It’s a beautiful day in the Feather Lane neighborhood, with tree-lined streets and brightly-colored houses, along with birds who are definitely not drones to spy on you. Can you build the nicest trio of streets with the right combinations of houses, birds, and trees to earn the most points?

Feather Lane is the newest title from Last Night Games, owned by designers Nathan and Jake Jenne, whose biggest hit is the dice-drafter Panda Royale and who also made the cute flip-and-write game Horticulture. This title is also pretty light, and very easy to learn, with enough strategy and variety in the cards to give it high replay value. You can pre-order it now on Miniature Market.

Players in Feather Lane will draft 24 cards over 12 turns to build three streets in front of them, with the goal of scoring the most points from the four public objective cards and from having the longest top, middle, or bottom streets. Each card has three segments on it, with each segment showing a house, a tree, or a birdbath. When you add a card to a street, you must overlap cards – the new one can go over or under an existing one, and you can cover as many segments as you like, but you must cover at least one segment on a new or current card. Each pair of cards you draft also gets you a bird token that you’ll place on a house of the same color at the end of that round.

There’s a central market of cards that allows the active player to select from sets of two cards and a bird. After each selection, the market is refilled so that the pairs change – the left column’s cards shift down into the open space, the right column’s cards shift up, and then new cards go to the top-left and bottom-right spaces. (The birds don’t move. They do what they please.) The round ends once every player has made four selections, getting eight cards and four effin’ birds, after which players place their four birds anywhere on their streets as long as the birds’ colors match their buildings. If a player can’t place a bird, or doesn’t want to, they can return it to the bag and take one mouse instead; a mouse on a building is worth one point at game-end.

There are four decks of objective cards in Feather Lane, each covering a different type of criteria, and you’ll choose one card randomly per deck at the start of each game. One deck is specific to birds, one to trees, and two to different buildings. There are four colors of buildings and of birds, and buildings come in large or small, while there are also different colors of trees. Bird baths are worth a flat two points each and I don’t believe they count for any objectives (but it’s possible I haven’t seen one of those yet). The points for these objectives vary based on how difficult they are to achieve, and you can rack up a lot of points if you hit some of them repeatedly.

Feather Lane suggests a play time of 30 minutes, but I’d say that’s the low end of the range; it plays up to six people, which I haven’t tried, but there is no chance six people play this in a half hour unless everyone plays like Chandler Simpson runs. If it weren’t for the complexity of some of the objective cards, you could play this with an 8-year-old, and you could probably select specific objective cards if you wanted to get some younger kids to the table.

I can’t help but compare this game to Tenby, another street-building game that came out this year, but a more complex and challenging one that tickled my brain more – but also isn’t a great game for new or younger players, which Feather Lane would be. I could teach anyone Feather Lane in five minutes; Tenby almost requires a few rounds to fully teach someone the selection and scoring mechanics involved. Tenby is the better game, but I would recommend Feather Lane first for family play. It’s a grade B for me,

Johannes Goupy is one of the best and most prolific new game designers to pop up in the last few years, making a name for himself with a number of small-box/big-thinking games like his hit game Faraway (which just got its third expansion), Rauha, and the lighter Pixies, as well as the heavy game From the Moon, the last of which is on my shelf of shame at the moment. Space Lab is in that former category, with a decent amount of tension and strategy in a smaller box, although it is definitely more luck-driven than Faraway and might frustrate players looking for something that gives you more control over card draws.

In Space Lab, players will draw and draft cards to fill out the ten spaces in their personal tableaux, working around three space stations that each have unique scoring objectives, similar to Forest Shuffle’s tableau format but much simpler with only one card going into each slot. At the end of the game, you score for the cards you played, the objectives you completed, and project cards you picked up, mostly through the cards you played above your space stations (three spots).

On your turn, you can draw three cards from the deck, keeping all cards of any single color and placing the rest in the ‘recruitment center.’ You can also take all cards of one color from that recruitment center area. As long as you start your turn with fewer than five cards in your hand, those two actions are available. You can also play any card from your hand, paying its cost (in the upper left corner, from 0 to 3) by discarding that many cards from your hand. Those cards go to the discard pile, not the recruitment center, so they’re out of play until the deck is exhausted and you have to reshuffle.

There are four colors in the game, representing different space agencies, and four roles on the player cards, both of which matter for scoring. Objective cards in your three space stations show three colors, anything from three different ones to three identical, and you score those if you place those colors in the four spots around the station. (You have ten card slots because there are two shared ones, between the left and middle stations and middle and right ones.) The roles matter mostly for end-game scoring, although there are some in-game options on objective cards where you gain something if you play that symbol below the station you gain a project or regular card. Finishing an objective card allows you to take the top point token from the stack for that location, with the points declining and the top left and right tokens giving you a one-time bonus as well.

The project cards are a bit of a lottery ticket, and from what I see on BGG, they’re the part of the game that engenders the most disagreement. When you play a card to one of the three slots above your three stations, you draw project cards equal to the number/cost of the card you played. You then keep just one of the project cards, all of which score more if you collect more of the set. Thus, playing expensive cards to those slots in your tableau means cycling through more of the project deck and increasing your odds of getting the card(s) you need. It is random, mostly, but you have some say in the matter here, enough that, for a medium-light game, I’m good with the balance.

The game progresses until one player fills all ten spots in their tableau or fulfills all three objective cards, at which point, you score. Many cards have variable scoring based on what’s in your entire tableau (e.g., 1-3 points per astronaut card) or just that card’s row, while others have fixed point values from 1-7. There’s a scoring pad here, but it’s not very difficult to score in your head.

I’m definitely higher than the consensus on Space Lab, which is about to get its first U.S. release from Pandasaurus (who sent me a review copy). It’s a fun filler that has a tiny bit of player interaction through the shared card space of the recruitment center, but where mostly you’re trying to cycle through the decks to get stuff you need. I wouldn’t put it over Faraway, but I’d probably take it over Rauha, just among Goupy’s games I’ve played. The solo mode is pretty tight as well, because it keeps all of the game’s rules but ends when the deck is exhausted and has a single automatic step that discards quite a few cards on each turn. It’s a B+ for me, and you can pre-order it from Pandasaurus now.