Wingspan (board game or video game) is such a lovely and cozy board game about attracting birds into your different habitats, designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and published by Stonemeier Games. BoardGameGeek describes it as a competitive, medium-weight, card-driven, engine-building board game. It has inspired sequels/alternate versions such as Wyrmspan and Finspan with their own mechanical twists.
Board game
Wingspan is an engine builder but I’d say in a bit different way than the usual. A lot of the engine part is already on the player’s board and you enhance it by playing cards and quite often, the biggest benefits of the engine comes from playing any bird as you’ll get better benefits based on how many birds you have in each habitat or lane on the board.
The birds then add their own engine parts that enhance your engine and help you achieve your goals but there’s always a benefit to playing a card even if you don’t have a specific card you’re looking for. I’m usually bad at engine builders because I tend to bounce back and forth with the ideas and ending up with suboptimal, spread out engines. I never feel like that with Wingspan which is why I like it a lot.
Photo by Daniel Mizieliński, shared with CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
A game of Wingspan is played in four rounds, each having their own goal and each round players have a diminishing amount of actions they can take. These actions allow players to
- play birds from their hand
- Gain food and activate birds in the forest
- Lay eggs and activate birds in the grasslands
- Draw bird cards and activate birds in the wetland.
It’s a simple loop but an effective one. Since gaining resources and using them are two separate actions and to play a bird card, you’d need a suitable card, required resources and eggs on the board, it can sometimes take three turns to effectively get one thing done.
This means you have to be strategic about when to do which actions so that you can build up for the future as well to be able to essentially skip some of the steps later. There’s a bit of randomness though with which food resources and bird cards are available so you can’t always plan perfectly.
The game has very little interaction between players which makes it a great game for social game nights. While one person is taking their action, others can chat. There are some actions that allow other players to make choices on someone else’s turn but the player who’s turn it is can just tell people when that happens. To some players, that lack of interaction is a blessing and others will heavily dislike it so depending on which type of player you are, you may love or hate the game.
Video game
The video game adaptation, developed by Monster Couch is one of the better board game adaptations of a board game. You can play against different levels of computer players (easy, normal, hard), against other players online or (my favourite one) against other players in a hotseat mode. This means only one player has to own the game and they can pass the controller on the couch as the game is played in turns and there’s rather little interaction during other players’ turns.
The video game has beautiful art and when you play a bird to your board, there’s a short spoken audio clip about that bird which I find a really nice tough. It’s easy to ignore if you just want to focus on the game play or socialising with friends but at the same time, it’s a nice way to learn more about the birds and it fits the cozy vibes of the game perfectly.
There’s one negative aspect that’s worth mentioning though. Each of the three habitats have their own view as well as all the other players so if you want to keep an eye on what’s happening, you need to browser through 12 different views in a 4 player game. It makes it difficult to gain an overview of the game state which leads the game to being played more solitaire-style.
Otherwise the UI is wonderful and after a bit of practice, it becomes easy to understand what actions are available and how to take them.