Wingspan Review – Why The World’s Most Popular Bird Game Is The Ultimate Potluck Dish

When going to a potluck or a BBQ, it can be hard to know what food to bring. That’s when you can rely on good ol’ potato salad. A dish that nobody loves, but everyone will eat without complaints. This is how I feel about Wingspan. It’s not going to blow your socks off, but it’s a great game you can pull out whenever.

In Wingspan, you’re creating a bird sanctuary comprised of three different habitats: forest, grasslands, and wetlands. In these habitats, you’ll release birds, which will give you points at the end of the game, and abilities whenever you select one of these habitats on your turn.

Throughout the game, you’ll be selecting these habitats to activate or run. Essentially, they’ll be three different engines, that are used to get points and complete objectives. These objectives come in two different flavours:

• Personal objectives you receive at the start of the game and are scored at the end.
• Round objectives that change at the start of each round, and are scored at the end of the round.

Between these two types of objectives, you always have something that you’re trying to achieve. It’s one of the strengths of playing Wingspan. In that, you’ll never be lost in knowing what to do next. You’ll find this a lot throughout the design, where the game goes to painstaking lengths to ensure you have a good time.

Turn-taking, for example, there are only four types of moves you can do, all simply explainable. You can play a bird to a habitat, or run one of your three habitats – activating that habitat’s power, and every bird’s ability in that row.

Then at the end of four rounds, the player with the most points wins.

If you like birds, this is your game

The highlight of Wingspan is its theme, and it goes to show what an impact a theme can have on a board game. The amount of fun I’ve had just looking at the birds and reading out their scientific names, is perhaps too much for a sane human being. But they’re wonderful animals and come in such interesting shapes and sizes.

Anyway, birds are cool.

Going back to the gameplay, the building of bird rows in Wingspan is satisfying without getting complicated. Even by the end of the game, you blitz through your turns as the engines you build are used for resource generation and don’t have any additional choices when you run through them.

The only strong strategic decisions you’ll make revolve around playing birds, getting resources, and wondering which habitat to run.

One of the mechanics I’ve yet to mention is the different types of resources. You have seeds, rodents, fish, invertebrates and fruit. The only way to get these is via a number of rolled dice, and taking the forest action. Unfortunately, this means there’s not always the food you want when you want it.

Therefore, you have to make plans around how you’re going to get the food you need. Sometimes, it’s impossible – and this is addressed in an expansion. But most of the time, it’s another satisfying puzzle that keeps you engaged.

Though resources aren’t the only randomness holding you back, there’s a lot of inherent randomness within Wingspan. Such as what birds appear in the market. For example, there are times when you’ll get a series of synergistic birds, and other times you won’t.

This randomness will frustrate some, as skill won’t always trump luck. But like Tapestry, I still really enjoyed playing Wingspan but not for its competitive integrity.

How do you like your eggs?

Perhaps the worst part of the Wingspan is the last couple of turns. At this point, it’s difficult to get the resources needed for another bird, and in most cases isn’t worth it anyway. When the final bell rings, you get one point per egg on a bird card. Meaning most of the time, in the later stages of the game, you’re better off spending turns getting as many eggs as you can.

Compared to the rest of the game, speed-running eggs in the final few turns is a bit of a letdown. It’s not as interesting or engaging as setting up to play a bird – even though you get more points.

Thankfully, this egg rush never lasts too long as one of my favourite mechanics in Wingspan is at the end of every round. You lose an action for the next round. So in the first round, you have eight actions, second round seven actions, and so on.

This bucks the trend of strategic games that start fast, but slow down as more options open up to players. Wingspan turns the other beak, and the speed of the game ramps up towards the end. Ensuring it never overstays its welcome.

Birds make everything better

For all its faults, Wingspan is uplifted by its excellent theme and wonderful artwork. Alongside the typically amazing production from Stonemaier Games.

Wingspan is a satisfying board game that is aggressively inoffensive in its theme and mechanics. Making it perfect for every occasion, but at the same time, it doesn’t take any risks with its design. Everything in Wingspan, you’ve seen in one form or another in other board games.

Yet, Wingspan brings everything together really, really well.

As such, it’s a great game that I enjoy every time it hits the table. However, because it’s the plain jane of board gaming it doesn’t inspire any strong emotions. I don’t think anyone who’s played a lot of board games is going to make this their new favourite, nor are they going to tear it apart in the backyard like Redneckopoly.

But this is to Wingspan’s credit. Even though it’s not one of my favourite games, for a board game of this complexity, it sees a lot of play because it’s so easy to bring out and enjoy. You know, it’s as I said earlier, Wingspan is the potato salad of board games.