Lost in Migration

Alternate titles:

Birds of a Feather
Great Goose Race

Game Overview

In Birds of a Feather, each player leads a flock of geese on their annual migration ahead of the advancing winter. Can you find the over-winter grounds before your opponents? Will your entire flock survive the journey or will fatigue, lack of food, or prowling wolves claim some of your companions?

Birds of a Feather is a mechanically simple but strategically rich game of racing, pushing your luck, and managing the health of your flock. Players create a migration route by laying tiles with different terrains. Flocks can forage for food on the terrain and find places to rest.

Additionally, players hold secret cards with terrain patterns. If their flock flies over this combination, indicating that it recognizes the migration route, the flock gains a bonus to help them.

Players can fly along the same route, which provide bonus to speed but restricts available food, or they can strike out alone, hoping to find Mexico before their opponents.

Current Rules:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4tst7IUzPk1c0VDdHpDSmZud2s/view?usp=sh...

Updates/Changelog

April 24, 2017

Rulebook Version 0.1
First draft of the rules. Fairly thorough. Still need to decide how to handle Flight Path. Variants need a fuller description, but this can come later.

April 26, 2017

Took the first Prototype out for a spin. Realized the economy might be broken and winter's a bitch.
Score: Game 1 - Me 0

April 28, 2017

Second playtest session. Some real progress on mechanics for Pattern cards, Winter, Terrain economy and other tweaks.

Winter: I discovered my original idea of having each tile have snowflakes that advanced a winter tracker which triggered winter to advance was stupidly overcomplicated. Instead, I just put winter tiles in the draw bag equal to the number of players.

Terrain economy: Bumped up the base values of terrain. Plains = 7, Hills =4, Mountains = 2. Flocks can collect all of it (with some modifiers) instead of 1 per goose. This allows flocks to recover easier on Plains.

Pattern Cards: Really cool idea for players to build a flight deck by selecting cards to represent the terrain they fly over. If they have a pattern card with the same sequence of terrain as individual cards, they can replace cards in the flight deck with a pattern card. Much simpler than my original concept.

New Rulebook, Version 0.2
Haven't played with Pattern Cards or Mexico Cards. Seeing how vanilla game plays