Wyrmspan is a 2024 sequel/alternate to a hit game Wingspan but with dragon theme and few different gameplay mechanics. Before playing my first Wyrmspan game, I had played a few dozen Wingspans and am absolutely a fan of that game.
In Wyrmspan, your goal is to gather more points than your opponents by excavating caves, enticing different dragons to move into those caves and exploring the caves to fulfill goals.
Photo by Daniel Thurot, shared with CC BY-SA 3.0 license
Each dragon has a preference of which of the three caves they are willing to live in, a resource cost, point total and some activated ability that can be activated when played, when explored, at the end of round or at the end of game. There’s a lot of depth and strategy that is balanced with quite a heavy randomness on which dragons you end up with.
The game is played in four rounds, each lasting multiple turns where players can take actions to build their board.
Photo by Daniel Thurot, shared with CC BY-SA 3.0 license
A major change or addition compared to Wingspan is the Dragon Guild. It’s a separate, shared board where advancing around the board will net you resources, cards and eggs and twice per resolution of the circle, players can activate very powerful abilities like playing dragon or cave cards for free, gaining more actions per round or scoring points at the end of the game.
I focused quite heavily on advancing in that board on my first game play and it definitely netted me a ton of points, some directly and some indirectly so ignoring it is not a good idea. The activated abilities are also limited to either two or three per ability and if you let your opponents use them first, you may be left without the best moves in the game.
I really enjoyed Wyrmspan. It’s hard to compare with Wingspan as it’s been a while since I’ve played that: some parts felt a bit more complicated but on the other hand things like Dragon Guild added its own extra actions to take and focus on that maybe there was more to do than in Wingspan.
A common feeling in both games is always feeling like you’re behind on resources or actions to do the things you want to do. It lends to really exciting game play that requires you to make smart moves but I’m not the biggest fan of that feeling lingering throughout most of the game play.
Definitely a game that I’ll never say no to when offered to play. Too big of a box and too many tokens for me to own though but I’m glad to have a friend who owns and likes it.