Thinky Direct 2025: Take flight in Scrabble-style, deck-builder Birdigo

Emma Withington, 3 June 2025

Birdigo is part of Thinky Direct 2025! If you missed it, Thinky Direct was our very first games showcase, spotlighting some of the most highly anticipated games you'll love to solve. We covered big announcements, exclusive trailers, brand new demos, and more! If you want to view the showcase, you can watch it right here on the website or on YouTube and Twitch.

Birdigo is redefining the term ‘birdbrain’, as scoring big in this Scrabble-style, roguelike deck-builder is the only way to get these pleasingly röund, bouncy birds to pack their bags and migrate. These birds know their words, and only the best will do for these harsh avian critics. Some say Shakespeare's impact on migration is often overlooked. 

Fans of board games like Wingspan may get a kick out of Birdigo's presentation, with its selection of real-world migration routes on the map and tidbits of information, including the Latin name of each path's feathery namesake. In the demo, you take flight on the Swainson’s Hawk Path, which features 14 stops to try and clear in one run. 

Here's the premise: you need to score enough points to fly the distance required to reach the next stop. If you don't, the birds hightail it back home, and you kick yourself for not playing that really obvious word that could have scored big. 

You're given the ‘Classic’ deck, containing a large range of letter tiles that includes the full alphabet and plenty of vowels for a balanced beginning. Looking at the unlockable decks you’d have access to in the full game, there will be several ways to help you play to your strengths or significantly up the ante. Why not challenge yourself with the E-less ‘Gadsby’ deck, or unleash your inner pirate (we all have one) with the R-tastic ‘Pirate’ deck?

Starting with the basics, you have a set of seven letters and a target distance of 20 to hit. Each basic letter is worth one flap, speckled tiles are worth two, gold is worth five and so on. Times this by power, which is generated by the length of the word, and hopefully the result means chocks away for the flock! You can play four words to reach your goal and discard up to four letters. The total distance required increases at each stop, alongside introducing its roguelike enhancements in the form of feather and song cards to help you reach the final destination. These appear as level rewards, or can be bought with seed-like currency when you reach a trading post, run by a bird that's absolutely the head bobbing champion of 2025. The more word attempts you have left at the end of each level, the better, as each remaining attempt converts into currency. 

You can have up to five feathers, which provide passive skills for the run, activating on every turn if applicable. In true roguelike fashion, you and your grey matter need to be malleable to the RNG, and Birdigo soon has you strategising with a host of possibilities. While longer words are initially the way to go, less is frequently more in some of my favoured powerhouse combinations. Thanks to the combo of Odd Duck (+5 power if word length is odd), Plume (+4 power on every turn), AEIOU (+2 power per vowel), and Elated (+10 flaps per E) on top of the basic points system - Reeds became one of my top scoring words at 450 points. I'm not maths-brained, but in this context, I can get behind it. Work smarter, not harder, right? 

Song cards are single-use and you can have two in your deck. These are more situational and nice to have, rather than something to rely on, but once you get a feel for each run, they can be extremely powerful and swoop in to save the day. Pairing the song Tweeet (transform up to three letters into E’s) with the feather Elated for example, is a strong combination. Along the flight path there are also optional levels featuring the humble egg, which can net you permanent bonuses for your run - for example, cracking open the Egg of Inquiry gives you an extra discard.

Birdigo's difficulty curve is steady yet devious, rapidly pushing you to your linguistic limits. As a result, it was extremely satisfying when I could consistently score over 300 points after some experimentation, and I was compelled to keep going even after achieving a winning run. It also manages to veer away from being overly stressful, even when the odds are stacked against you. Its melodious and unobtrusive soundtrack of birdsong and soft piano tones, while birds happily bob along, creates a meditative experience that focuses the mind, and clearing my mind is normally a heck of a task, let me tell you.   

Even within the limitations of the demo, there are seemingly endless possibilities to get these birds south for the winter (more than six million combinations in the full game, according to Steam). Don't let Birdigo's simplistic aesthetic or vacant-looking birds fool you, there’s a compulsive puzzler underneath ready to ensnare the word enjoyers.