u/pedrob_d

I somehow managed to play every New World vulture/condor card in Wingspan in a single game... they just kept on showing up, so I decided to go all in. I lost by a lot cause they are not very good. No regrets though.

It also seemed like a good excuse to share some fun vulture facts for you nerds.

(1) Did you know there are only seven living species of New World vultures (family Cathartidae)? Wingspan includes five of them:

• Turkey Vulture

• Black Vulture

• King Vulture

• California Condor

• Andean Condor

The only two missing are the Lesser Yellow-headed Vulture and Greater Yellow-headed Vulture.

(2) 🦅 "Condors" are just giant New World vultures. They're not a separate family or group, just the two largest species of Cathartidae.

(3) 👑 The King Vulture (my favorite) is actually more closely related to the two condors than it is to the Turkey or Black Vulture. So it could be called "King Condor" or "Lowland Condor" or "White condor". But common names don't make taxonomic sense :)

(4)🌎 New World vultures and Old World vultures evolved their scavenging lifestyle independently (!!). They look alike because of convergent evolution, not because they're close relatives. Indian Vulture is a representative of Old World Vultures in my board as well.

(5) ✈️ The Andean Condor is one of the largest flying land birds on Earth, with a wingspan of over 3 m (10 ft), and can soar for hours with remarkably little wing flapping thanks to mountain updrafts.

Vultures are some of nature's most important cleanup crews, preventing the spread of disease and recycling nutrients. Anyway... all those scavengers couldn't scavenge me enough victory points. 😄

I have been waiting for this to happen ever since I saw the Daurian Jackdaw card for the first time! ~30 GAMES LATER IT FINALLY HAPPENED!

I got the jackdaw in my starting hand, and since the first round goal was already "no goal", I waited to play it on round 2.

While I started with a forest engine in the first few rounds, I got lucky with Swan+ Grackle to be able to tuck 6 cards, and pivotet to the Wetland. Tge Southern Screamer comboed extrmelly well with the Swan! The swan replaces the tucked card under it every round, so it gives the three cards to tuck under the with Swan consistently. Win-win and sustain a 8-tuck habitat activation, ocasional 9 tucks.

End result is 95 (!!) tucks and 174 points total. I Still haven't broken the 100 tucks personal goal... my record is still 99 from a previous game (I posted here a couple of years ago).

Loving the games with the duet board+hummers! Board setup is very quick with all the extra resources.

The Noddy reset had 4 fish in it, and the grey owl drew 5 rats. This is never happening again is it?