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Wingspan
Have you ever stood inside an aviary and thought “I wish these screaming f*cks were cards”? Or played Everdell and thought “These dirty rodents need cages”? Ever kill a horde of hummingbirds cause you stupidly loaded up their bird feeder with polymethyl methacrylate dice? HONEST MISTAKE. We’ve all done it.
Well GUESS WHAT! If you’ve done any of those, then YOU, sir, should probably see a doctor. Also, Wingspan might be your game. Now, don’t get me wrong. These days, literally every f*ck*ng game is a hand-clogging, resource-hoarding, engine-building table hog. All of them.
But Wingspan is quite different. First, the order of cards played is more important than other games. Second, each card played directly improves one of the available actions. And third, action economy is everything – you will only have 25 turns each game. But the real reason you should play this game is cause of it’s fricken baller artwork. It’s that sh*t you see at your local state park’s lodge.
Actually, who are we kidding… You’re a gamer; you don’t do nature things. You’ll only recognize the bird artwork from those weak-*ss field trips you went on to learn about horses and sh*t. Still though! You should play this game once before you die.
Gameplay
Wingspan is an action selection, hand-management, engine-builder with an aviary theme. On your turn, you will take one of four actions. One action is to play a bird card. All birds played will enhance one of the other three actions. The remaining three actions are to gain food (needed to play birds), lay eggs (needed to play birds and are worth VP), and draw bird cards. Playing a bird into the “Gain food” action area allows you to gather more food. A bird in the “Gain eggs” action allows you to collect more eggs, and playing into the “Card draw” action allows you to draw more cards.
But the most prominent aspect of birds are their individual effects/powers – many birds have powers that are triggered when the associated area they have been played in is activated. By the end of the game, your own actions will work much differently than your opponents, allowing for a lot of replayability.
Because you need to discard food and eggs to play birds (and you need to draw more birds to play them), all four actions are tightly locked together. There are also end of round goals as well as personal goals. Wingspan is one of those rarely seen point salads where the theme is tied strongly to mechanics.
The Hook
Choose Your Fate
I like games with a lot of agonizing decisions. And I really like a game if the first decision feels like a self-inflicted wound. The hook of Wingspan strikes during set-up. You are dealt 5 birds and are given 5 different types of food. From these combined 10 things, you discard down to a total of 5 between them.
Well F*CK I don’t want to! I like all this sh*t. Too bad you nerd – you gotta cull from the get go. So how do you choose which to keep? Cause it ain’t just a simple manner of “ho-hum for this game I’ll try this mechanic out!” You have to consider the following RIDICULOUS laundry list when deciding:
- Which birds help your hidden private goal
- Which birds help win the end of round goals
- Which action the birds enhance
- What food those birds need
- Which birds are currently available in the shop
- What the VP of each bird is worth
- Which bird is the cutest
- Which bird supports human rights
Okay, so those last two are totally not real, but I do HATE discarding that adorable Little Penguin – but his power is really just so G*d d*mn dumb. Once you decide, you chuck the 5 you don’t want and then prepare to forget EVERY f*ck*ng plan you just made as the available food and bird cards will distract you like a gunshot. If I had a nickel for every time I jumped ship on my opening plans, I’d have – OH SH*T THE FRANKLIN’S GULL JUST HIT THE SHOP! Guess my agonizing decisions 4 turns ago mean nothing. The hook is a wonderful slippin’ and slidin’ puzzle that will leave you questioning every decision until your engine goes online.
The Turn
Engine Takes Flight
The formation of your engine takes about 20 minutes to become apparent. But those 20 minutes feels like f*ck*ng ages as you perform a bunch of subpar sh*tty actions to build it. GOD I HATE GRABBING ONLY ONE PIECE OF FOOD! But once the birds start dropping, your engine starts a poppin’.
The turn reveals how important each of the 4 actions are . . . and how fun it is to merge them. You can’t take the lay eggs AND draw cards action on the same turn . . . but you can play a bird with an egg laying ability into the drawing cards action. This turns drawing cards into a shortcut to paying for birds. Plus you get to gobble up the bird shop and take cards needed for end of round goals. If you put a food gathering bird in the egg area, well then pumping out eggs means you can play birds faster AND pumps out VP. Better drop some birds in the card drawing area since you now have an abundance of resources!
This lightly combining of actions, as well as just improving them overall, is the beauty of the turn. It is like a growing map – you don’t know where you’re headed when you start, but your changing actions show you the best direction. The birds you play could dictate something like “I have to gain food so I can play a bird into the draw cards and THEN draw cards since I just improved that action.” It is a puzzle disguised as an engine-builder.
Though card driven engines are very common in board games, Wingspan has different DNA. It is not Terraforming Mars or Everdell. In those games, you do anything in any order. They have a “better play this card before the game ends” feeling throughout. During the turn of Wingspan, you are mapping out your actions to use them in the most efficient way.
The Bite
Five Perfect Turns
Without a hint of hyperbole, I can honestly say that you can not afford to make one G*d d*mn mistake in the final round of Wingspan. We are talking about the epitome of ol’ fashioned action economy. Each player only gets 5 turns in the final round and what you have to do before the end is, quite frankly, a million f*ck*ng things. But you only get to pick 5. This is the bite – the 4th and final round.
What’s kind of bizarre is that you don’t really have any inner dialogue about what to do. It’s oddly instinctual. When the 3rd round ends, you already know exactly which five actions you will take and in which order. Think about it – you have been staring at the end game goals, your personal goals, and by now are TOTALLY biased on which birds you just f*ck*ng love to activate. Plus, if there is any question at all as to how to get points, squeezing eggs from their tiny little bodies is clearly the right choice. Unless you have owls. Then you need to squeeze their giant bulbous bodies. F*ck owls are big. Seriously, ever seen one? They could hoist up a Gloomhaven box if so desired. But I digress!
When the final round begins, you will have ALL 5 turns planned out. There is no winging it anymore. The unpredictable variables – food and the bird shop – do not play much of a role in your decision. Thinking of what to do is like staring at your favorite restaurant’s menu – You knew you were ordering chicken parm before you got in the car. You aren’t playing zero-point birds for powers, the food you need can be grabbed in a single action, and those bird cards you picked up two rounds ago had better be f*ck*ng played if you want to achieve your personal goal.
The bite of Wingspan is the enjoyment of the engine. You aren’t making many decisions – you are just watching the birds you played do their thing. It’s fun, it’s unique, and it makes you want to shuffle up and deal again.
This remarkable idea is necessary just by the way
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