Overview & How to Play

There’s a lot of birds in WIngspan, 170 to be specific, each represented by a card that will comprise the game’s shared deck of bird cards. The game takes place over 4 rounds, where the player with the most victory points wins the game. Many different things will award points, such as each bird card you’ve played, the amount of eggs you’ve laid, competing over round bonus tiles, as well as completing your personal bonus cards.

At its core, Wingspan has players accumulating resources, and then having to pay those resources in order to pay bird cards in their aviary boards. Your turns are incredibly simple because it’s literally just choosing one of 4 actions: gaining food tokens, laying eggs, drawing cards, or playing a bird. However, remember that this is an engine builder game, and every single time you play a bird card, you’re permanently upgrading one of these actions.

A optimal turn by turn strategy will force you to have to consider your long term plans based on what birds you think you can get, juxtaposed with the birds and resources you currently have available to you. However, a massive wrench gets thrown into these considerations because of the round bonuses on top of your personal bonus (though this one matters a little less). Ideally, you’d be able to snag those round bonuses away from everyone else while also developing your engine how you want it to go, but the game state isn’t always going to line up like that, and you’re going to have to make decisions about where your efforts are better focused.

What we’re trying to say is that Wingspan is really crunchy, and is definitely the type of game where you can notice slight optimizations to eek out just a handful of extra points, and where those points can make the difference between winning and losing. There’s a lot of buttons and levers to push here even with its simple action premise, and there’s so many clever design decisions made here to ensure that every game not only feels different, but also really fair.

Pros

Wingspan makes excellent use of input randomness, because just about everything in the game lets the players react to randomness, and then decide what they want to do with it. As an example, the birdfeeder dice tower that comes with the game (super awesome btw) can have a bunch of food dice in its tray that are available for players to take as resources. However, if at any point there’s only one type of icon shown, you’re allowed to reroll all the food dice, meaning that you’re never going to be forced to “choose” the last option.

Another example of this randomness done well is how the middle of the game has a bird tray with 3 cards. You can always choose to draw from either the bird tray, or from the top of the deck if you’re feeling lucky (or desperate). So while you may not always find the perfect bird, there will always be a way to get a bird that’ll fit the bill. And even if the bird tray fills up with 3 really similar birds because of bad luck, it refreshes at the end of every round anyways, so no choice stagnation here!

The next thing to commend here is how all the birds have such a wide variety of abilities that are not only nuanced, but extremely easy to read at a glance. Their abilities use such nice icons and color coding that it’s really easy to be able to glance across the table and figure out what someone else’s engine does.

And speaking about visuals and aesthetics, Wingspan’s components and art are an absolute slam dunk. We already mentioned the birdfeeder dice tower which is just absurdly cool, but also the dice that are in it are made of wood with an amazingly smooth finish.

Every bird card has a super minimalistic style with a plain white background followed by most of the card taken up with bird art, followed by a bit of iconography and text for either abilities or real life lore. All the icons used are extremely self explanatory and also shared across everything that needs to mention them, making the learning experience unbelievable smooth.

Then on top of all that, the game includes several multi-colored eggs that are incredibly vibrant and an absolute charm to play around with and place on your bird cards. And because everyone we’ve ever played with asks if their colors mean anything gameplay-wise: no, it’s just for the sake of having colorful eggs so they’re not dull to look at.

Cons & Nitpicks

The only issues with Wingspan are gonna be incredibly slight. First off, there are quite a bit of round bonuses that revolve around who has laid the most amount of eggs on birds with a certain type of nest. While we just commended Wingspan for being able to quickly see what other player’s engines do, this is the one aspect that’s really hard to parse at a glance because not only are the nest icons small, but they’re also not the most dissimilar at a glance. Next, because this is an engine builder with some amount of randomness, it is possible—albeit rare—to have an opening hand that turbo’s out specific cheap birds that generate a ton of extra eggs and resources early on, which does compound on itself later on. There is a really clever mulligan system in place though where you can choose between keeping more cards or more resources, so you’re never going to have an unplayably bad start. This opening luck issue is incredibly minor and if anything only showcases the incredible versatility and fun factor that exists in always being able to have a decent opening.

An actual con with the balance would probably be that the egg laying strategy is a little too consistently strong in Wingspan. Each egg on your board is worth 1 point each, so maxing out upgrades to the egg laying action basically means that every time you lay eggs, you plop 4 down for 4 instant points. For a strategy that’s so consistent and safe, it probably shouldn’t be as strong as it is if the design intent was to encourage players to mess around with different builds and optimize their engines in different ways. However, the fact that dumping everything into egg laying will pretty much always get you a really high score might start incentivizing players to just do that instead of trying to make the weirder stuff work. Granted, egg laying is never going to be the highest point earning strategy since you can definitely find unique bird abilities and combos that can overtake it, but for how consistent eggs are, it probably shouldn’t be as powerful as it is.

Final Thoughts

Wingspan is a superb game that’s really tight with it’s mechanics and components to feel like a super polished package. To this day, it’s still a game we compare other games to when they don’t utilize their components, rules and mechanics together flawlessly. Like if Wingspan can have amazing rulebooks, super clever organization, an excellent automa, and clean setup/teardown, then why couldn’t this other board game do it?

And if you’re wondering why both of our personal scores are so low for a game that otherwise has an excellent recommender score, it’s because we both hate uninteractive euros, which Wingspan unfortunately is. But if euros are your jam, it’d be a crime not to have this in your collection.