Flappy bird

In Wingspan there is a variety of bird that moves around from place to place.  Normally you have to build up your card, food, and egg rows separately, but this kind of bird can fly to another zone after you use it, which effectively gives you extra development in all 3 zones.  It does constrain your actions and plays some though, which is a downside.  I haven't ever played with flappy birds before because they always arrived too late to be good, but today I opened a starting hand with 2 of them.  Time to experiment!  I was especially excited because two of the round goals were 'number of birds in a zone' and flappy birds are fantastic at scooping those up with minimal effort.

I was optimistic.  Being able to always take actions at rank 3 is crucial, and I expected it to give me a huge early game advantage.  I slammed down my two flappy birds and got busy.

I ended up with my worst score ever at 78.  Ouch!

When you do this sort of experiment it pays to look at the other factors like how my bonus cards and end of round goals played out.  My score card looked great, except for one thing.  I had 26 points in eggs, just 2 shy of maxed out.  That is good.  I got 18 points in round goals with little invested in getting them, which is excellent.  My single bonus card got me 6 points, again with minimal investment.  I got 2 tuck points and 2 food points, which is fine, but the crushing failure was my 24 points in birds.  Normally I end up closer to 40 points in birds, which explains why most of my scores are in the mid 90s.

I made 2 errors that I know of, each of which cost me 1 point at endgame, though both were defensible in that they might not have been errors, depending on draws.  I also ended up with 5 bird cards in hand because I took a single draw action trying to get something good to play and whiffed completely.  

Overall my game looked strong, except for those extra bird cards and that terrible ending score.  I think the conclusion is that flappy birds, while they seem powerful, just aren't.  They have wretched point values on them so you pay a huge price to have them.  They also suck in the endgame where you just want to take eggs a bunch of times in a row because they don't have any ability to help those actions.  You do get rank 5-6 eggs, which is nice, but you don't get anything extra.

I thought that flying around the board would be a massive advantage, but it doesn't seem that way.  I have had consistently superior results going with normal birds that stay in place and keep on using their abilities to generate points or resources.  Flappy birds are exciting but the total advantage they bring just doesn't seem to add up.

I am curious to know if other people have had this same experience.  When other people have had flappy birds I have been worried about it, but I have never actually lost to someone using one, so maybe that was a sign.  In any case if you have used flappy birds and been really successful, please let me know, and explain why you think that is.  In my admittedly limited experience, flappy birds are weak indeed.