Wingspan, or to use the more accurate scientific name "Bird Girth", didn't just take off when it was released last year. It was more engineered and graceful than that. Wingspan took flight. It sold out as fast as the publishers could print it, the press regurgitated whole parental bellyfulls of awards, the publishers have already released an expansion that adds European birds, and a second Oceania Expansion is on the way, that will add the indolent chicken nuggets that pass for birds in New Zealand. This is a game that speaks to people, and like a choir it does so in three voices at once. First, it speaks to people through its theme: Wingspan's world of birds, also known as "the world", feels fresh and classy and inviting. Second, Wingspan speaks to people through the game itself, which is easy to learn, hard to master and rewarding. Who wins is who gets the most points, and I'll explain that in more detail later, but what's relevant is, that cards you play, end up sticking around on your board, granting you more and more power. So the game starts simple, accessible, but then rapidly, as all of your plans come home to roost at the end of the game, approaches this crescendo of combos, where everything you do is getting you points, and eggs, and cards, and food... These are what's known as engine building card games, and people tend to like them, because, as well as just a layer of strategy you'd find in an ordinary card card game, they have this sensation of growth, of power, and of getting somewhere. Third, Wingspan speaks to people through its production. This game once again proves that Stonemeier publishes the best boxes in the business. Not only does Wingspan have all of these lush watercolor illustrations and components that beg to be touched. Even the manual is luxurious If I was mailed a letter on paper of this quality, I would assume I was being groomed by a millionaire. But the reason I, personally, was excited to play Wingspan was that first one: It was the birds. This might be TMI, but ever since my father passed away, it was like a switch turned on in my head, and I just fell in love with the stupid things. So now I've disgorged all of that hyperbole, and you almost certainly think that this is gonna be a glowing review ... Let me pull a classic Shut Up and Sit Down handbrake turn, as I tell you, That I am among a small group of people, who does not enjoy this game very much. But it still might be good *for you*, still might be a good purchase, so Let's take a closer look. When you sit down to play Wingspan, you are given an empty habitat, and a hand full of birds. Now, the first rule is to forget everything that your mama taught you about birds in the hand being worth something in the bush. No, in Wingspan birds in your hand are worthless, birds in the bush are everything, your mother's a liar, your world is crumbling. Now, on your turn you can do one of four things, and one of those four things is to take a bird from your hand, place it on the floor ("the floor", that's pretty not accurate terminlogy), you're gonna pay food for it, and also later birds are going to require an inexplicable down payment of eggs. Now, that's great, well done, you put a bird from your hand into the bush, you crushed it, but to keep this up you're gonna need more birds in the hand, and more food, and more eggs, and getting those are the other three ways, you can spend your turn (this feels rude, don't mean anything by it). If you spend your turn getting more food to pay for these birds, you can pick any one of the dice in the bird feeder, and discard it, and get that kind of food. If you choose to spend your turn getting birds, you can pick any one of the three birds that is always available, or draw blindly from the top of a deck. If you choose to spend your turn laying eggs on your birds, I'm not entirely sure what's happening thematically, presumably your bellowing orders across your habitat using a megaphone: Push! Push! So those are the basics, you know: Get food get birds, get eggs, get paid! However, that's not all this game is. Let me introduce you to the beating little bird heart of Wingspan. So, as you play cards into these three rows, you'll notice that they each correlate to one of the actions you can do, and the more birds you play into that row, the more powerful that action becomes. So if I lay eggs, now that I've squeezed all these birds into a row, like a some kind of cross between an aviary and a clearance rack, I'm not gonna get one or two eggs, I'm gonna get four! These guys are gonna be squatting out eggs, like that one weird character from Super Mario 2, and not only that, but these birds have "skills", like Napoleon Dynamite, all of these brown strips, that most of the cards in the game have, are activated whenever you do that action, so if I lay eggs, I'm getting four eggs, and then, all the brown powers activate, so my California Quail is gonna get an extra egg. my Peregrine Falcon is gonna go hunting and, eats a pelican ... that's not going to happen ... And then my Northern Mockingbirds can pick any other bird in the habitat to go again. I'm gonna send my Peregrine Falcon out hunting again ... It's a Sandpiper, that's going down its gullet. At the start of the game The system is just satisfying and neat. It might be the case that, every time you spend your turn getting a food, you get a free egg, like some kind of ovoid cashback. However, this isn't how Wingspan stays. By the end of the game, it always feels like you've managed to assemble the Avian Avengers, and you're not even able to draw a card, without your birds saying: "Oh, hey, have some extra cards, have some extra food, have, you know, a bunch of extra eggs, that you won't know where to put them... The reason this is good, is not just because it gives Wingspan an arc, that's awesome, or because you feel some pride over this little thrumming engine you've built, that's neat... The reason, I think, it's... probably the thing that keeps me coming back for game after game of Wingspan. It's because the game is never the same twice. Because of the cards in your board, that you chose to put down, the cards in your hand, the cards in the shop, the cards you might randomly draw. This game is never the same, from moment to moment. It is endlessly surprising and evasive. (*drilling sound*) One good thing about Covid is that in every single direction all my neighbors are using this opportunity to do DIY. I can do that too. They think it's big and clever, I can do it too, I can get *rrrrRRRR* At long last we have arrived at a point, where I can teach you how you win Wingspan, so if this game has an arc like a firework, imagine if at the end of the game the firework exploded, and in the explosion was birds, and in the birds was maths. So, you're gonna get a point for every bird card on your board, you're gonna get a point for every egg on your board, also, some birds have the ability to cache food or cards on them, or under them, and food and cards on birds, or under birds, are more points. And if this was all Wingspan was, I might dare to try teaching it to my mum, but it's... *drilling sound* ...but it's not all Wingspan is ... that's gonna drive me completely insane... But it's not all that Wingspan is... Brace yourself, cards also all have their own intrinsic point value, that has to be taken into consideration when you're playing the game. Also everyone has one bonus card, that also has to be taken into consideration, because that's gonna get you extra points, you can also get more bonus cards, and then also... At four discrete points during the game, you're gonna check the bonus board, to see who has the most of a particular thing, or, if you prefer, you can instead of playing with the less directly competitive blue side of the board, where you get points for having a lot of a particular kind of..thing. This is what the tabletop scene calls "point salad", which is a lovely term, but what it means is, that the game resides in you, looking at all the different ways, that you could score points, by playing this bird or that bird, taking that bird, laying some eggs, and figuring out which the most efficient one is. And this is good, you know, it means that in a game like Wingspan, with this many variables, you are always engaged, there's always something new to think about. The disadvantage is it takes a game, which is otherwise welcoming, and makes it super obtuse. Listen, when I am dealing with people, who have been brave enough to sit down to play a designer boardgame for the first time, and I'm they're trying to show them, that this hobby is for them, the moment I see their faces light up, and I know they see the whole tabletop scene differently, is when just for a moment, they can kick arse. Whether that's helping the team to cure a disease in Pandemic, making one wicked shot in a dexterity game, or making someone else look like a doofus in Love Letter, in that moment, I see them relax, I see them feel proud, I see them maybe consider, that they belong here. You know, those are the moments I'm seeking to create. Wingspan is not an entry game for me, because it is a game, where even I don't know if I'm winning. Partially because players aren't fighting, partially because your score ... isn't hidden, but it's so tedious to calculate, that no one ever does it, but mostly because, this is a game, that you have to play with your gut, and I don't want to put it in front of people, who don't have a gut to listen to yet. So, if I don't love Wingspan as a sort of entry-level hobbyist board game, that means that next, we have to get our talons out, and consider it as a game for gamers. But first let's have a quick interval, and look at the top three birds. Not my top three birds. But objectively, the top three birds in the world, and I love you Elizabeth Hargrave, designer of Wingspan, But none of them are in this game. Taking the number three slot: It's the Bearded Vulture, an animal that looks like an 80s glam rock star in the streets, and eats bone in the sheets. That's not a euphemism, the bearded vulture is the only vertebrate, whose diet is mostly bone. At number two, It's the cockatoo! This cockatoo's expressive crest shows you exactly how excited it is, like some kind of Pokemon, and like most parrots, it is enormously intelligent, and completely insane. It's just that cockatoos seem particularly insane. And at number one: It's the feral pigeon! The bird that mankind bred for food and entertainment for five *thousand* years, then turned on a dime, abandoned the bird entirely, and then we forgot our entire history with them, and started calling them "rats of the sky". Next time you see a feral pigeon, why not apologize to it, personally. The whole species is, like, humankind's ex-lover, that we pretend not to recognize, when we see in the street anymore. Where was I? Er, Wingspan as a gamer's game. Right. So, where I think this game succeeds, isn't giving you so much intriguing stuff to think about. As I've said, looking, at the shop at the birds, you've got, the birds in hand, your objectives, It's a... it's a rich, fluid, warming thing, like a cross between a tasty skew, and an Excel spreadsheet, and always, no matter what peculiar game state, you end up looking down at, you can draw on all of your past Wingspan games, to try and efficiently play your way out of it. And the key word there is *try*. I'm talking about, thinking for ages about which bird to play. And then, just before your turn, your friend rerolls all the dice in the bird feeder, and now, randomly, you can't play that bird. *Rrrrr* I'm talking about, drafting a bonus card at the start of the game, that says you will get two points for every predator, you have in your enclosure, And then, no predators fall out of the game's giant deck for half of the game. Let me put it another way: Wingspan is a game, that asks you to crunch a lot of variables. But whether that pays off better or worse than you were expecting, doesn't feel like something, you can take ownership of. There's a lot of luck involved. To which the rebuttal would be: Ok, Quinns, then It's a little bit of a gambling game. To which I say: "No! Bad hypothetical viewer!" Because, gambling games, which I love, are ones where you decide what kind of a risk to take. So whether there's good luck or bad luck, you can take ownership of that. Wingspan is a game, where I proceed logically ,and the game inserts all the luck, so whether I'm lucky or unlucky, that doesn't feel like something that I... deserve. Also, gambling games are ones where bad luck happens out in the open. So at least if I get upset with my bad luck, all of my opponents can go "haha", and celebrate my misfortune. In wingspan, this intensely personal, private game, no one even knows what's going on with me. Which means, if I have bad luck, I have two choices, I can either Charlie Brown it, and just sit here being sad, or I can announce to the table, exactly I was unlucky, which is *absolutely* worse. But the single thing that I'm afraid of in a game of Wingspan, that makes me never want to play it, personally, is that you might end up in a situation, where your friends engines are just working better than yours. And that might be your fault, which is still a pretty unpleasant sensation, but it also might not be your fault. You might have just received a random hand of birds at the start of the game, none of which are gonna help you to acquire more birds. Now, there are loads of engine building board games that are fun because *they hide* the fact that your engine blows. In Wingspan, if I spend my turn getting, you know, two eggs There's nothing that is gonna stop me from seeing that when my friend takes their turn they're gonna get three eggs, or three eggs and a card, and then when it gets back to me and I have to do my pathetic "Oh, on my turn, I'll take one card" or "I'll get one food token", that feeling *sucks*. Oh, I got a bit heated. Why don't we chill out by looking at my top three worst birds? In at number three, it's the Marabu Stork. I once saw two of these things in person, both big as a man, eating garbage. I'm still haunted by it. This is a real troubling creature, and I think it should stop. At number two: Let's talk about the Eagle Owl. The only species of bird, that is on record as having attacked and killed a healthy adult human. Honestly, depending on how grumpy I am, this thing can be in my bottom three birds, or my top three. At number one: It's the Hummingbird Moth. I saw a field of these on my honeymoon and thought they were hummingbirds. Imagine how I felt when I ran out into them and saw I was surrounded by giant insects, only pretending to be birds. My honeymoon was ruined, my marriage has yet to recover. Back to the review. I'm sure some of you are now just sat there thinking: "But Quinns, don't you want to at least keep and play Wingspan to have access to all of these colorful birds?" To which I say: That's the really tragic part. Wingspan's theme does *nothing* for me. So listen, obviously, I love the illustrations in this game. I love the opulent amount of birds you get. I love that every bird card has a fact, and a Latin name, and I think it's super cute how some of the mechanics in the game actually use this fluff, like the way that predators hunt as you draw a card off the deck, and check that bird's wingspan to see if your predator can gobble it up, and there's a gold card that gives you points if you can collect birds with colors in the name, or geographical details in the name, but themes in games are more than just set dressing. Ideally the theme sits underneath the game and fits with the mechanics, so that when something fun happens mechanically, the story that's being told there amplifies that moment. So in Monopoly, you're not just taking points from dad, you're bankrupting his empire, or in Werewolf you're not just lying to your friend, you're doing it to kill them... Maybe that's not a great example... but with games like Wingspan, where the thrill comes from collecting stuff, you want a theme that's gonna make that stuff feel *tangible*. Wingspan's theme is gorgeous to look at, but in terms of the work it does to fire my imagination? Let's just recap: Wingspan's box says that "You are bird enthusiasts seeking to attract the best birds to your aviary". And it's nonsense. This is a game about playing some kind of dark timeline version of Dr Doolittle, trying to trap birds in a pyramid scheme. Listen, you, a *human*, first has to go to this enormous, like, socialist shared bird feeder to collect food, which you then use to attract birds, who then live here forever, and act as some kind of a traitor to their genetic class, because they help you to attract even more birds. But there's more, they also produce a secondary currency of "inert eggs on demand", because if there's one thing a pelican and a grebe can agree on, it's that they will not move in, unless you first destroy a number of eggs, equal to their neighbor. It makes *no* sense. and that's not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, I quite enjoy teaching Wingspan, because I get to say those sentences. But in terms of it being a game that excites me, a bird fan? There is so little animal in these birds that, well... I'm not exaggerating when I say, the animals of cockroach poker to me have more personality, because at least they have expressions, they're shown in different poses, which implies they are somehow alive. Wingspan could be rethemed as a game about taxidermy, and, I don't just think it would still work. I think it might work better. Now, obviously, there is still attraction and appeal in Wingspan offering just a tremendous amount of beautiful birds, that here's the thing: I already have a deck of beautiful birds. They're just playing cards. So what I'm really looking for from Wingspan, is a solid game. And I like it, but I don't love it enough to keep it. In conclusion, if you want to buy Wingspan, if you think your friends will love it, or if you just crave it, I think you can buy it and feel pretty safe. But, if you want to know what I personally would buy instead? If you are looking for an engine building game that, for me, feels a little more fair, and a little less annoying when I'm losing, The Quest for El Dorado is fabulous, as is Istanbul. If you are looking for a game as pretty as this, but that you can actually take home to meet the family, I would recommend Azul. But if, oh wow, I have to rub the dust off this one, if what you're looking for is an engine building card game, and you don't care about the theme being accessible, or the rules not being a nightmare to learn, Race for the Galaxy remains not just a great card game, but one of the greatest board games ever made, and if you're new to this hobby and you haven't heard of this game, oh, oh Oh It's really very special. And, as a little extra bonus, all four of those games I just mentioned are cheaper than Wingspan. However, mine is not the only opinion on "Bird Girth" on team Shut Up and Sit Down. Our staff writer Ava Foxport enjoys wingspan for one very sweet reason, and they recorded an audio track of why that is, that we now present to you to close this video out. And as a kind of music video, my building actually has some nesting peregrine falcons up on the roof. So, as an accompanying video track, why not enjoy watching them grow up. Take care everybody! Wingspan is a game about birds. It's a lovely gentle thing, and there's beautiful pictures, and a solid game of stacking bonuses and tiny, fluttering engines. But the purest joy in that freaky box, is as simple as saying the names of the birds: Carolina Chickadee, Painted Bunting, Loggerhead Shrike, Juniper Titmouse, Bewick's Wren and the Blue Gray Gnatcatcher. The Violet Green Swallow, Horned Lark, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Steller's Jay, The Belted Kingfisher, and the Bobolink. Northern Shoveler Clark's Grebe, and the Prothonotary Warbler. It's just the names of birds, just the odd labels, we've given to beautiful, tiny creatures, that fly, and dance, and peck for food, and that... is delightful.
Very brave of Quinn to review it with his honest opinion this way, I really hope not too many people give him a hard time for it 😅
I like Wingspan, (which is just as well because my wife absolutely LOVES it), but I respect him for being honest about a few issues the game does have, it's not perfect after all.
As much as I do like Wingspan, it's good that everybody out there has a contrasting opinion to consider before purchasing 🙂
Only issue with the game is round 4. Least amount of actions but majority of them are simply egg blasting all your nests 90% of the time.
I'll admit not knowing the scores of other players was a bonus to me. It's hard to know who is winning so unless you are super far behind it is still possible to have a person win out of nowhere.
I like Wingspan. I think is beautifully designed in the way it presents itself to the player. It streamlines a genre that is generally more complex and I think it's great for that.
But I cannot help but to agree with SUSD criticism. I think the drafting mechanic is fundamentally flawed and does not let you have agency on your engine. One can say that is all about making the best out of the options that you are given, but then we enter in the balance problem, where the options given to other players are just plain better than yours. We added mulligan at the beginning to trying to offset this but with a deck of birds this big is not enough. Maybe if the drafting deck will be categorize and you could somehow choose...
I still like playing Wingspan (like another redditor said probably because my wife loves it), but I dont feel too acomplished when I win and dont learn much when I lose, which I think is what keeps you coming back to other (better) games.
The rules mistake at 7:05 where Quinns said you get one point for each bird you have on your board sent me in a panicked scramble for the rules book, haha.
That was a nice ending to the video
I was introduced to both Wingspan and Everdell at the same convention in January, 2019. After one play, I was desperate to get Wingspan, and I thought Everdell was just okay. I ended up buying both during that year, but now after 10+ plays I can confidently say that both are beautiful games but Everdell has much more strategy to it than your first impression shows, while Wingspan has much less.
I can definitely respect this review. The one huge thing I disagree with him on is its viability as a gateway game. The reason for this is because he's operating under the assumption that someone brand new to board gaming should be able to form a winning strategy on their first attempt.
I think this is a wonderful gateway game. I actually taught my 75 year old grandma who had never played a modern board game. She did terribly. She then immediately asked to play it again and sent me a photo a week later of the game, newly purchased, on her kitchen table.
Moving forward it's Bird girth all the way.