You need to balance the need for exploration the alchemy map and proceeding with legendary recipes while also keeping enough ingredients to keep customers happy. The loop is fun and relaxing, but I can see how it can become tedious after a couple of hours of seeing slower and slower progress.
When I relax in Wingspan, what I don't expect from an expansion is new mechanics that will change the way I approach the game. I already like how I approach the game... ;) And Oceania delivers: it's more birds, and it's new mechanics that fortunately merge almost seamlessly with the old ones. The new board nerfs some strategies that might have been considered too easy. Also, Nectar is a nice way to smoothen the game-play, reducing the number of times when birds get stuck in hand due to lack of resources. So: the game is as relaxing as ever, and if there were frustrating moments, there are now less of those. No additional notes from me. :)
A very relaxing game that I go back to repeatedly to play a round, sometimes two, every couple of days. Mechanics-wise, this is a spreadsheet optimization game: cards give bonuses, which you try to constructively stack, so that the effects feed of each other. The deck and the dice throw randomness your way that you will often find it difficult to optimally execute a strategy and will have to pivot in some ways. If you approach it as a hardcore games with only winning as your aim you will be able to memorize the strategies pretty easily and get bored while winning consistently. But this game excels not when you take a gun, a scope and aim for winning, but when you take some binoculars and just enjoy the birds, while playing some cards on the board in the meantime. You will still organically get better from game to game (admittedly, the game-play here is a much better teacher than the tutorial), in case the sting of casually losing repeatedly is something that would deter you. And then, you'll be able to just load this up every couple of days to relax and wind down after a long day. :)
