Finspan Sharks & Reefs: Unboxing and What's New
Transcript
Hey, I'm Jamie from Stonemire Games, and today I am really excited to share with you an unboxing, unveiling, and uh kind of a what's new in the first Finsspan expansion, Sharks and Reefs. I'm going to go through an unboxing video today, show you what's inside the box, and show you what these components mean for the uh foreseeable future of Finsspan. So, let's take a look. Here is the Sharks and Reefs box right here. And let's go ahead and open it up. So, it is it's a pretty big box for a specific reason. Um, and it is one of these folding boxes because you won't need this box after you open the expansion. The reason is we included a pretty big tray in here. The reason for that is that we wanted the biggest tray that we could fit into the Finsspan box next to the tray that was included with the original game. I'll show you what it looks like right here. So, here is the original Finsspan box. Here's the original tray. And now you can also fit this other tray in the box. So, we wanted you to fit uh as much Fins Span stuff in the core box as possible. So, hopefully we don't need something like a nesting box like I have for Wingspan behind me. We can hopefully fit a lot of Finsspan stuff right in the box. So, we went with this big tray for this expansion that includes a lot of new cards. Not enough to fill up this tray at all because we're kind of planning for the future. There's also this middle section right here which will be used for uh the coral tokens which I'll show
you in a moment. They're actually in this other tray over here. Um so one of the core elements of Sharks and Reef Reefs are a lot more cards. So we have a ton more fish cards in this expansion. Here's just a small sampling of them. Here's some of the fish cards. Here's some fish that I already showed on an update. Um, I'll keep going because we have more fish here and even more in here as well. Here are the rest of the fish cards. In total, I might have to look at the the rule book. I'll get to the total in a second, but here are a bunch more fish cards, including one thing that we're trying to do with the Finsspan expansions is include, it's a fiveplayer game, and so we're including five new starter fish in the expansion. So, you can have uh you can add these to the 10 starter fish that were included in the core game.
So, some some new starter fish, some new original or just new fish, standard fish along with some solo Altama cards here. These are for Otama solo mode. And over here, we have five new reference cards that reference the new icons that we've added in this expansion. I'll keep those out to reference as I'm talking about it in this video. So, we have all that stuff. One other thing that isn't in this tray because I've already put it in my finsspan tray or my core box tray over here is that we have these coral tokens. See them right here. A bunch of coral tokens. I believe there's 30 of each token. Blue, green, and purple. And these lean into the coral reef aspect of this expansion.
That will make more sense in a moment. But a bunch of wooden tokens. They are uh printed on one side. There's no real reason to print on both sides of them, but they are printed on one side. So, in this expansion, we have a bunch of these tray or these uh these overlays. These overlays will go on the um the original mat for Finsspin um the player mat, the ocean mat. So, these will overlay on top of the mat. And what these do is they give you places to place coral as you're diving down into the reef. So as you as you dive down, as you reach this area, so you can see it's right above the twilight zone. Um as you reach this area, you can if you want to uh pay in this column in this dive site, you can pay an egg to place a coral token. You can place get rid of a young to place a coral token or discard a a card from hand to place a coral token. And what these do, these coral tokens are done for they're used for a couple things throughout the game. One of the purposes of the coral tokens is that they help you activate certain abilities. Let's see if I can find a fish card that wants coral. So, like this one, the furry coffin fish says that if activated, you can recover a card from your discard pile. Also, if you have three of the purple coral tokens in the dive site, so in the far
right dive site, um then uh then you can um I believe that was the purple one. No, no, it's the it's the should be the green one, I guess. Yeah, the green because we're in the green dive site or whatever the dive this dive site is. uh you can move a young or a school as far as you want in one direction. So these abilities get better if you've reached this threshold of three. We use that threshold a lot throughout this expansion. Also, there are ways that certain fish just give you coral tokens when played. You just get a coral this type of coral token here. So, at the end of the game, coral tokens give you different uh point values based on basically how difficult it was to complete the coral. So, every individual coral will give you one point at the end of the game, but if you complete the coral reef with six tokens. So, like if I have all six tokens here, I'll get eight bonus points at the end of the game. Feels good to complete those core reefs. These are double-sided. The backside is just uh just has regular just has circles in it. We use both for play testing, just a generic circle and an exact shape. I think in general, people will probably use the exact shape version, but um it's fine to it's fine to use either type here in case you want to kind of mix up the colors of the coral to have a more colorful wreath.
We have five overlays. We also have an updated score pad here. Um I believe there's all actually no, it's just double-sided. We sometimes we do all of one side. Um, but in this in this one we just have the uh the standard uh player mat. And yeah, as I mentioned here at the end of the game, we have coral one point each plus that bonus for the reef. We have updated autama rules for solo play and we have an updated rule book for sharks and reef play. There was one icon that I didn't mention before. Actually, we have a couple new icons. Um, so there's also this like any coral icon. This icon means a fish in your ocean consumes a shorter fish from your hand.
So I I guess we didn't have that in the core game. I thought maybe we had that in the core game, but uh this is a an ability that says specifically you're tucking a card from your hand. This icon means this is one that I was advocating to have in this expansion. This means choose a fish from your hand with the characteristics shown if any and play it for free. Do not pay the cost. So, it might be like u a fish might give you a bonus at the end of the game and it might say play a fish um in this dive site, but if it has this little icon, it means that you get to skip the cost. Unlike in the core game where there's a similar icon where just the card without that icon that says play a fish in this dive site, but you still have to pay the cost whenever you do that. This lets you play it for free. This one also just says play this fish for free. This last icon you can see on a lot of the sharks in the game. This means discard discard a school token from your ocean. So, get rid of a school token, but then place one young in each of four different slots. If you do not have a school token to discard, place one yoke young token instead. This is really powerful. At first, you might think, why would I want to give up a school token? I I already have it. It's worth six points at the end of the game.
Young are only worth one. But you make a school using three young. This says you get uh you end up getting four young. So, you get to scatter these young. You scatter the school. So, you're going from three young to four young. And some of those young might immediately form new schools based on where you put them because you can put them in any slot on your on your uh on your mat. So, that ability can be really powerful leaning into the kind of the shark theme of a shark swimming through a school of fish and how to get scattered. Um, yeah, we also have a section of the rule book that we added that has commonly overlooked rules from maybe the core game in case people messed up certain rules. And last, we have the new punch board. This adds some new goal tiles. They're all double-sided.
Some new double-sided goal ties tiles. And also an updated um achievement mat. Same same as the core game. We have a side A and a side B. The addition here is pretty much just the reminder that uh the coral tokens are score one point each plus the bonus points for complete reefs at the end of the game. So, those are the new mechanisms and the components from Finsspan Sharks and Reefs. I've really enjoyed adding this expansion to my copy of Finsspan. I I think it it leans really well into the theme of the coral coral reefs of the and the schools. It offers a bunch of new abilities and um yeah, and it it uh it makes the mat even more colorful because you're kind of growing your mat with these reef tokens while you're playing. So yeah, I hope you have fun exploring Finsspan Sharks and Reefs. And uh yeah, if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments. I'm happy to talk about specific abilities, how they interact with the core game.
Finsspan, sharks, and reefs. Pretty big box. Again, just for that tray so that you can fit a lot of components into the core game of Finsspan. You can recycle this box after you open it. Yeah, let me know if you have any questions. I look forward to sharing this expansion with you in the near future. It'll be on our web store soon. Or if you're watching this in the future, might already be there. I'm recording this in uh late March of 2026. This should be on our web store in May 2026. So, if you're watching this uh in the in the future, then it's already available. All right. Thanks,