Of the nearly 200,000 board games listed on Board Game Geek, Wingspan is currently ranked number 38. It’s a ten-ton gorilla in the board gaming world, and one that I had never previously played.
I’ll admit, the reason I hadn’t picked it up sooner is the theme. I just wasn’t sure how I felt about playing a game completely bereft of wizards, T-34 tanks or zombies.
But, I’m trying to be more open-minded these days. So, after the monumental success of Tsuro: The Game of the Path with the family earlier this week, I doubled-down and yanked Wingspan off the shelf from the Halifax Library.
Avian engine-building
Wingspan is an engine-building game where you adopt the role of a bird enthusiast. Your goal is to discover and attract the best birds to your aviary. You take it in turns to either play bird cards onto your habitats, collect food, lay eggs or draw cards from the table. Taking an action in a habitat can also trigger the special abilities of birds already played there. Most actions amount to points in some form or another, and the winner is the player with the most points accumulated after four rounds.
If your games pan out like mine, you’ll spend the early game focusing on attracting new birds to your aviary with food, eggs, and false promises of a better life in your care. By the last round, you’re battery farming the soul out of them while your feathered Luftwaffe blocks out the sun.
It’s a delicate balancing act of placing the right birds in the best habitats, and making strong combinations of special abilities to maximise points.
The sheer volume of bird cards and combinations allows countless possible board states – every new game is a new puzzle. This gives Wingspan plenty of replay-ability and prevents experienced players from optimising the fun out of it.
From my limited experience, the game seems pretty well balanced. No single bird feels particularly under- or overpowered, and any strength in one area is usually offset by a weakness in another. Some cards are clearly geared towards one playing style or points approach, but no starting hand feels unbeatable.
I found the birds in your starting hand heavily influence your overall playing style. In one game, I parked a northern harrier on the grassland on turn one. By game-end, the hungry little bastard had eaten everything but the kitchen sink, bagging a ton of points. In another game, when tits-krieg wasn’t an option, I sent in the SAS (Sparrow Air Services). The song sparrow’s ability to flit around the board on each turn nearly doubles the effectiveness of your early actions. Granted, it wasn’t a harrier bloodbath, but it delivered results. Well-played early cards heavily impact the result.
Wingspan is beautiful
Every card in the core game has a unique illustration, and each is delightful. In fact, the whole game has an aesthetic polish that looks like the creators took a lot of pride – and joy – in making it. The design system works wonderfully. The board, complex as it could have been, is so intuitively laid out that it keeps cognitive load to a minimum. Even the choice to create the eggs in a range of colours, which serves no mechanical purpose, demonstrates how much the designers care about creating a pleasant playing experience.
Wingspan is serenity in a box and, when firing on all cylinders, the mechanics and aesthetics combine for a really delightful, rewarding game. I can see why the designers restrained themselves from giving the birds hand grenades, now.
Rules so simple they can clip your wings
After a few rounds, the game loop becomes mostly instinctive. For some reason, the simplest rule seemed to be the hardest for certain members around the table to grasp.
When you play a bird, you pay that bird’s cost and do nothing else. Nothing else extends to all the varied and miraculous possibilities you can think of. This, strangely, presented the biggest challenge. A typical interaction might go something like:
Mum: “I’m going to play this bird. I’ve paid the food and egg cost. Now I’m going to activate…”
Me: “No, mum. That’s it. Once you’ve played the bird, there’s no other action.”
Mum: “OK, so I’ll just draw a card then…”
Me: “No, mum. No card needs drawing.”
Mum: “Right. Yes. Can I lay an egg?”
Me: “Ideally not, mum. Just do nothing, yeah?”
Mum: “OK. Well what should I do then?”
I began to question my own reality having to repeatedly check-off all the things that nothing else constitutes.
Player interaction
My only major criticism is the player interaction. It’s… minimal. This is an engine-building game, and I spent most of the time staring down at my own game board. Other players served mostly as a background noise. My mum could have built Jurassic Park at the other end of the coffee table and I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.
You share the same resource pools: cards, food etc, and there is some interdependency between players’ boards, but this feels more shoehorned in than offering any meaningful interaction. It usually comes in the form of a bird with an ability of if another player does X, your bird does Y. Honestly, most of our games didn’t even have these birds in play and they weren’t missed.
You could choose to take shared resources tactically in a way that denies other players options, but there is so much to do on any given turn that this never felt limiting enough to adopt as a strategy.
No, Wingspan is a solo game with an option to play alongside other people. You all play the best solo experience you can, and at the end you look up and figure out who had the better solo game to determine the winner.
I get why some players find this appealing. Ultimately, nothing you do in Wingspan will ruin the day of another player. But that also takes away any sense of investment we have in each other’s boards. My board has a negligible impact on my opponent’s, so why should they bother looking? They’re hardly going to share my joy as my Kestrel claims its fifth mouse of the day.
What I’m trying to say is, sometimes, you’ve just got to send an army of MG42-wielding swallow dive bombers into your opponents’ base to remind them who’s boss, a feature sorely missing in Wingspan.
And yet, it’s fun
There’s no denying it. For a game without space wizards, I had a surprising amount of fun. Every time we finished a game, it took no effort to say yes to another one. We filled a whole afternoon and evening playing. If somebody got this out at a gathering, I’d be very happy – even excited – to play it again.
Wingspan is beautiful, elegant and great fun. I just won’t be buying it for my own shelf. Not until they release a Cold War expansion, at least.
