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The island of Starbeak was first discovered when explorers followed a strange bird with a glowing beak through the sea mist. On the other side, they found a mysterious island full of unusual creatures, hidden habitats, and enough weird wildlife to make any explorer pack a notebook and leave immediately. It’s the kind of place where you probably shouldn’t touch anything, but as board gamers, we absolutely will.
A few years later, Starbeak has changed. Winter has arrived, and not in the cosy “blanket, tea and biscuits” kind of way. This is a long, magical winter that changes the island itself. Snow covers familiar places, the weather becomes less predictable, and a new species, the spirits, can be found during this cold season.
Wondrous Creatures: Winterfall is an expansion for Wondrous Creatures, and it doesn’t just add a few extra cards. Starbeak changes while you play, with auroras appearing, snow building up, and familiar spaces becoming less reliable. So, is Winterfall a lovely fresh layer of snow on top of the base game, or does it make things a bit too slippery?
Small practical note before we dive in: the pre-order for Wondrous Creatures: Winterfall is available through Bad Comet Games.
👥 1-4 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 50-90 minutes
📝 Designers: Jaewoo Bang, Gunho Kim & Yeom.C.W
🎨 Artwork: Sophia Kang
🏢 Publisher: Bad Comet (review copy provided)
Gameplay overview
The base game
In Wondrous Creatures, you play as explorers travelling across Starbeak, trying to build the best nature reserve. You collect eggs, recruit creature cards, complete achievements, gain trophies, and try to create a reserve where your creatures work well together. The game mixes worker placement, resource management, hand management and engine building. That sounds like a lot when you say it like that, but in play it’s quite easy to follow.
On your turn, you choose one main action. You can place one of your crew members on the map, play creature cards into your reserve, complete an achievement, or recharge. Most of the game happens around the shared map. When you place a crew member, it interacts with the nearby habitats. Those habitats can give you resources or let you take creature cards from the wilderness into your hand. Some spaces also have special icons that you can activate with butterfly nets.
Getting a creature card into your hand is only the first step. To actually add it to your reserve, you need to pay its resource cost. Once it’s in your reserve, it can help you with instant effects, recharge effects, energy abilities, or end-game scoring. One of the nicest parts of the base game is how your reserve slowly comes together. At the start, you’re just trying to get enough resources and decent cards. Later, if things go well, your creatures start helping each other and your turns feel much more satisfying. And yes, sometimes you still pick a card because the creature looks cute. We’re only human.
The Winterfall expansion
Winterfall needs the base game to play. You still place crew, collect creatures and build your reserve, but Winterfall keeps interrupting that familiar flow with events, auroras and changing terrain. The new winterfall time track can trigger winterfall events and aurora events whenever someone takes a recharge action. That means recharge is no longer just the moment where you take your crew back and reset a little. It can also change the board for everyone.
I like that idea a lot. It doesn’t add a completely new main action that everyone has to learn from scratch. Instead, it gives more weight to something players already know. You’re still recharging because you need your workers back, but now you’re also wondering whether you’re about to make the island do something strange. Winterfall events use winterfall cards. These can add snowflakes to the snowfield, bring auroras into play, turn plains into mountains, add blizzards, or change things in the wilderness. Some effects just happen once, while others are resolved by all players in turn order.
This could have felt very random, but in our plays it didn’t. There is surprise, yes, but players often still make choices. One turn you’re planning around a habitat, and a few turns later there might be an aurora on top of it, a mountain nearby, or snow making a different creature card more tempting. Aurora events add temporary aurora tiles to the map. These cover existing habitats and offer strong abilities for a short time. They’re not habitats themselves, but if you place a crew member next to one, you can usually activate its ability by removing one of its aurora tokens. Once the tokens are gone, the tile disappears and the original habitat underneath comes back.
The expansion also adds wild habitats. These are flexible spaces where you can gain any resource or take any creature card from the wilderness. Wild habitats don’t steal the show when you first explain the rules, but during play I was happy they were there whenever my neat little plan started falling apart.
Then there are spirits, the new species. Spirit eggs are added to the egg pouch, and new cards and achievements make them part of the scoring puzzle. Projects are also added, giving extra end-game goals that can push players in different directions. Together with the new captains, prelude cards and extra creature cards, Winterfall clearly isn’t a tiny expansion. If you were hoping to open the box, shuffle five cards and call it a day, Winterfall will politely disagree.
Setup changes too. You use the winterfall board, project board, new time tracks, prelude cards and the new supply setup. It’s not difficult after you’ve done it once, but it is more involved than the base game. I’d learn the base game well before adding this.
Artwork, components and visual design
Winterfall looks beautiful on the table. The base game already had a very colourful and slightly magical look, and this expansion keeps that feeling while moving everything into a colder season. You get new cards, captains, boards, tiles, tokens, spirit eggs, snowflakes, blizzards and storage trays. It’s a lot of stuff, but most of it has a job on the table. The snowflakes change how you look at the wilderness, the auroras pull players toward certain spaces, and the winter boards give all of that its own place.
The aurora tiles are probably the first thing people notice. They have those green and purple northern light colours, and they really stand out against the snowy board. The snowflakes and blizzards also look good, and the little spirit eggs fit nicely with the other eggs from the base game. It still looks like Starbeak, just after someone left the freezer door open for several months. The creatures are still strange, colourful and a bit silly in the best way. Names like Auroraxol and Snoworm are exactly the kind of thing I expect from Wondrous Creatures. Snoworm sounds like a creature that would ruin your garden and somehow still look adorable.
The new captains also get winter versions, with warmer clothing and colder backgrounds. I liked seeing them dressed like they actually noticed the temperature dropped. The board also tells a story while you play. Auroras appear, mountains make some placements more expensive, snow builds up in the snowfield, and the island slowly becomes less familiar. You don’t just read that winter has arrived. You see it happening on the table.
The only downside is that there is more to manage. More pieces, more tiles, more things to set up and clear away. The trays help, and I’m glad they’re included, but you’re still adding more sorting, more setup, and more things to check before the first turn. That’s not a huge problem, but it is something I noticed, especially when you just want to get a game going without turning setup into its own little expedition.
Our experience
Winterfall made the turns between our own turns matter more, because a recharge, an event, or a new aurora could change the option I was waiting for. In the base game, I often know roughly what I want to do next, unless someone takes the card or egg I had my eye on. With Winterfall, that changed. I still had a plan, but I had to keep checking whether something was about to change before my next turn came around, and that made the table feel more involved.
The new role of recharge worked really well for us. In the base game, recharge is useful and sometimes necessary, but it can feel like a reset turn. In Winterfall, it becomes a real timing decision. You might trigger an event, and that event might help you, help someone else, or change the board in a way nobody was fully ready for. I like that because it gives the recharge action more bite without making it difficult to understand. Someone recharging suddenly matters to the whole table, not just to that player.
That mainly comes from the winterfall cards, because they’re the moments where the island actually does something back. They can add snowflakes, bring auroras into play, turn plains into mountains, add blizzards, or change the wilderness. I was worried these events might feel too random, but they usually still gave us choices. Sometimes everyone gets involved in turn order, so the island changes because of the card, but also because of what players decide to do with it.
Around the table, the auroras were the thing we reacted to most. A good aurora appears, everyone sees it, and suddenly people start pretending they’re “just considering options” while clearly planning to take it before you do. Very suspicious behaviour. Very board game. Do you go for the aurora now, even if it’s not perfect, or do you wait and hope it’s still there later? I liked that small race, because it made us get in each other’s way without turning the game nasty.
The snowfield surprised me too. I expected it to feel like another scoring layer added on top, but it actually changed how we looked at the wilderness. Snowflakes are placed on snowfield spaces that match cards in the wilderness, and later they can make certain collected creatures more valuable. That means a card you normally wouldn’t care about can suddenly become worth picking up. Sometimes the “perfect” card isn’t available, but another card has enough extra value attached to make you reconsider. That little temptation is fun, especially in a game where you’re already trying to line up creatures, eggs and achievements.
Wild habitats became the spaces I was grateful for when the board didn’t give me exactly what I wanted. They give you flexibility when the board changes or when another player takes the card or space you wanted. In the base game, planning well is very important. In Winterfall, planning is still important, but you also need to stay steady when the island doesn’t cooperate. Which feels quite realistic. Nature reserves probably don’t run on spreadsheets either. I also liked how they stop a bad turn from feeling too punishing, because there is often still a way to get something useful.
The extra species, projects, captains and cards gave our plays more to explore, but they also added more to keep in mind. There are more icons to check, more timing details, more board changes, and more small rules that matter. None of it is extremely hard, but together it asks more from the players. If your group already thinks the base game has enough going on, Winterfall may push it a little too far. For our group, it was still on the good side of “a lot”, but yes, it is a lot.
The only real issue we felt during play was the extra time it can add. Some events ask players to make choices in order, and auroras give everyone extra things to consider. With players who like to calculate every possible option, the game can take longer. That’s not a problem if your group enjoys that, but it’s worth knowing before you add the expansion to the table. By the end of our plays, I felt like I had spent more time watching Starbeak itself, not just staring at my own reserve. For our group, that was a good thing.
Our thoughts
Winterfall doesn’t feel like someone simply added another stack of cards to Wondrous Creatures. Its reason for being is easy to understand: Starbeak gets a winter season, and the rules actually follow through on that idea. The auroras, snowfield, mountains, spirits and projects all feel like they come from the same winter version of Starbeak. I never felt like I was switching between random mini-modules. Most of the time, it felt like one island going through one large seasonal change.
I also like that it builds on the game you already know instead of replacing it with something else. I still felt like I was playing Wondrous Creatures: collecting strange animals, building a reserve, chasing achievements, and hoping my cute little engine didn’t collapse in the snow. If you already know the base game well, Winterfall gives you new reasons to look at familiar spaces, cards and timing decisions again.
That said, I don’t think Winterfall replaces the base game. The original is still easier to teach, quicker to set up, and easier to read from turn to turn. I’d still choose the base game when introducing Wondrous Creatures to new players. Winterfall is the version I’d bring out when everyone already knows the base game and wants Starbeak to push back a little more. Not necessarily every time, because sometimes I do prefer the base game when we want something a bit more direct.
The one thing I’m still curious about is how every system will feel after many more plays. There is a lot in this box, and while it all fits the winter idea, I do wonder whether every part will stay equally important or whether some pieces will eventually fade into the background.
So, would I recommend it? If you’re new to Wondrous Creatures, I’d start with the base game. Learn that first, enjoy it, and only then add Winterfall. If you already enjoy Wondrous Creatures and want a version where the shared board matters more, then yes, Winterfall is one I’d be very happy to add once the group knows why the base game works.
Starbeak looks lovely in winter. It asks a bit more from you, but it also gives the game a stronger sense of place and more reasons to stay alert. For the right group, Winterfall can make Wondrous Creatures feel fresh again, and I’m very happy to return to this frozen version of the island.
📝 We received a review copy of Wondrous Creatures and Wondrous Creatures: Winterfall from Bad Comet Games.
