Wingspan Card Game First Impressions

In Wingspan, you’re collecting birds based on a randomly selected scoring system.

Let the innuendo run wild!

You are bird enthusiasts—researchers, bird watchers, ornithologists, and collectors—seeking to discover and attract the best birds to your network of wildlife preserves. Each bird extends a chain of powerful combinations in one of your habitats.

Wingspan Game Play

This is a very general overview, not a tutorial 🙂

You’re going to be collecting Birds which are worth points but will help you score points in other ways. As point scoring varies from game to game, your birdie requirements will change. Let’s look at the game to see how all this is done.

Players have a number of action cubes that they’ll use to, well, take action. There are 4 actions available, let’s look at them.

Play a Bird – Play a bird card from your hand onto your player board. They must be placed into the leftmost empty space on the correct row depending on the bird’s habitat. There are two costs to be made here. Eggs are paid for cards placed in columns 2, 3, 4 and 5 and food is also required. Food is just tokens that you spend and the number/type of food is printed on the bird card.

Gain Food – Draft a die from the available food dice and take a token matching the face of the die you took.

For this action, and the next 2 actions on the board, you then activate all the birds you have in that row, right to left. Some of the birds have the ability that activates in this way.

Lay Eggs – Gain a number of eggs showing in the leftmost empty space. Eggs are placed on bird cards for safekeeping. Each bird shows how many Eggs it can hold.

Draw Cards – Draw a number of bird cards showing in the leftmost empty space.

Play continues clockwise with everyone taking 1 action until they run out of action cubes.

End of Round

Players collect their action tokens back then add 1 to an end-game scoring chart. This, of course, means you get 1 fewer action per round each time.

Across the top of this board, 4 randomly assigned tokens are placed that gives you a goal to achieve that round. At the end of the matching round, players add their tokens depending on how well they did for that goal compared to everyone else.

After 4 rounds you score points for each bird card, end-of-round points, end game scoring birds, remaining eggs and food as well as other things.

Most points win.

Theme

Hmmm, yeah so Birds are fine. They’re OK. It’s educational. But nothing makes too much sense. Ducks go in Water etc That does sense.

The rest is fairly abstract, to be honest.

Setup

Seems simple. Nothing too complicated I think. It’s just putting stuff out.

It takes up a fair bit of table space.

Components & Artwork

The component quality confuses me. On the one hand, it’s from Stonemaier games and they’re known for good quality stuff. On the other, it’s all over the place.

The boards and cards are nice. The eggs are really cool and the dice are big and chunky.

The food tokens are standard tokens. But the action tokens, the thing the players use the most, are just normal every-game cubes.

When the game came out people were spending a fortune upgrading these. You wouldn’t expect people to want to pay money to upgrade a game from this particular publisher.

Even stranger is the weird plastic tray that holds cards. Not needed at all and looks a bit silly on the table. Speaking of silly, a dice tray would have done but instead, you get this birdhouse, ridiculous.

The artwork is clearly very good. Nice realistic birds with interesting flavour text.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

The rules are very simple. Teaching should be very straightforward. There are only 4 actions and they make sense.

The only hidden information is the cards in your hand. If you have a new player you can help them out with that. But while it’s easy to play rules-wise, to play well and to play strategically is tough with a lot of planning required.

Wingspan Summary

So this is a set collection, engine-building game with a bit of hand management. My favourite game of this type is still Saint Petersburg.

While it may not have the art or the production it just does what it does very well. That’s not to say this game isn’t good.

You have 4 actions and you need to do all 4 all the time. You need to play birds, but you also need to draw them first. Then you can’t play them without Food and Eggs. But you don’t want to waste too many actions just gathering those resources so this is why you need that engine.

To save actions, you need birds that will allow you to get more ‘stuff’ for each action cube you spend. Why just get eggs when you can also get a bit of food?

But, again, you have to consider if those birds fit in with the scoring for this game. Variable scoring is always good and it’s done well here. I’m not sure how many scoring tokens there are (26?) but you only use 4.

So it is a very good game. Will I get it? Probably not. Will I play it again? Of course!

Jesta ThaRogue