Wingspan (Base Game)

Got this gift for my board game loving family and we thoroughly enjoyed our time. There were some learning curve when first starting out but once we understood the rules, it was a pleasant surprise. The quality of the board game was great! Loved the bird feeder. It was nice to see artistic and educational information about different birds that we've never heard or seen before. Pretty simple to assemble, and fun to play! Will definitely be playing this every weekend for a bit.

Firstly, let's start with the physical aspects of the item. It's a well built board game, the pieces are all tactile and of great quality. The eggs especially are beautiful and fun to hold. Wingspan really is a gorgeous looking game, the art on the cards is truly stunning, and it's super educational with so many fun facts on many different species of birds. And the font size is reasonable enough for anyone with moderate vision to not have to squint deeply at the cards. Now, the more important question is, is it fun? By golly, yes it is! It is a good low-weight game (2-3 hour playthrough with decent pacing, single action turns) that incorporates some very interesting card play and clever engine building, coupled with a fascinating depleting action selection mechanic and multiple ways to score. If you love birds, you will like this game. If you enjoy hand management and simple tableau building, this game is perfect for you. And if you buy into any of the hype, this game has won multiple awards for good reason! Get ready to sit down for a few hours and throw yourself into the aviary world of Wingspan!

This is one of my favourite games, the design is lovely and strategizing is very fun. However, it is a calm game, where you focus on yourself more than others and pacing will be affected by distracted players who aren’t thinking of their next move during other player’s turns. It has a bit of a learning curve but nothing brings me peace like a game of wingspan. Those who prefer faster paced games will disagree with me.

Background: I've played a ton of board/card games in my life, enough to call myself a board game enthusiast. First of all let me say that this game is beautiful. Everything from the gorgeous bird artwork on the cards to the box itself is stunning. If you're like me, you'll probably be gawking at at least some of the artwork when you play for the first time (and long after that too). Wingspan oozes theme. The board is made up of three different habitats that birds commonly live in, and you're placing birds in the specific habitat that they belong in. The actual bird cards themselves, while being beautiful, also have an interesting fact about the bird, along with their wingspan in cm. I'm definitely not a bird person, but this game really pulled me with the bird theme, and I love it. Every time I drew a new card I would say things like "Oooo would you just look at that bird!?" or "Damn, that's a nice bird right there", and would look forward to reading it's little factoid. Drawing a new bird was just as exciting as making a strategic move to gain an advantage. I won't go into the gameplay much (you can look up a how-to-play on YouTube for that), but I will say that literally every facet of it works, and exceptionally well at that. You only have a few things you can do each turn, so typically turns don't take too long, as long as you're planning ahead when others are playing. This is GOOD, as you won't be sitting for 10 minutes waiting for your next turn (at least once everyone has played once). You'll be drawing birds, playing birds on your habitats, collecting resources, and laying eggs. Your birds have effects that can be triggered in future turns, doing cool things like getting free eggs or swallowing another bird for a victory point as long as it's wingspan is small enough to fit down your gullet. You can get a bit of an "engine" going later in the game, where you can trigger a ton of effects back to back, doing a bunch of awesome bird stuff at once. There is some player interaction with some of these effects, so it pays to pay attention when it's other players' turns! This is a "point salad" kind of game, meaning you have a ton of different ways to score victory points at the end of the game. It's great because you're always looking ahead at what you think will be the most efficient way to earn points at the end, and your options are going to be different each game depending on your starting birds or playstyle. There's also different universal goals and secret individual goals that you're working on that are different every game, which greatly adds to replicability. If you're secret goal one game is to play a bunch of birds with wingspans under 40cm, you'll probably be biased towards playing a bunch of tiny birds in your habitat, which effects differ greatly from most larger birds. I would say this game has a moderate learning curve. About halfway through your first game you'll start to get the feel for what you should be doing, and by the end you feel pretty good about it. It's really not too difficult to learn, but it definitely takes plenty of time and strategy to master. Quality of game pieces is exceptional. Even the game manual is made of a thick textured (vinyl?) material that feels amazing to flip through. Overall this bird game is well worth the money. If you enjoy board games and birds, you need to own this. If you enjoy board games and don't care about birds, you should still probably own this, it's just that good. PS If you do end up enjoying this game, I would highly recommend "Parks" from Keymaster Games (a Barnes and Noble exclusive in the US). It's gameplay is different, but it has equally beautiful artwork/design and the strategies you'll employ are very similar to Wingspan.

Purchased this after a couple of hours searching for an adult strategy game that did not depend overly much luck. The instructions could not be worse! The game is fun and intriguing. My advice: look at the scorecard first. This gives you a clue as to how to succeed so the instructions will be a little less confusing. Key point: there are several strategies that can work and one’s strategy may change more than once during play. You can accumulate birds, or eggs, or cover a habitat to earn point. Certain bird cards have important “power” features that can deliver points multiple times during play. The little wood blocks are used to 1) track each of your 8 turns 2) track your progress from right to left on a selected habitat during your turn.

antastic game! Wingspan is beautifully designed with stunning artwork and high-quality components. The gameplay is smooth, strategic, and engaging without being overly complicated—great for both casual players and board game enthusiasts. Every play feels different thanks to the variety of bird cards, and it’s just as fun solo as it is with a group. Easily one of the best games in my collection—highly recommend!

The artwork on every piece in this game is truly remarkable. The level of detail in this is incredible and it’s obvious how much effort went into crafting this. The game is definitely complex and hard to pick up at first but their are game cards that walk you through the first few plays and it made it a lot easier to get started. The variety of birds to play with is super fun and as a birder, it has been a great addition to our family’s game collection. I like the ability to play multiple rounds and gives you the ability to modify how long you want to play for, could be a short game or long game depending on time. The wooden egg pieces feel great and overall quality of all the components is very well designed and crafted. I highly recommend this to birders, nature enthusiasts, or even just seasoned board game players.

If that sounds like a game you'd enjoy, then perhaps Wingspan is for you. This game gets major props for it's design: The game pieces are substantial. The cards are nicely coated and won't whither away. The art is beautiful. The multiple instruction books/guidebooks/helper materials are heavy and coated and nicer than magazine quality. But what about the GAME PLAY? Ask yourself if these are the types of things you like in a game: Complicated: The rules are complicated enough that the game includes these very nice starter cards for each player to use the first time you play an open-handed game, they show you how to set up the game and dictate/explain your first several moves. This is a really nice touch, but it speaks to how confusing the game can be. There are 10 different ways to earn points, and you have a LOT of options on every turn, so to get good at the game, you have to be thinking many, many moves ahead and considering a lot of possibilities. To play well, you have to map out of a lot of things in your head. And there are far too many bird cards to learn them all. Not Very Competitive or Interactive. Every player has a limited number of turns in which to build out a thriving bird habitat. The things you put in your habitat earn you points, and those points are tallied at the end to determine the winner. Some of the things you do can affect the other players' scores and resources, but that is by no means a major driver of your behavior. This is definitely not a game where you can screw over your opponent. In my experience, planning your moves gives you so much to think about that there's it's hard to even pay attention to what the other players are doing, let alone chat with them (of course, if you're able to process and keep track of all that, you'll have a slight advantage). Limited Engine-Building: What does this mean? The beauty of the game is the fun you may have building "engines", which means you've constructed a bird sanctuary that sustains itself beautifully (and earns you points without much additional work). But each game of Wingspan is exactly 26 moves. This keeps games manageable, length-wise, but can be frustrating in two ways: 1) you will inevitably have choices to make that limit what you can build, and 2) if you've done a really great job, then your final 25% of the game will be pretty boring -- you'll stop building and just collect points on your turn. This is satisfying points-wise, but pretty unsatisfying if you like the building part of the game. UPDATE: Get the Oceania expansion pack (often on sale for under $20 here) and the game becomes much more balanced, interesting, and forgiving, with loads of new end-of-game strategy options. Highly recommended. Impossible to conquer: I like games like poker that are impossible to truly conquer, but this one has me really mystified. I've played a dozen times and the only conclusion I've made about strategy is that I need to study the 200 available cards a little better to understand how to best combine them in future games. I guess the limited number of moves per game makes for a really long learning curve, because I feel like I don't have enough turns every time I play, or I need to do better with the math part of the game (and I'm pretty good at math). The final score always surprises me, whether I came in first or last.