a new goose from the face-up display,
and then flip out another card to replace
it. Play then passes to your left.
Here are the five actions and what they do.
When you place a goose in your tableau and use
the FLY action, you get to potentially move your
token along the terrain pathway. But we need to
jet ahead to a point later in the game for this
to make more sense. Say your tableau eventually
looks like this. You plunk down a goose with the
“fly” action on it. That lets you start from your
lead bird, and choose a branch — either this one
or this one. You collect the little terrain icons
as you go along. So if we chose this branch, our
flight path would be forest, lake, mountain. If
we chose this branch, it would be forest, field.
For every card in front of your token that
has a terrain type matching your flight path
in that order, you can move your bird along the
track. So if you chose the forest-lake-mountain
side of the V, you could move to this forest, but
since the next terrain doesn’t have a lake on it,
you couldn’t move any further, even
if there’s a lake way over here.
That’s why it makes more sense to choose this
path instead: you get to move to forest, field.
The next card is a mountain, but you don’t get
to move your token any farther, because mountain
isn’t the next icon in your flight path. You chose
the forest-field branch of your V, so your flight
stops on the field. At the beginning of the
game, if you played this bird with a fly action
and a forest terrain, and the next terrain card
isn’t forest, your token’s not going anywhere.
Some terrain cards have multiple terrain types
on them, giving you more options when you fly.
You only have to match one of the terrain
types on a card to fly through it.
In fact, the first terrain card on the table
has to have two or more terrain types on it,
to give everyone a fighting chance. Note that
some bird cards have terrain icons on the bottom,
next to some binoculars… we’ll
talk about how those work shortly.
Playing a NAVIGATE symbol lets you choose
one of the three face-up terrain cards
and place it in the next available slot along the
path. Then, you replace the card from the deck.
The GRAZE action lets you prune your tableau by
removing one goose card from it and placing it in
the discard pile – thematically, that goose leaves
the V to land on the ground and snack on some
ribeye steak, or whatever geese eat. You
could remove the card you JUST played,
or any other card in your V. Additionally, the
GRAZE action lets you remove any other card in
your tableau with that graze symbol
on it – either up here OR down here.
So in this tableau, if you played this graze
card, you could get rid of any card you like,
and then get rid of any or all of these
cards with the graze icon on them.
Why would you want to get rid of cards to begin
with? Well, if ever you fill up your tableau so
that it has a lead bird and three birds in each
of the branches of the V, your goose is cooked:
if that last bird you played can’t help you
remove any cards, you’ve essentially gone bust
and your flight is over. You don’t want that to
happen. So graze buys you a stay of execution.
If you remove a card from either branch,
snug up the other cards to reform your V.
If you remove your lead bird, pick
either the top or bottom branch,
and slide the cards over in order, to reform.
Playing a bird with the SWAP action lets you
pick any two birds – and that choice doesn’t
have to include the bird card you just played
– and have them change places. As you know,
geese flying in V formation like to trade out
their positions in order to conserve energy,
and you’ve retained this factoid in your
brain because you’re probably a big nerd.
The LEAD action lets you re-trigger your lead bird
as if you just played it. You can also trigger the
bonus actions on the card you just played, AND
the bonus actions on your lead bird as well.
So what are those bonus actions all about?
Well, this pair of binoculars is called the
IDENTIFY icon. When you play a bird, if you can
spot at least this many of this type of bird in
your tableau, you get to avail yourself of this
bonus action. If you see a slash, it means you can
do this OR this. So we lay this card down. It’s a
yellowish juvenile with an IDENTIFY 3 icon on it.
That means that if you have 3 or more of these
grey juveniles in your tableau, including the
card you just played, you can take either a bonus
fly action or a bonus navigate action. If you
qualify for a bird’s bonus action, you can take
it either before or after the bird’s main action.
As i mentioned, bonus actions stack with the LEAD
action. If you played this card, and spotted these
three yellowish juvies, you could take this FLY
action, picking a branch and ripping along it
to move your token across the path. Then, you can
activate this LEAD icon. We look at the lead bird,
and it has a SPOT 2 bonus action, so if we see
two or more of these white-headed mature snow
geese in our tableau, we can additionally
take either a NAVIGATE or FLY action.
This kind of double bonus action thing only really
applies if you use a LEAD action. Once you play a
bird, you evaluate its bonus action. If you can’t
spot that many of the same bird, you can’t take
the bonus, and then that’s essentially done – you
don’t have to think about it any more, because
you can’t ever activate that bird’s bonus or main
actions on any successive turn… unless you manage
to GRAZE or SWAP that bird into the lead position
and use a LEAD action to re-trigger it later on.
The only tricky thing going on in the
game is THIS type of bonus action,
which shows an IDENTIFY icon and one or more
terrain icons. When you play a card like this,
you might think “Oh – i get to spot this many of
this type of bird, and then move my token. But no:
this terrain bonus only comes into
effect when you use the FLY action.
So if i play this bird with this FLY action, and
i pick a branch, normally i’d string these icons
together and that’s my flight path. But along the
way, i can evaluate the spot bonus on this card.
If i spot this many of these birds, then its
terrain icons get included in my flight path.
You don’t have to move your token as far as
you’re able to. If you so choose, you can
stop short along your flight path. And there’s
a reason you might want to do that. It’s because
life isn’t all perfect for snow geese, on
account of the fact that they are…. delicious.
Some terrain cards have encounter icons on them
that affect the composure of your tableau.While
these encounters sound bad, they can often help
you shake things up in your V and fly
farther than you ever could before.
When you FLY, if your token passes
through a piece of terrain with one
of these encounter icons on it, you ignore it.
But if your token STOPS on a terrain with an
encounter icon, you are subject to its effects.
Stopping on a terrain with a fox icon means
a predator snacks on one of your snow geese.
Pick a card in your tableau, and send it off
to meet its maker. Or its eater, i guess.
This helps you thin out your tableau so you
don’t reach that 7-card limit and go bust.
The eagle encounter lets you discard all of
the juveniles in your tableau — the juveniles
are the grey snow geese and the yellowish
snow geese. These other two are both adults.
Don’t worry about remembering that, even if
you ARE a big nerd — this is a prototype.
Your copy will have these handy little
baby birdy icons to mark the juveniles.
So the eagle attacks, and you discard all of
your juveniles, reforming your V as before.
Now you have more slots where you can
place cards to keep from going bust.
Stopping on a piece of terrain with the wind
icon pushes your token one card ahead along
the path to the terrain type of your choice on
the next card. And yes, if that pushes you into
a piece of terrain with another encounter
icon on it, you resolve that encounter.
Stopping on a decoy means
that a hunter shoots a gun
and startles your birds. You have to
scoop up your whole tableau, shuffle it,
and then place your geese back down in a random
order. Flip them all over to see your new tableau.
If you stop on a terrain card on a piece of
terrain that doesn’t have an encounter icon,
but another portion of the
card does have an encounter,
you don’t get to resolve the encounter.
So this fox icon only resolves if you
flew to the “field” portion of
the card, instead of the forest.
When one player reaches the end of the track at
the 10th terrain card, that triggers the end of
the game. All other players get one more turn
to try to catch up. If anyone uses the NAVIGATE
action, new terrain cards can be tacked on past
the end, lengthening the path. So it’s possible
on that final turn that a player overshoots the
game end-triggering player, securing a victory.
If two or more players are tied for the win, the
player with the most geese in their tableau wins.
If players are still tied, whoever has
the most of a single type of geese wins.
If there’s STILL a tie, all tied
players share in the victory.
And now, you’re ready to play F…-BEEP-lockers!
Did you just watch that whole thing? Oh,
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You Might Still Catch Up to the Flock!
Flockers was initially crowdfunded on GameFound. Depending on when you’re reading this, you may still have a chance to late-back the project. Otherwise, look for Flockers and its expansions at retail.
