I have finally 100%ed Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin). Here was what I had to say in my A Quick Review about it. As usual, the one achievement I thought would be the hard one was the easiest (and the first of the three that I got). Let’s review. The three achievements I had left were: 1. winning a run by only using one word to clear every round.
Before I get into how I did each of the three achievements, I want to talak a bit about the different decks. The first is the classic deck. It’s the most well-rounded of the decks and it has no penalties. It has two or three of each consonant and four of each vowel. And one wildcard. It’s what I used for most of my gameplay until I realized the usefulness of using the more thinned out decks.
You have to unlock the other decks under certain cirumstances. Some of them are joke decks like the Pirate Deck, which you unlock by playing one word with 3 Rs in it (I had to look it up, obviously). There are three decks that I consider joke decks (Gadsby Deck, Pirate Deck, and Alphabet Deck. Well, the last one is not a joke, exactly, but it’s a deck that only has one of each letter. And you get one extra word at the start. You unlock it by playing each letter at least once in the same run.
The Pirate Deck has 9 Rs in it and one wildcard. The Gadsby Deck is unlocked by winning a run without using an E. The deck has no E, but you start with 10 seeds. (Seeds are used to buy feathers and songs, both of which will help with the run). And it has one wildcard. I have never won a run with any of these three decks because the wackiness of them did not appeal to me.
Oh! The two decks that I consider more serious. One is the Lean Deck. It has one of every consonant (well, two of a few like S and T) and three of every vowel (except U. Only one of that) And one wildcard. But you also get one less discard.
Finally, there’s the Feral Deck. This has the same letters as the Lean Deck, but it gives you six wildcards instead of just one. And you get one less word. Normally, you start with three words, which means you start with two (there are ways to add words). This is the deck that is often said to be the best overall–if you’re comfortable only making two wourds per round (for the first few rounds at least). This is the deck that most people seem to recommend for–well, just about everything.
As a reminder, these were the three achievements I had left:
1. Win a run by passing each round using only one word.
2. Win seven daily migrations (daily run. I don’t know how they were seeded, but you had to finish them in the same day. Or rather, the same run. I’ll get more to that later).
3. Finish the final route (Short-tailed Shearwater). It’s not the longest or shortest of the routes, but–I’ll get to that in a minute, too.
I did all of them in a desultory fashion without much success. I was using the Classic Deck as this point, as I’d done everything else with it. I started getting frustrated so I looked up tips. One person swore by the Feral Deck for everything. I was skeptical because as I said, starting out with two words? No. The person suggesting it said so casually that you just had to do 7-letter words all the time as if it was nothing.
After failing several times on each achievement, I decided to try a different deck. Not the Feral Deck as it scared me, but I thought the Lean Deck I could handle. One less discard was doable, and so was the thinned out deck. One less word, though? No thank you.
I decided that I was going to focus on one achievement, mostly. For whatever reason, it was the win each round with one word. I still tried to do the Daily Migrations because I had to win seven of them (which, I assume, is beacuse it’s a week), but I left the last route alone for the time being.
I got into this flow/numb state while trying to do the one word per round run. Here’s the secret (really, with all the achievements)–you have to get as many enhanced tiles as possible. Gold for five points each. Platinum for ten. Diamond for…twenty? I think? Then, you want to get all the feathers that are based on enhanced tiles and word length.
I read that you should enhance S first because you can make plurals of words, but I tended to enhance E first and then other vowels because you are always going to have at least one vowel per word. By the way, can we agree that Y is not a vowel? It really frustrated me when the only vowel in my hand (you’re guaranteed at least one) was a Y.
While I’m at it, let’s talk about other things that frustrated me. Getting the same letters two or three times in a row when I drew new letters. When each word matters so much, that was not great.
General gripe about this game and other games that rely on RNG: pure RNG is not fun. Nor is losing a run by two points. Nor is not knowing how many points I’m getting for each round. By the end of the last achievement, I was using a calculator to see how many points I needed exactly to win. I really wish there was a place that let you know how many points you accumulated per round. And if there is one, Ireally wish it was easier to find and/or that they had told me where it was.
The tutorial was very sparse. Which is not unusual for indie games, but frustrating, nonetheless. I was thisclose to quitting without the last three achievements (which, frankly, probably would have been better for me).
I buckled down and–ok. I’m done for now. I let time get away from me once again. More tomorrow.