Gather round fellow bird enthusiasts! Have we got a game for you!

Not a bird enthusiast? Well, let me let you in on a little secret…neither was I until I played Wingspan. But after multiple plays this game has turned me into a bonafide ornithologist, if only in my own mind.

Believe me, after playing this, you’ll be calling yourself one too! 

Gameplay Overview

Wingspan is a medium weight, card-driven, engine building board game where players are bird enthusiasts working to attract the best birds to their wildlife preserves. 

In the pursuit of personal and common goals, players will work to attract the best birds to their habitats. Each bird provides a unique action which extends a chain of combinations in the habitat they reside.

There are three different habitats available for players to attract birds: forest, field, or wetlands, and each habitat allows players to focus on key areas of growth: gain food, lay eggs, or draw bird cards.

The winner of the game is the bird enthusiast with the most points after four rounds. 

Quick Breakdown

There is a lot going on in Wingspan. All of it lovely. So we want to cover the game play quickly to give a bit of context for our review of the game below. This will not be a complete rundown of the rules. If you want to see and learn exactly how to play Wingspan, check out the always great Watch It Played video on YouTube.

To start the game, players are dealt a hand of five random bird cards, two random goal cards, and one of each food type. 

Before the game can begin, players will need to choose one goal card, and which birds to keep in their starting hand. You can keep all of the birds if you want, but you’ll need to discard one food token for every bird you keep, so choose wisely, this is where your engine building begins!

On your turn, you have the option of choosing one of four actions. You can play a bird card from your hand into it’s specified habitat, spending the food and egg costs required of the bird. You can gain food from the bird feeder, the dice tower where the five wooden food dice are rolled. Select the dice you want, remove it from the feeder, then take the corresponding food token. Perhaps you’ll want to take the lay eggs action, taking the allowed amount of eggs and placing them on your birds in your habitat. Finally you can choose to draw more bird cards. 

To choose an action, you’ll take one of your eight action markers, place it on the right most open space of a habitat, take the action, and then move your token to the left one space at a time, activating any bird powers if desired along the way. Once you have made it to the leftmost spot, your turn is over and play proceeds clockwise.

The round is over when all players have used all their actions. Then the end-of-round common goal sheet is consulted, players take one of their action markers to mark their spot on the sheet, and the next round begins. 

Because players use an action marker on the goal sheet, everyone will have one less action in the next round. This repeats after each round, meaning that players will start round one with 8 actions, but going into the fourth and final round will only have 5 actions to work with. 

Once all rounds are completed, players will use the included score sheet to tally up the points from bird cards, end-of-round goals, bonus cards, eggs, cached food, and tucked bird cards. 

The player with the most points is declared the winner

What’s in the Box

Wingspan retails for $55 and for the sheer amount of gameplay and the quality of components, this is a fantastic price!

Seriously. Inside the box are some of the most beautiful components you’ll ever see in a game. They are the type of quality, top notch components that I have come to expect from Stonemaier Games. Every piece of this game is well thought out and intentional.

There are 170 unique bird cards and each card features a beautiful, lifelike illustration of the bird, as well as all of the necessary information required for players to know how to play the bird. At the bottom of each card, there’s also a depiction of the location the bird can be found and often a little fact about the bird as well. 

Speaking of all those cards, their storage and in game use was considered in the wonderfully designed Game Trayz container/organizer that is included. There is plenty of space to hold all of the bird cards, the bonus cards, and the Automa cards that are included for solo play. Not only that, but the top comes off and is then able to be used to splay the face-up bird cards, making them easy to pick up, while the remaining cards in the deck stay nicely inside the tray, ready to be drawn.

The wooden eggs really up the table presence of the game. They come in five colors for aesthetic purposes only and it is the perfect touch. They look so amazing sitting on your player mat, and the flat bottom allows them to sit without rolling all over. I was worried that that could be a problem, but so far, so good, they stay nicely put where you place them. 

The food tokens are cardboard rather than wooden like the eggs. While I’m sure a third party will develop upgraded components for these, I actually prefer the cardboard tokens. Some birds give you the ability to cache food on them which then gives you points during final scoring. If these were three dimensional like the eggs it could become a little busy. Food is mostly just drafted and then quickly used to play a bird, where as the eggs stay on your player mat, so I like the cardboard food for this purpose. 

You get food by selecting it from the wooden food dice which you roll using the included dice tower! And it is the cutest little bird house themed dice tower you ever did see. The tower itself is also cardboard and comes in a quality punch board with rules for assembly. We had no issues, snags, or tears setting this up and while it isn’t necessary, (you can just roll the dice without it) it’s addition to the game really adds to the overall feel and theme. I love the aged, mossy look to it! 

Because there is a lot going on in this game, there is also a detailed rule book which explains the game very well and is easy to follow. And since there are so many unique cards, they’ve also included an Appendix that is incredibly helpful during play. They each also provide some context for the amount of work and research that went into creating Wingspan. The birds aren’t just given powers willy nilly, every power, egg, and habitat on a bird card corresponds to how the bird behaves in real life. 

Along with these two rules books there is also a rule book included for solo play. Each of the three rule books is printed on this amazing, linen like paper that stopped me in my tracks the second I touched it. It’s luxurious and adds that unexpected touch of elegance that makes you love the game a little bit more. 

Our Thoughts

This is easily one of my favorite engine builders. I absolutely love how you are given more time in the beginning to get your engine started, yet your action options are less powerful. Then, as the game progresses, you slowly lose the number of actions you have from round to round, but, if you built your engine wisely, your turns, though fewer, are more powerful. 

You really need to use each turn smartly to best maximize your potential each round. And you’ll have a lot to keep track of too. Between the end of round goals, personal bonus cards, and victory points available through birds and eggs, you’ll have to manage how to best score the most points, especially since not everything will always match up and you may not have the necessary birds available. 

This forces players to be flexible and ready to adjust their engine as necessary. You won’t have the time to waste a turn doing something that won’t benefit you. You’ll be forced to make multiple hard decisions. We often kept expressing how we wish we had “just one more turn” so that we could pull off some big move. But honestly the turns and actions allowed is just right. It leaves you wanting just a little bit more and makes the game addicting. 

Theme 

I’m not one of those players who doesn’t care about the theme of the game. While great mechanics can make a game fun, my favorite games always involve those where the theme is integral and helps create a unique feel to the play experience. 

Wingspan completely nails the theme in every way. It is not an afterthought, but rather woven through every single piece of this game. Not only do the look and feel of the components set the scene, but the very mechanics of the game, the actions and abilities of the birds, and the end of round goals all work together to make this theme come to life. 

One of my favorite ways the designers worked the theme into the game was through the bonus cards. In a lot of other games, the bonuses are something random that will net you points if you complete it, but don’t really matter to the theme, it’s all just mechanic based. But with Wingspan, you have bonus cards that award you points for things like the number of birds in your habitat that have a body part or a color in their name. 

These force you as a player to not ignore the name of the bird. Without them you may have glanced at the name, looked at the bird, but then paid more attention to the abilities of the card. But with these types of bonuses, you are having to look at the name, along with all of the other mechanics because it all matters. I just love that. In a way it not only creates a fun, well themed game, but it also helps you learn a bit about birds in the process. 

Bird Cards

Speaking of those bird cards, they are really well designed. Not only are the illustrations beautiful, but there is a ton of information on these guys and its all easy to read, interpret, and understand. The appendix really does help for any time that you need to double check something too. It’s always frustrating when you have a card where the writing can be interpreted more than one way and you don’t have the ability to cross check. The designers made sure that wouldn’t be a problem here.

Time needed to Play

Wingspan hits the sweet spot for game length. The box says that it takes about 40-70 minutes to play and thus far, each game we’ve played has taken under an hour. If you are playing with the full five players, I’d imagine that it could take a bit longer as there are a lot of options to consider and players prone to “analysis paralysis” may succumb to this tendency. But being a shorter, medium weight game is great because it doesn’t outstay its welcome. At no point have I ever felt the need to look at the clock to see how much time has passed, if anything the game seems to fly and I’m left wanting just one more turn!

Because it doesn’t require two hours to play, not only do you not have to plan your entire evening around it, but playing back to back games is also an option. There are so many bird cards included in the base game that you don’t even have to shuffle them again. We played three games and only went through just under half the deck!

It’s not overly complex

While there is a lot going on in the game, it is still a relatively family friendly game. The game play itself is intricate yet smooth. Once you understand how turns work and get used to managing it all, everything really clicks and flows beautifully. Yet you still have the satisfaction of having felt like you played a more substantial game. 

The game stays friendly and competitive without ever being combative. There are no “take that” elements to the game. If anything, other players’ birds can help you gain things that you need, so you still have reason to be paying attention even when it is not your turn. 

Could kids play this game? 

The game itself is pretty heavily language dependent. Every bird card is unique and requires reading, so younger players will probably have to wait until they are pretty fluent in both reading and reading comprehension. 

Our daughter has a fair bit of gaming experience under her belt at nearly seven years old, but this one is going to be too tough for her until she is about nine or ten. Otherwise it is a great option for older, pre-teen kids and their families to play together. 

Does it Play Well with Two Players?

So far we have absolutely loved playing this game just the two of us. There are some bird cards have actions that take effect when another player does something specific, and with two those opportunities are much smaller than if you are playing with four or five, but that hasn’t bothered us. 

I also like how, since it’s not a super secretive game, you can play side-by-side. This allows you to orient the cards so that they are easily read and neither of you has to read upside down or sideways. That may seem like a small thing, but it was one of the first things I said during our first game. 

Summary

Wingspan is a fantastic game all around. It is a strategic, medium weight engine building game wrapped up in one of the prettiest packages I have seen in board games. After multiple plays it is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. 

Because the game features great depth of strategy while being relatively easy to learn and teach, it gives you the satisfying post game feel of having really played a great game without having your brain hurting from a three hour campaign. 

For me, Wingspan flies in at nearly the perfect length for games of this weight. Each game we have played has come in around the hour mark or under. For a two player game this is fantastic because you can play it back-to-back if you’d like. And we have, because the game itself is addictive. For larger player counts the game will take a bit longer, but not so long that you have to spend your whole evening playing just this one game. 

One of the main things we are always interested in when looking at games for our shelves is replayability. The more I want to replay a game, the less the game costs me overall, as far as cost per play goes. Because the game has so many unique bird cards, bonus cards, and scoring options no two games will ever be the same. You won’t be able to guarantee that you can draft a specific bird that worked well for you last game in the next game, so you’ll have to learn how to work with new birds every time you play. This helps make you a much better player at building your engine, too. The variety of cards also makes the game addictive. Each game you’ll see something new or have to work towards a different goal. It’s that variety that is going to give Wingspan a huge edge in table time. 

Wingspan has completely blown us away and we cannot recommend it highly enough. If any of the above seems interesting or exciting to you, then I am confident that you will enjoy this game too. 

If you are interested in getting a copy for yourself head to the Stonemaier Games website for more information. For other great Stonemaier Games check out their games here.

Title: Wingspan
Designer: Elizabeth Hargrave
Artists: Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, Natalia Rojas, Beth Sobel
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Published: 2019

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