Spread those wings

Looking beyond the drama and distribution issues, how does Wingspan stack up as a game?

The TL;DR

• Production quality is great, a labour of love

• Lightweight, tight gameplay with no sense of surplus

• Blue side scoring makes it even more of an MPS (Multi-Player Solitaire) game (I recommend using the green)

• Synergies rather than engines, but can be difficult to create due to lack of choice

• Restricted bird choices limit options, but the game has a great pace, weight and replayability

Magnificent Plumage

This is a game that drips with gorgeous details, from the unique artwork and bird on every card, to the ever so tactile eggs. The player boards are robust and look like you're opening some leather sketchbook and it comes with its very own bird box dice tower. It's silly but even the rulebook's linen finish set this game apart.

Yes, there are things you could complain about if you're in the mood; the plastic card tray, thin card scoring board and cardboard food tokens, but the worst you could say is that these are just standard and some games wouldn't even include them.

The bird deck is an ornithologist's dream with details on the common and Latin names of each bird, its habitat, food and nest type, where it's found geographically and an interesting (or in the case of the American Kestrel disturbing) little fact. Plus of course it's wingspan.

All that and the game manages to cleanly convey everything you'll need to play the game. The iconography is clear and it takes very little to learn what all the symbols mean.

Gameplay

Gameplay is very clean and keeps the game feeling light, there are not a lot of options, but limited actions and the importance of each choice do mean this game is subject to a little AP.

This can kick in as early as set-up when you're presented with 5 food and 5 birds and asked to keep any combination of 5 of them. You also have two bonus cards from which you'll keep just 1. It's unlikely you'll see great synergy here given the variability of cards, but these decisions may shape the rest of the game. Some players, particularly in their first few plays, will find this choice incredibly difficult.

Once you're ready to play on your turn you have just four possible options;

• Play a Bird

• Gain Food

• Lay Eggs

• Draw Bird Cards

The first, Play a Bird, works a little differently than the others and changes the way the others work. You choose the column in which you want to place the bird and place one of your action cubes above that column paying the requisite number of eggs. You then place the selected bird, paying its food cost, onto your player board.

This may result in a 'when played' ability being triggered, but more often will end your turn.

Gain Food, Lay Eggs and Draw Bird Cards all work the same way. You place an action cube on the row you wish to activate, then find the leftmost empty space on the board and process that action. Having more birds placed will increase the value of these actions. This will gain you resources (food, eggs - if you have birds to place them on, or new cards) you may also have the option to trade for an extra resource (a card for a food, a food for an egg or an egg for a card).

After that, you work from right to left looking for birds on that row that have a 'when activated' ability and process those.

The game is played over four rounds and you have a declining number of actions during each of these; 8, then 7, then 6 then finally 5 (26 in total). At the end of each round you score a specific scoring tile which can be for things like; number of eggs in a particular type of nest, birds in a habitat or number of eggs in a habitat. After four rounds the game ends and you score.

Scoring is a point salad with points scored for birds, bonus cards, eggs, cached food, end of round conditions and tucked cards. Each of these can vary wildly meaning there is a good variety of ways to approach the game.

Take the Green Pill

The game presents two options for scoring end of round bonuses; blue and green. Blue offers 1 point to a maximum of 5 for each matched condition. The green side offers the player with the highest number of matched conditions points and rewards the objectives for later rounds more.

Go green

With the blue side you can broadly ignore your opponent's boards, what they do makes very little difference to your game and you will feel you are playing your own game while they play theirs. On the green, while the game does not transform into an interactive game, you will regularly check how each player is doing against the objectives and it encourages focusing on leading the pack for later goals.

I would highly recommend using the green side exclusively.

Left Hungry

Excellently the game never gets to a point seen in other engine builders where you take actions that acquire you more resources than you can meaningfully use. This means you're always wishing for just one more action or just one more piece of food or egg.

Some turns can feel like you're refuelling to start playing again, particularly if you haven't played birds on a particular row. You don't experience this as intensely as you might in a game like The Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, where your whole turn is consumed by the reset, but it can be more frequent.

With a restrictive opening hand and just three cards on display at any time, you get to see very few bird cards over the course of the game, which means it holds massive replayability just in that deck before you even look at the plentiful bonus cards and end round scoring options.

The downside to this is that you may find you never see the makings of an engine or may have to ignore potential engine building plays later in the game because you don't have the time left to meaningfully take advantage of them.

A great combination

In any case, I felt the game presented more synergies than engines. There aren't three or four card chains that gain you massive advantages, but typically you'll see card a that makes card b better, or gains you its effect for free.

While I feel the limited bird choices mean less engine building options, Wingspan's weight and pace are excellent, the design is gorgeous and the replayability high.

I'm very glad it's finally managed to find a perch in my collection.