Recently I stumbled across some criticism of Little Penguin on Reddit. Luckily the comments made sure to set the poster straight!
Github Repository for Data Analysis:
Data for this article:
coolbutuseless/wingspan: Data about the birds and bonus cards in the boardgame “Wingspan”
Image used in “The Littlest Penguin”:
Little Penguin (Eudyptula minor) | Ana María Martínez J
This got me thinking, how good is Little Penguin? And what evidence do we have to back it up.
Little Penguin:
Cost: 3 fish
Location: Wetlands
Points: 7
Nest Type: Wild
Egg Capacity: 2
Wingspan: Wild
Power: [Predator] WHEN ACTIVATED: Draw and discard 5 cards from the deck. For each fish in their food costs, cache 1 fish from the supply on this bird.
Points: 7
Little Penguin is worth 7 points when played. This is a massive amount of points! If we look at other comparable birds with high points we can look at the Trumpeter Swan. It is worth 9 points, can only live in the wetlands, has an egg capacity of 2, and costs 3 food. Except it has no powers! So the Little Penguin can grow far past 9 where Trumpeter Swan is stuck at 9. Only 10.08% of birds have 7 or more points which means Little Penguin is in the top 10% of birds.
Bonus Cards
A hidden area that we can gain points from a bird card is bonus cards. Each bird helps achieve some amount of bonus cards and it is important to quantify how valuable bonus cards are when evaluating birds. Little Penguin qualifies for 9 bonus cards; Fishery Manager, Enclosure Builder, Nest Box Builder, Wetland Scientist, Wildlife Gardener, Large Bird Specialist, Platform Builder, Falconer, and Diet Specialist. Only 7% of birds qualify for 9 or more bonus cards, which puts Little Penguin in the top 7% this time!
Each bonus card is worth different points. How do we determine how much a bird is worth to each bonus card? For example Bird Feeder counts birds that eat seeds. If we get 5 to 7 birds it is worth 3 points and 8+ birds is worth 7 points.
A bonus card like Falconer gives 2 points per predator bird. This is a lot simpler than a table with different values for different amounts of birds and is instead just a straight line. It is important to decide how we want to evaluate worth for bonus cards where it depends on the number of birds. Usually in a game I find I hit the minimum amount of birds for either the small or big goal. This does not take into account bonus cards I get later in the game that either I have no chance at getting or could be somewhere in the middle with enough for the small goal but not enough for the big goal.
To get the average points per bird we are going to take the average points per bird from 1 to the amount that qualifies for the big goal. As an example we have Fishery Manager which scores: 2 to 3 birds: 3; 4+ birds: 8 and has an average points per bird of 1.125
Little Penguin has an average of 0.57 points per bonus card.
This does not include the bonus cards like Wetland Data Analyst and Mechanical Engineer where the * wingspan and * nest add to it’s usefulness. To add to this, just because it’s average points per bonus card is only slightly above average this does not take into account the number of bonus cards Little Penguin qualifies for.
As we can see Little Penguin gets decent points for it’s excellent number of bonus cards it qualifies for.
Food Cost: 3 Fish
3 fish as a food cost seems a little steep, but is it really?
We can see that there are plenty of birds with a food cost of 3. Adding nectar also makes it easier to be able to play Little Penguin. What is the distribution of points across food cost? We expect that a high food cost would result in a high victory point amount. We can see that Little Penguin is acceptable value for it’s food cost.
Points From Power:
[Predator] WHEN ACTIVATED: Draw and discard 5 cards from the deck. For each fish in their food costs, cache 1 fish from the supply on this bird.
Let us look at the big reason why you play Little Penguin, because it can get tons of extra points! As we can see there are plenty of birds that have fish in their food cost.
But how many points does this actually get us? Let’s simulate 100000 activations of Little Penguin to see how strong it is.
Average number of fish in 5 random birds: 1.12
Variance of number of fish in 5 random birds: 1.49
Standard deviation of number of fish in 5 random birds: 1.22
As we can see the average number of fish in the food cost of 5 random birds is 1.12. This is higher than a lot of birds which do things like “Lay 1 egg” as that is only 1 point. The standard deviation is very high at 1.22 but this is a good thing! From the graph we can see that the high amount of randomness could lead to very large point gains!
Conclusion
In conclusion there is nothing wrong with Little Penguin. It is in the top 10% of all birds, probably the best considering how cute it is.
If you noticed any inaccuracies with my data analysis please be assured that you are wrong. There is no cherry picking or displaying of data to deceive.