It isn’t often that we can say that a board game has great sound design. When it comes to Corvids, another small-box offering from the creative collective Jasper Beatrix, that’s possibly my favorite thing about the entire game. This one is about birds digging through a trash heap to find the shiniest bits and bobs to decorate their nests. It’s an affecting, gentle exercise occasionally rent by theft and spite.

Rustle rustle.

In the beginning, there was garbage.

Corvids opens with a trashfall, cards shuffled and then dumped across its fabric mat. Moments later, wooden feathers will also be scattered like raven-black sprinkles over melted ice cream. The resultant tangle of cards, some face-up, others face-down, many concealed by the rubbish, marks the banquet for the forthcoming struggle.

Compared to much of what we cover here, this is a straightforward game. Turns consist of two parts. First, using slender plastic tweezers that represent your beak, you select a card — any card, even one that’s mostly buried — pinch it tight, and flip it over, possibly overturning cards and feathers. Next, you will select a single card, an exhumed offering this time, to claim for your own.

These treasures confer points, but there’s an essential texture to each one. Some confer extra points, like buttons that are worth more if you scrounge together three of them, or car keys that jingle pleasantly once you’ve collected a pair. Others provide bonus actions, like an acorn that permits you to rustle through the pile once more, a metal nut that gathers together some feathers, or a bent paperclip, the traditional tool of ravens and crows, which can be used to pull another card from the heap.

Importantly, claimed cards must retain their orientation. This permits a few unexpected rays to break through the cloud cover. Coins, for example, are worth extra points when stored securely face-down, while tickets and string can be flipped up to either steal from a rival or prevent one from pilfering your own nest.

The more mess, the better.

Theft is a big part of life in Corvids. Certain items permit stealing, but so do those feathers you dredge from the dump. When spent — by scattering them back onto the pile — you’re allowed to nab a single card from another bird’s collection, hopefully avoiding any blue-footed booby-traps (okay, just string) and stealing their very best tidbits for yourself.

But this process is far from thoughtless. As is quickly becoming one of Jasper Beatrix’s hallmarks, there’s more to stealing than simply declaring that you want so-and-so’s bottle cap. Each player also has a corresponding bird card. This outlines which treasures award bonus points, which is already a nifty detail, but the really interesting part is that your identity starts out hidden. Only once your nest is uncovered on the mat, all those cards brushed away, does it get turned over. Your hiding place revealed, now it’s open season on your loot.

Of course, you can hide your nest again, obscuring it once more by dragging cards back over its place on the mat. This transforms the back half of any session into a twee arms race, everybody scuffling through the trash to uncover rival nests and conceal their own. As gameplay, it feels somewhat binary. You reveal my nest; I cover it back up; you uncover its location again. But as diegetic sound design, it’s downright pleasant.

Scoring my birb’s collection.

Both the Greeks and the Romans had a word for the sound produced by wind moving through leaves or water burbling in brooks, birds pecking through dried grass, the scamper of little feet through reeds. Both of those words, psithurism and susurration, took their origin from their respective language’s root for “whisper.” In English we would likely call it a rustle, although I don’t think that conveys the smallness of such noises, their capacity to course shivers of pleasure down our legs and spines, their song.

To my delight, Corvids produces those same small noises through the clatter of wood against cardstock, the linen ridges as they slide over and past one another, the dry friction of edges catching corners, the click of the tweezers. When a flipped card takes an entire pile with it, turning them over, the noise it produces is unlike anything I’ve heard a board game even attempt. My eleven-year-old noted that Corvids “felt good,” but that she couldn’t explain why. It isn’t only the feel. It’s how the game caresses the ear.

Was this deliberate on the creative team’s part? Did they strive to mimic not only the objects coveted by corvids, their cleverness and smartness, their little wars, but also the sounds they make as they pick through fallen leaves? Or was this all a happy accident, an unexpected crossover between the games played by ravens and humans, some shared helice from the Late Carboniferous passed down as one last testament to our kinship?

I have no idea. I’m not even sure I want to know. Whether deliberate or serendipitous, either answer would be charming in its own right. Either way, Corvids is full of those sounds, those little moments of unexpected there-ness, when the black tweezers, colored surely on purpose to evoke a beak, sheds its plastic nature and becomes, for an instant, keratin and bone.

Will I expose a nest this turn? I hope so.

As a plaything, Corvids intrigues. Of the Jasper Beatrix titles I’ve played, it’s undoubtedly the flimsiest, playing the symphony straight rather than adding that distinctive ludic wrinkle. For that, Typeset and Scream Park and Signal and Here Lies remain untouched.

But I keep coming back to its sense of diegesis, its narrative-without-narration, its whispers-in-leaves. I am astounded not at its gameplay, but at its capacity to excite the senses. I intend to keep it around for that reason, for when I go searching not for innovative gameplay, but for an experience that will channel chilled rosewater through my nervous system.

A complimentary copy of Corvids was provided by the publisher.

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