Many players dislike the "Power 4" for being too powerful, and have house rules to nerf them or remove them from the game. The Board Game Arena adaptation has an option to remove the Power 4 from the game. Similarly, the Oceania Expansion rulebook suggests leaving out the Ravens, the two most notorious Power 4 members. The standalone video game adaptation implemented this variant instead of the one that removes all the Power 4 members, and it's available even if you don't own the Oceania DLC.
Some players dislike how plentiful nectar is, and use a combination of Oceania food dice (nectar) and the base game's dice (no nectar) to make it rarer. This concept became an actual rule in the Asia expansion, though as a way to split one set of Oceania dice between two groups.
Author's Saving Throw: A common complaint about the game is that it ends too soon. In a retrospective, Elizabeth Hargrave confirmed that she created the "No Goal" rule (which doesn't require players to give up an action cube that round, leaving them with more actions overall) to address this.
Official Fan-Submitted Content: A Fan Art Pack has been created, offering versions of the bird cards with artwork submitted by fans.
Serendipity Writes the Plot: The trend of Stonemaier Games featuring a cameo from Jamey Stegmaier's cats, Biddy and Walter, was initially skipped over for this game because domestic cats are often predators towards birds. Asia opted to feature the likenesses of Biddy◊ and Walter◊ hidden in the rockwork as a compromise.
Early in development, she tried having the players share one board they interact with. One version involved driving a truck around a park. This was scrapped because it "did not work very well mechanically" and because the playtesters wanted to focus on just the birds.
The game used to have a goal of playing a certain number of birds, or "something with eggs". This ended up undermining the engine-building aspect as the playtesters focused on just playing more birds. It also led to some awkward situations where players avoided triggering the end of game because they weren't ahead or weren't sure if they were ahead. As a result, they switched to a round structure where each player is guaranteed a certain number of actions.
The end-of-round goals were originally applied to the entire game, all at once, which turned out to be a bit much to deal with. After the round structure was implemented, the designer quickly figured out that it was better to apply one goal to each round.
Working Title: Hargrave has mentioned that the game was titled Bring in the Birds when she pitched it to publishers.
One mechanic Elizabeth Hargrave (and Jamey Stegmaier) was particularly happy with is the fact that there are two layers to the engine building: not only do many bird powers improve your engine, but the mere act of playing a bird into a habitat improves it.
Elizabeth Hargrave uses a spreadsheet to balance the birds.
The web novel
Keep Circulating the Tapes: gleeful.com, the website that hosted the story, went offline some time in 2012. The story has been preserved in the Internet Archive, though.
, Elizabeth Hargrave confirmed that she created the "No Goal" rule (which doesn't require players to give up an action cube that round, leaving them with more actions overall) to address this.
