Wingspan is a digital adaptation of the eponymous boardgame Wingspan. Like many such games, it is an exact 1:1 replication of the game, and contains all of the contents of the base game, while automating the game rules.
Wingspan is a pretty simple game. There are three major resources:
• Bird cards – these are drawn from a deck. Each has a different bird on it, with its own name, point value, ability, nest type, and number of egg slots. Birds that you play are worth victory points, but they are worth nothing in your hand!
• Food – in the form of berries, fish, grain, grubs, and mice. You have to spend this to play bird cards.
• Eggs – these are placed on individual birds, with each bird having up to its egg slots worth of eggs. These are used to play birds later in the game, and are also worth 1 victory point each.
Each player has a playmat composed of three areas, each of which has space for five birds:
• A forest – This area allows the player to get food from the “birdfeeder”, a set of five dice which are rolled, with each face showing one of the food resources (one face shows a grub and a grain, allowing the player to choose between these resources – making these resources the easiest to get)
• A field – This area allows the player to lay eggs on their birds.
• A wetland – This area allows the player to draw cards, either from three face up cards or from the deck of cards.
On each of their turns, the player gets one action. They can either choose to play a bird card (paying all costs associated with it) or to activate an area’s ability.
The more birds you have in an area, the more resources you get from using that area’s ability; likewise, a lot of the birds have abilities that are activated when you use the area that they are presently located in.
The entire game is broken up into four rounds, with each player getting 8, 7, 6, and 5 turns in each round respectively; at the end of each round, players are ranked against each other in competition for some goal (like having birds in a certain area, or having eggs in a certain area or a certain type of nest), with the player who has the most getting the most points.
At the end of the game, a player’s score comes from five sources:
• The point values on their bird cards
• The number of eggs they have across all birds they have
• Points based on the four round goals
• Bonus points based on a card they’re given at the start of the game with some random objective on it (like getting such and such many birds with place names in the card name, or having a certain number of birds that eat a certain type of food); it is possible to gain additional cards like this from certain bird abilities
• Some bird abilities directly give victory points in other ways
Your goal is to score the most points.
Most of the strategy of the game lies in collecting resources to play birds that allow you to gather even more resources, making it even easier to play more birds, and then at the end of the game transitioning over to doing high-scoring plays.
While the game is pretty straightforward, the individual card abilities on the various birds allow for a surprising amount of strategy and optimization; figuring out the right order of doing things, working with the cards you manage to get on the fly, figuring out how to apportion your resources between various goals, and doing all this whilst trying to fulfill various other point goals makes for a very interesting game that has a lot of working parts.
While it isn’t a particularly interactive game, there are some cards that have positive influences on other players, such as everyone drawing a card or getting a food resource or laying an egg on certain kinds of nests; in addition, there are “pink” bird abilities that have reactive abilities, giving you, say, a vulture with an ability that gives you food if another player has a “predator” bird “hunt” successfully with their ability, or a parasitic bird (like a cuckoo) that lays eggs in the nests of other birds (in your own habitats, not theirs) when another player uses the Lay Eggs ability associated with the field.
Overall, the game is quite fun, and you can play it both against other players locally or online, as well as against the AI. There’s a couple dozen achievements for various random things you can do in the game, all of which are bird puns, and thinking about and trying to optimize your gameplay is quite enjoyable.
All that being said, it is still a board game at its heart, so it can get a bit old after a while, especially as the games aren’t particularly short (a game against AI players can last 40 minutes, and against real players more than twice that), so playing too much of it all at once can cause it to wear thin.
Still, I enjoyed this game for the amount I played it, and I will likely come back to it at some point in the future if a friend wants to play it with me again. It’s not the best game ever, but it is enjoyable enough, and it is interesting trying to build an “engine” that works.
3.0