Review: Wingspan

Introduction & Overview

You are passionate bird enthusiasts seeking to discover and attract the most interesting birds to your aviaries. Each bird is a new gear in the powerful chain of combinations that you will form in your habitats, which focus on fundamental aspects of growth: food, eggs, and new specimens.

This is how Wingspan is presented to us, a design by Elizabeth Hargrave, this being her first published game. It went on sale worldwide in 2019, with Stonemaier Games as the main publisher. The illustrations are handled by Beth Sobel (Snow Tails, Herbaceous, Viticulture), Ana María Martínez Jaramillo, and Natalia Rojas (for the latter two, this is their first work within the board game world).

In our country, it is published by Maldito Games in a Spanish version (language dependence is quite significant). It allows games for 1 to 5 players, with a suggested minimum age of 10 and an approximate duration of 40 to 70 minutes. The MSRP is €55. For this review, a copy of the Spanish version by Maldito Games has been used.

Important: if you already know the game and/or are only interested in my opinion about it, you can go directly to the Opinion section. The Content and Mechanics sections are especially intended for those who do not know the game and prefer to get a general idea of how it works.

Go to Personal Opinion

Components

Inside a two-piece cardboard box (lid and bottom), measuring 29.7×29.7×7.2 cm. (standard square box like Ticket to Ride), we find the following elements:

• Goal Board (made of cardstock)
• Bird Tray (made of plastic)
• 5 Player Mats (made of cardboard)
• Birdfeeder Dice Tower (made of cardboard)
• Scorepad (made of paper)
• 212 Cards (57×89 mm.):
  • 170 Bird Cards
  • 26 Bonus Cards
  • 16 Automa Cards
• 75 Eggs (made of plastic)
• 5 Custom Dice (made of wood)
• 40 Action Cubes (8 of each color) (made of wood)
• 103 Food Tokens (made of cardboard)
• 8 Goal Tiles (made of cardboard)
• Rulebook
• Quick Reference Guide
• Automa Rulebook

How to Play

Wingspan is a card-driven engine-building game in which each player must try to build the best possible collection of birds. Each card has specific characteristics (cost, victory points, nest type, habitat, and abilities). The game is structured into four rounds, in which each player will have a limited number of turns. On each turn, players can execute one of four possible actions (play a card, activate the forest row to gain resources, activate the grassland row to lay eggs—which are necessary to play more cards and score points at the end of the game—or activate the wetland row to draw new cards). When a row is activated, the visible action is executed along with the effects of all the bird cards already played there. At the end of each round, a specific goal is assessed, awarding victory points based on the players’ relative rankings. Additionally, each player will have secret bonus goals to score more victory points based on the birds played on their mat.

Key Concepts

Let’s start with the cornerstone of the game, the Bird Cards. They show the following anatomy:

• In the upper left corner, the habitat and the food cost of the bird are shown.
• In the top banner, the name of the species appears (both in Spanish and Latin).
• In the left side banner, we find symbols representing victory points (with a feather), the bird’s nest type, its egg-laying capacity (with eggs), and additional symbols to mark certain characteristics.
• Occupying the center of the card is an illustration of the bird.
• In the lower right corner of the illustration, the bird’s wingspan is shown in centimeters.
• Finally, in the bottom banner, we find the card’s effect (if any). There are three types: habitat effects (brown/orange background), activation effects during other players’ turns (pink background), or “when played” effects (white background).

In order to play bird cards, players will have to return a set of Food Tokens to the supply. These tokens represent the birds’ diet, having five types: fish, berries, invertebrates (worms), rodents, and seeds (cereals).

To get these food tokens, players will use a birdfeeder into which the Food Dice are rolled. There are five six-sided dice, showing each of the five types. The sixth face shows the symbol for both invertebrates and seeds, allowing the player to choose. When a player chooses a die, they remove it from the birdfeeder (making it no longer available) and take the corresponding token from the supply.

Bird Cards are played onto a Player Mat (Aviary). This mat features three rows with five columns. Each row is associated with a habitat and an action type (forest-food, grassland-eggs, wetland-cards). Players can activate a habitat and execute the action in the leftmost open space, plus all the bird cards in that habitat with a habitat effect. Additionally, each column indicates a number of eggs (at the top of the mat) required to place a card in a slot within that column.

These Eggs are placed using the action of one of the habitats. When laying eggs, these uniquely shaped miniatures are placed onto bird cards already present on the mat (respecting each bird’s egg capacity limit). These eggs serve to play new birds, as well as providing victory points at the end of the game.

To keep track of turns, each player has a set of Action Cubes. On each turn, a player will either play a card or activate one of the habitats. To avoid forgetting to activate any effects, the cube is moved from right to left across the row. Additionally, at the end of each round, one of these cubes will be placed on the goal board.

This Goal Board features four rows with a ranking where players are ordered according to the goal indicated at the beginning of the row, with each slot showing the number of victory points obtained. In case of ties, tied players are placed in the same position, leaving the subsequent positions empty. Since players must leave an action cube behind to mark their position, they will have one fewer action in each subsequent round than in the previous one.

To determine the goals for each round, Goal Tiles are used, which are set up on the aforementioned board at the beginning of the game. These goals refer to birds in a certain habitat, eggs on birds in a specific habitat or nest type, or birds with a certain type of nest.

Lastly, at the start of the game, players receive Bonus Cards that provide end-game victory points exclusively to each player based on certain criteria. In this way, players have a guiding strategy right from the start.

That is enough to get started.

Setup

1. Shuffle the bird card deck and place it next to the bird tray. After this, reveal the top three cards and place them in the tray slots.
2. Shuffle the bonus card deck and leave it facedown in the center of the table.
3. Form a general supply with the food tokens and eggs.
4. Place the goal board (choose a side, using the green side for a more competitive experience and the blue side for a less competitive experience) in the center of the table and place 4 goal tiles in the four slots on the board (the rest are returned to the box).
5. Place the birdfeeder dice tower in the center of the table and drop the five food dice through the top.
6. Each player chooses a color and receives 8 action cubes, a personal player mat, 5 food tokens (one of each type), 5 bird cards drawn from the deck, and 2 bonus cards drawn from the deck.
7. Now, each player must decide how many bird cards to keep in hand, discarding one food token for each card kept. The rest are discarded.
8. Of the two bonus cards, the player will choose one and discard the other.
9. Finally, choose a starting player and give them the corresponding token.

We are ready to begin!

Game Flow

A game of Wingspan is played over four rounds. In each round, players alternate taking a certain number of turns (8/7/6/5 turns per player in rounds 1/2/3/4).

On each turn, the active player must choose one of the following options and place an action cube in the corresponding space (when activating habitats, the cube will be used to move along the played cards to ensure no effects are forgotten):

• Play a Bird Card: the player places a bird card from their hand into the leftmost open slot of the corresponding habitat (some birds can live in multiple habitats), returning the required food tokens to the supply and, depending on which column the slot is in, between 0 and 2 eggs from other bird cards already on the player’s mat.
• Gain Food and Activate Forest Bird Powers: the player gains as many food tokens as indicated by the next open slot in the forest habitat (some slots allow gaining an additional token by discarding a card from hand). Each food token gained must match one of the available dice in the birdfeeder (the die is removed from the birdfeeder after selection). If there are no dice left in the birdfeeder, roll all 5 dice back into it. If the remaining dice all show the same face, the player may reroll all dice before choosing. After this, the player uses the cube to mark the habitat effects of the played cards, resolving them from right to left.
• Lay Eggs and Activate Grassland Bird Powers: the player lays as many eggs as indicated by the next open slot in the grassland habitat (some slots allow laying an additional egg by discarding a food token). Each egg can be placed on any bird card on the mat, respecting the maximum egg capacity that each bird card can hold. After this, the player uses the cube to mark the habitat effects of the played cards, resolving them from right to left.
• Draw Cards and Activate Wetland Bird Powers: the player draws as many cards (either from the visible tray or from the deck, but the tray is not replenished immediately) as indicated by the next open slot in the wetland habitat (some slots allow drawing an additional card by discarding an egg from a bird card on the mat). There is no hand limit. After this, the player uses the cube to mark the habitat effects of the played cards, resolving them from right to left.

Finally, if the player drew any cards from the face-up tray, it is replenished by revealing cards from the deck. After this, the turn passes to the player on the left.

The round ends when no players have action cubes left. If it is not the fourth round, the following maintenance is performed:

• The starting player token is passed to the player on the left.
• Each player recovers their action cubes.
• The bird cards in the tray are discarded, and three new ones are drawn.

Game End

The game ends at the conclusion of the fourth round. Each player accumulates victory points from the following categories:

• Victory points for each bird on their mat.
• Victory points from the end-of-round goals.
• Victory points from bonus cards.
• One victory point for each egg on a bird card.
• One victory point for each food token cached on a bird card.

One victory point for each card tucked under a bird card. The player with the most victory points wins. In case of a tie, the player with the most leftover food tokens in their supply wins. If they are still tied, the players share the victory.

Variants

Automa: the game includes the Automa system for solo play. Through a deck of cards, a virtual player will execute actions and compete for victory against the player.

Personal Opinion

The game we are looking at today has sparked a heated debate within the national gaming community due to an aggressive marketing campaign carried out by Maldito Games. As you might guess, this humble blog was part of that campaign, so I thank the publisher for the courtesy.

The summary of the controversy is that many users expressed discomfort with being bombarded by the same game everywhere (especially on social networks, and specifically on Twitter). It is hard to find the cause of such widespread annoyance when this way of promoting a product is neither new nor will it be the last time we see it.

Therefore, the cause must lie elsewhere. For me, there are two significant details that, combined, explain what happened.

The first is sending review copies to trusted media outlets a few days before the official release. Since it wasn’t a significant timeframe, reviews could only be superficial. First impressions that usually praise the positives due to the enthusiasm with which games carrying high expectations are received. Come on, things have to go very wrong for those first impressions to be negative.

The second, I believe, is the publisher behind the design. We are talking about Stonemaier Games, responsible for games like Viticulture, Euphoria, Scythe, or Charterstone. All products that are as highly produced as they are overrated. They are not bad designs—in fact, many achieve a rating of remarkable—but for a significant mass of players, these are the games that got them into the hobby, and they hold them on a pedestal. And it is undeniable that there is also a certain snobbery from hobby veterans who don’t take it well when these designs are ranked above others with more pedigree.

If we combine both factors, it explains the fatigue felt by part of the community. But hey, although we are here to talk about birds, it is good to give some context to anyone who stayed out of the loop. Because something like this only happens with titles that have generated massive hype. So let’s see how this Wingspan performs on the table.

In Wingspan, we become passionate ornithologists trying to develop an aviary composed of three habitats. To do this, we will have to acquire birds and settle them into the appropriate habitat. Each bird is represented on a card that gathers its essential data: habitats, diet, nest type, reproductive capacity, wingspan, as well as other parameters represented by various symbols.

Over four rounds, with a decreasing number of actions in each (8/7/6/5 actions in rounds 1/2/3/4), players must manage their hand of cards and resources (food and eggs) to expand their aviary as optimally as possible and become the most prestigious ornithologist in the world.

Wingspan is a card-driven engine-building game that clearly knows its target audience and fits the player profile Stonemaier Games usually aims for—that is, casual and gateway players looking for designs suitable for the whole family, not overly complex in rules, visually appealing, and with a duration contained within an hour or an hour and a half. So, if you are looking for the definitive heavy card game, you can keep looking, because today’s game is not that long-awaited title.

What we find instead is a game with few concepts that revolve around the development of the player’s mat. These concepts are easily digested because each has its own associated action. The first is gathering food (in the forest habitat). Each player can obtain a certain number of food tokens depending on the number of cards they have in that habitat. This is a common feature across all habitats: the more cards played in it, the more powerful that habitat’s action becomes.

Returning to the action, the resource tokens depend on a curious dice tower shaped like a birdfeeder into which dice showing the available food types are rolled. Thus, for each food token gained, players must choose one of the available dice in the birdfeeder and remove it to get the corresponding token. Only when dice of a single value remain or the birdfeeder has been completely emptied are the dice rerolled.

I am not entirely convinced by this way of “hindering” resource acquisition. It’s true that you can use any two tokens as a wild resource, and this provides enough leeway if the dice don’t roll what you need, but I would have preferred a slightly more elaborate resource management system—though that might have complicated the design, something the folks at Stonemaier surely wouldn’t have wanted.

The second concept is laying eggs. And a bird game couldn’t lack the ability to lay eggs. As with the previous habitat, the number of eggs generated depends on the number of birds in the grassland habitat. Eggs are placed on bird cards, with the only restriction being the maximum egg capacity of each card. These eggs have a dual nature: we need them to play new bird cards from the second column onward in any habitat, and alternatively, they provide victory points at the end of the game if kept on the birds.

The third concept is card management, allowing players to draw cards both from a visible central display and from the deck. The same rule applies: the more birds in the wetland habitat, the greater the number of cards we can draw.

Finally, the concept that stitches everything together: the cards themselves. We need to have drawn them, accumulated the necessary food to play them, and have enough eggs to occupy a specific slot. In addition to a fixed amount of victory points, these cards provide various effects related to the aforementioned elements or options to score more victory points. These effects are of three types: habitat powers (activated from right to left when we execute that habitat’s action), when-played powers (triggered once upon playing the card), or pink powers (triggered during opponents’ turns).

This way of activating effects has already been seen in two great games like Ginkgopolis (here its tocho-review) and, especially, Deus (here its tocho-review), so that when activating a certain action, the row of cards in that action activates sequentially. This is a very effective mechanic for building combos, since the earlier a card is played, the more times we can reap its benefits, as activating its associated action at least once per round is almost mandatory.

With this, we have sketched a fairly deep overview of the game. Two details remain that add a touch of flavor and round out the design. On one hand, the personal bonus cards. At the start of the game, each player chooses one card out of two, which will provide additional victory points based on an exclusive criterion (it is possible to get more during the game thanks to some bird effects). On the other hand—and more importantly in my view—the end-of-round goals. At the start of the game, four goals are set up, one for each round. These goals can be configured in two modes (one more competitive than the other) where players score points based on how well they have developed their aviary according to that additional criterion.

Personally, I consider it essential to play in the competitive mode, which establishes a relative ranking among players for each criterion based on how many times they achieved the indicated goal. I have read in many reviews that Wingspan is a multiplayer solitaire game, but thanks to this competitive system, I believe there is a relatively intense point of interaction because, let’s not forget, Wingspan is a game with relatively little leeway, having only 26 actions per game. Ignoring opponents’ mats is not an option, because the final score will almost always remain tight. Completely skipping the goals is synonymous with defeat, no matter how well we develop our aviary. Therefore, spending extra actions on a goal when we already have it secured or pushing hard when we are close are factors to keep in mind. Thus, it doesn’t seem to me that this Wingspan is any more or less interactive than, for example, Terraforming Mars (here its tocho-review), where we have the same concept of competing for goals with Milestones and Awards.

As you can see, Wingspan is a card-driven engine-building game that limits itself to recycling concepts that have already worked well in other games, without excessive complications and dressing it up with a peculiar theme. Probably the most direct comparison would be with Everdell (here its tocho-review), although the game of adorable anthropomorphic animals is perhaps a notch more demanding, both in development and at a mechanical level. But both rely on card engines that combo together, requiring resource hoarding to put them into play and boasting spectacular production value (which we will talk about later).

Faced with the inevitable question of whether Wingspan is worth it if our collection already holds one or more of the titles mentioned throughout this tocho-review (Deus, Terraforming Mars, Everdell, etc.), the answer is, naturally, it depends. For me, the defining factor compared to those games is that in Wingspan we have a fixed number of turns. It is a common practice in this type of game to delegate the endgame trigger to the players, which can lead to bloated playtime once the game is mastered and card synergies allow for more and more turns. There are glaring cases like Imperial Settlers (here its tocho-review), the sugar-coated version of 51st State that overshoots its mark and, despite being a good design mechanically, ends up degenerating into massive runaway snowballs that hurt the experience. Especially when one of the players finishes their game several turns before the others.

In Wingspan, the duration is predetermined and, barring bouts of analysis paralysis, the time spent at the table making decisions will remain more or less constant over multiple plays. And this is highly appreciated, because let’s face it: card engine-builders are, by definition, repetitive. The core loop of these games basically consists of getting cards, gathering resources to play them, and once they are on the table, accumulating effects. That’s all there is to it. Everything hinges on how efficient we are compared to our rivals and how lucky we are when drawing cards. Therefore, a game that chooses not to abuse this system and sets a barrier to stop snowballs at a specific point provides a different approach. Here we have to strive to make our turns more optimal than our opponent’s, rather than just building an increasingly massive engine.

This leads to very close games where small details, like the aforementioned end-of-round goals, are crucial to seizing victory. If one stops to list the elements to consider when making decisions, they will realize that Wingspan is not as trivial a game as it might seem. Every card we choose and/or play must be geared toward scoring points—either because it has a high value, because it fits well with our bonus card, or because it represents a step forward in achieving an end-of-round goal. Or all at once. This, combined with optimizing basic actions, playing with timing when deploying birds to extract the maximum value out of every single action point.

In contrast to this great positive aspect, we find the issue of replayability. It’s not that Wingspan is a game you will ditch after a few plays, but it’s true that for those looking for deeper synergies, the game might fall short. Card effects focus on optimizing the three main actions and, occasionally, offering ways to score points through various means. There isn’t much else. But then again, in a masterpiece like Race for the Galaxy (here its tocho-review), with the exception of a few cards, most are just small effects that gain importance when successfully combined with others.

This leads into talking about luck. Besides the quirk of the birdfeeder, having a large deck of cards means that in some games Lady Luck might turn her back on us, preventing us from drawing cards aligned with our personal bonus card and/or the common goals. If this happens, no matter how well we combo, we will likely fall short of victory. Fortunately, since the game doesn’t drag on, you can always play again right away, something that isn’t feasible in other games of this genre.

Scalability is typical for this type of game. It is true that the weight of the game rests on the player themselves, and subtle elements are what provide friction with rivals. This allows the game to function perfectly at any player count, although in the end, two or three players turns out to be ideal so that downtime doesn’t extend the games too much—even though with more participants, the tray will refresh much more and we will see more birds.

Let’s move on to the production. Stonemaier has always maintained a supreme quality standard rarely seen in board games that don’t come from crowdfunding campaigns. Here we find top-tier components like the cards, which have a spectacular thickness, a very pleasant linen finish, and a magnificent snap. The cardboard components are thick and punch out easily, with the dice tower birdfeeder being a standout (a shame that you have to disassemble part of the tower to fit everything back in the box). The wooden cubes are standard. The stars of the show are the eggs, which look just like pastel-colored candy. Be very careful around young children because the temptation to put them in their mouths is great. Finally, a well-structured rulebook printed on incredibly high-quality materials.

And what can be said about the artwork? Wingspan is an example of how to use an unusual theme in a board game and make it look absolutely stunning. Each card is like a small entry for a bird species; the accompanying illustration is simply delightful. The habitat mats are functional and highly eye-catching. And the minimalist cover featuring the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus Forficatus) is mesmerizing.

And let’s wrap this up. Wingspan is a card-driven engine-building game that is well aware of its limitations and capitalizes on every single virtue. Few concepts, a spectacular production level, and, above all, a tight duration with a fixed number of actions per game, forcing players to shift their mindset and seek optimization from the very first moment. Those looking for massive combos and spectacular chaining effects won’t find their game here. But those after an accessible, beautiful card design that leaves you wanting to play again because it doesn’t exhaust the players will surely enjoy it immensely. For all these reasons, I give it a…