When Everdell launched in 2018, it seemingly changed the makeup of the board game industry, with animals and critters now a highly desired board game theme. Bad Comet Games took this idea one step further and created imaginative creatures akin to Pokémon, and released Wondrous Creatures in late 2024.
Almost 18 months later, a whole new slew of content is dropping for Wondrous Creatures through the Winterfall expansion. More creatures, more mechanics, but surprisingly not really a more complicated game.
How does Winterfall change Wondrous Creatures?
In Wondrous Creatures, players will be placing crew members onto a central board, collecting resources, and using those resources to play cards. Cards provide a variety of bonuses, sometimes ongoing, sometimes endgame, and sometimes instant. Each card has a variety of animal-type symbols, and players will collect those, along with eggs, to complete objectives and earn big points.
The answer to what the Winterfall expansion changes in the base game of Wondrous Creatures is, well, simple: not too much.
The expansion adds an additional type of creature called Spirits. These creature cards bring new strategies to the table and are heavily influenced by the game’s new dynamic weather system.
Snow, blizzards, and the Aurora tiles have all arrived, bringing a ton of new mechanics to the game that definitely make it more enjoyable while not increasing the teaching or playing time too much. Players will compete to have the most snowflakes when the game ends, and these snowflakes are earned when selecting new cards from the market. Blizzards block resource locations on the central map, and the new Aurora tiles provide really powerful, although time-sensitive, spaces to the board that provide more options than standard resource spaces.
A better expansion than most
I’m generally pretty lukewarm on board game expansions. They either don’t add enough, making me wonder why it was an expansion at all, or they add too much, which overcomplicates the game and makes teaching it so much harder.
This expansion adds a few key new mechanics that do change the way you play the game. That said, none of these additions is in and of themselves complicated to understand.
You get snowflakes when you gather cards from the market. Blizzards block locations and are removed when your crew member is placed near them, earning you a free card. The Aurora tiles add powerful locations to get great resources when your crew are placed nearby.
That’s about all there is to it. The game does just add more stuff as well. We have more creature cards, more captains for players to choose from, and of course, brand new captain powers. These tie nicely into the new weather system introduced with this expansion, but are well-balanced if you mix them with previously released captain powers.
One key addition, though, is the new little creature type tiles that make setting up the end game scoring area so much easier. Sometimes it is the small things that matter most. This one is exactly that.
Everything feels well thought out and balanced
I’ve seen board game expansions release and ruin the base game experience. Often, it’s because certain elements in the expansion make older elements less appealing, ruining the overall balance of the game.
That isn’t the case here. Everything seamlessly integrates into the main game, and strategies I might have used when playing just the base game are still viable options with the expansion. In my opinion, this expansion actually makes the game a lot more playable, as you’ll have access to more resources, better powers, and will earn more rewards, more often.
Bad Comet Games titles have always been plagued by their length, and with a group who knows what they are doing, adding in Winterfall actually makes a game of Wondrous Creatures go faster.
If you love Wondrous Creatures, then this is an easy recommendation from us. If you weren’t keen on the game when it first launched, nothing here is about to change your mind.
What you need to know
Is the Wondrous Creatures base game required to play Wondrous Creatures: Winterfall?
Yes, a base copy of Wondrous Creatures is required to play the expansion.
If I don’t like Everdell, would you recommend Wondrous Creatures?
While these two games are not really all that similar, they both have you building out a tableau of cards that provide bonuses. If that aspect of Everdell is what you don’t enjoy, I’m not sure Wondrous Creatures would be a good option for you.
Authored by
Adam Roffel
Adam has been writing about video games since 2014 and board games since 2018. If he's not rooting for the Toronto Maple Leafs or Toronto FC, he definitely has a controller in his hand - probably playing on a Nintendo platform - or is sitting at a table playing a board game. Adam also has firm opinions on a few key topics: there are much better board games than Settlers of Catan, and Nintendo doesn't need to compete with Sony and Microsoft.
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