Fetching Feathers Preview – Ornithological refinement

A preview copy of Fetching Feathers was kindly provided by Unfringed. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Chris Priscott and his Unfringed brand are no strangers to Punchboard. I covered Molehill Meadows a little while back (read my preview here), and before that came the sleeper hit Zuuli (my preview is here), which Oink Games then picked up and republished as Moving Wild. The Next Big Thing is here in the form of Fetching Feathers, and if you liked Zuuli, you’re going to really enjoy this.

If you never played Zuuli, it’s a game of drafting animal cards and enclosures, and arranging the cards you collect to score the most points. Fetching Feathers takes the formula and, in my humble opinion, refines it to take the game down to its essence. I haven’t played Fetching Feathers as many times as I have Zuuli yet, but I prefer the birdy game for sure.

A bird in the hand…

You start the game with three location cards in your tableau, each of which has places left and right of it to house birds. The locations provide the type of food shown at the top of the card: plants, fish, or meat. A bird can only roost next to a location which provides all of the food it needs, which you can see on the bird’s card. As each of the three rounds progresses, you take a card from those in your hand, then pass the rest to your neighbour. Rinse and repeat until there are no more cards to pass on.

There are a couple of things to remember as you take cards and add them to the pile in front of you, ahead of placing them for scoring. Firstly, among the various bird cards are more location cards, which you can place to give more birds somewhere to call home, or alternatively you can tuck them behind your existing locations to upgrade them and add another food source. More places for birds, or places where more birds can nest? It’s a difficult choice.

The other thing to be aware of is how many flocking birds can be on one side of a card. Some birds like company, whereas some are more solitary. That ostrich in your hand might be worth 5 points, but you can only have two of them together next to a card. Is it worth going for them, or would you be better off with four hummingbirds instead? As if that’s not enough to think about, there are the bonuses too.

Your birds can score more points depending on certain factors. Some like an extra, alternative food source at their location. Tuck a meat card behind your plants for the ostrich, and you might net yourself another couple of points. Some birds like a bit of variety in their company, too, so you might find that those hummingbirds can score you even more points if they have puffins as their location neighbours.

You make all of these bird and location choices during the round, but don’t even have to commit to what goes where until all of the cards are claimed. There’s a lot to think about, and you’ll probably find your plans flitting back and forth as new cards come into sight as quickly as that hummingbird zipping around looking for nectar.

Phew, all of that, and we’ve not even mentioned what happens at night!

Night owl, or up with the larks?

The astute among you will notice that the location cards have a light half and a dark half, with potentially different food sources at either end. At the end of the first round, once all the birds have been scored, the locations all get rotated 180 degrees. It occurs to me now that I think about that the cards aren’t actually about night and day. That’s just how I think about it, and how I’ve even taught it to others. They’re actually different seasons if you want to get finicky about it, but either way, they get flipped. All of the birds you had stay with you, ready to be scored again, but it means you’re going to need more locations once you draft another bunch of birds.

The game leads us on this merry dance of collecting cards, organising, scoring, and doing it all over again for three rounds, after which it’s time to see who scored the most points and won.

Now, if you’ve played Zuuli before, this might all sound a bit… familiar. In that game, you have habitats and enclosures, and animals that could live in them as long as specific conditions are met. You draft and pass cards, rearrange, and try to optimise your scoring with what you have. It’s not entirely surprising, they’re both from the mind of young Mr Priscott after all. So why am I telling you this? I guess it’s so you’re at least aware of the similarities. If you’re trying to keep a micro collection of games and want to curate the types of games you have in it, it might be a bit too similar. For the rest of us, however, it’s a different story.

Final thoughts

I knew I’d found something special when I first looked at Zuuli a few years ago. I recommended it to people, and if memory serves, it was when I told Becky from the Whose Turn is it Anyway podcast (go and listen to them, what a nice bunch of people) that she loved it, and I’m sure many others have been influenced the same way. It would be unfair and dismissive of me to call Fetching Feathers a straight-up reskin and retheme of Zuuli, because it isn’t. It’s a familiar game, for sure, but I think it’s more like a refinement than anything else. It’s like making the most amazing sandwich, then someone saying, “You know what, let’s see what happens when we add fewer flavours of crisps in this”.

Despite having written 300+ reviews now, I still struggle with words sometimes. There’s a bit of me that wants to say Fetching Feathers is less fussy than Zuuli, but I’m not 100% sure fussy is the word I want to use. It’s a word that feels like that anyway. Crafting the locations is refined. Working out what can go where is a little easier. Being able to make a couple of rows or columns of locations and just placing stacks of birds on either side just feels a bit neater.

I think the biggest change is the one I like most. The fact that the locations literally get turned on their heads is great. It means you’re not just constantly adding to this amorphous, shifting zoo. You’ve got to plan ahead. Add new food sources to the sides of the locations you know you’ll be using next round. Figure out which birds will pair with which others when their part of the world suddenly becomes inhospitable. It’s a fun puzzle to work at.

Oh, and if it isn’t extremely obvious already, the artwork in Fetching Feathers is beautiful. Absolutely stunning. “Jol” Mudhakir certainly knows his way around a box of crayons. Fetching Feathers is a brilliant mix of drafting and tableau-building, and I think everyone’s collection has a space where it’ll fit nicely.

You can follow and back Fetching Feathers over on its Kickstarter page. It is scheduled for launch on October 9th 2025.

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