Wyrmspan Review – Building a Dragon Sanctuary One Silver Coin at a Time

Disclaimer: Wyrmspan was provided for free by VR Distribution, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

Upon hearing the news of Wyrmspan, I immediately checked the date. We were still a ways out from April 1st so it couldn’t be a joke. But even now that I’ve had it for a couple of weeks and played it numerous times, it’s still hard to believe it’s a real product.

At a high level, Wyrmspan trades the birds of Wingspan for dragons while keeping the same feel and base mechanisms. It adds new rules and streamlines others to create a similar but slightly more complex board game.

How to play

Wyrmspan is a game of creating caves, luring dragons to live in them, pleasing the Dragon Guild, and victory points. The player with the most points after four rounds wins the game and challenges Toothless and Hiccup to a match of Dragon Racing.

But before anyone torments any sheep. Every player starts the game with an empty player board, six silver coins, a couple of dragon and cave cards, and three resources.

Each turn you spend one of your silver coins to do an action. Such as:

• Excavate a cave by adding a cave card to one of the three caverns on your player mat. The first space in each cave is pre-dug, and the second is free to Excavate. But to dig further, you must pay with dragon eggs… Mining is hungry work after all.
• Entice dragons to your excavated caves by spending the resources on the top-left of their dragon card. Each dragon rewards you with victory points and an ability.
• Explore the caves by placing an adventuring meeple on the left-hand side of your player board, and working their way through one of the caverns. Stopping at, and in between, each dragon to pick up resources, activate abilities, or improve your standing with the Dragon Guild.

Dragons come in all shapes and sizes but their abilities only have four timings. They can activate their ability when first played, when an adventurer Explores them, when you cache a resource on their card, or during end-game scoring.

Speaking of scoring, you’ll have a chance to earn some victory points at the end of each round. But only if you complete that round’s public objective.

As an example, one of these objectives rewards players for having the most medium-sized dragons in their menagerie by the end of the round.

Visiting the Dragon Guild is another great way to earn victory points.

The main way to gain an audience with the Guild is by Exploring your caves and reporting your findings. However, you’ll find more ways to visit through dragon and cave card abilities.

Each time you visit the guild, your token moves around a circular track and rewards you with resources. You get a special bonus when you reach the halfway point or complete a full lap. This can be a powerful once-off ability, victory points, or a new end-game objective.

Once everyone uses all their coins or elects to pass, the round is over. Three more and you’ve completed your first game of Wyrmspan.

The circle of life

Wyrmspan is a game of collecting dragons, caves, resources and victory points. Starting from your first turn, you may only have enough resources for one flying lizard. But by the end, your board will be filled with baby dragons, adolescent dragons, and even Smaug might make an appearance.

The journey to get there, however, is where the fun lies.

You’ll have to pick and choose your dragons carefully as though you’re the captain for a pick-up game of basketball. Weighing their resource cost, their ability and how they interact with the rest of your cavern inhabitants.

That’s going on in the front of your mind, while in the back you’re wondering how you’re paying for them. Except in a few games, I found it difficult to get my hands on resources in Wyrmspan. This results in some tough decisions about which dragons to play, and which to keep on the bench.

The effect of low resources went beyond just picking dragons. It forced me into making moves I didn’t want to make, to do what I wanted in a future turn.

The pay-off for the future turn is sweet, but getting there can feel like a slog. There were many times I’d eye a big move and slowly get more dismayed as I worked my way backwards counting the actions needed to pull it off.

For instance, for you to Entice a dragon to one of your deeper caverns. You first must get a cave card, then Excavate that cave card, which you can only do if you have eggs – not so easy to come by in Wyrmspan. Then after all that, you must get resources to play your dragon. Which we’ve established are also not so easy to come by.

By the end, you need at least three to four turns of planning to make your dragon dreams come true. You’re also trying to align these spent actions with end-of-round objectives and Dragon Guild bonuses.

Doing everything by the book is labourious, so thankfully, almost all abilities on dragon and cave cards and the Dragon Guild help you shortcut this process. Turning a dreary game into one where your eyes light up at the smallest efficiencies.

In saying that, what frustrated me most about Wyrmspan is how my enjoyment of the game depended on these shortcuts appearing.

Black market dragons

Not all dragons are created equal, and with a dragon deck the size of two baby wyrms standing on top of one another, you’re never guaranteed the same, or even similar dragons, in each game.

As a result, if you get a bad starting hand and the wrong dragons appear on the market. Then you might be up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Sadly, with only three dragons in the market, this happened more often than I wanted it to. In a couple of our games, we had a few hatchlings (expensive baby dragons) in the market without any way to generate additional resources or dragon cards. This led to some incredibly low-scoring games.

On the other hand, we had games where resource-generating dragons overwhelmed us at the beginning. Leading to everyone ending up with a full board of dragons and plenty of victory points.

We also had games, where some people got lucky, and others didn’t.

This is the make-or-break issue of Wyrmspan.

The difference between a high-scoring player board and a low-scoring one is all in the dragon dynamics. However, these are based on random card draws and a tiny market selection. When combined with the low interaction between players, if someone lucks into an early combination, there’s nothing you can do to stop them from running away with the game.

Wyrmspan vs Wingspan

Unsurprisingly the biggest difference between the two games is the swap from birds to dragons. I didn’t think this would be that big an issue. However, Wyrmspan loses out heavily by going the fantasy route.

Compared to Wingspan where you learn about the weird, freaky little birds living on our planet. I cared little for the dragons of Wyrmspan, as they didn’t exist and I struggled to connect with them beyond thinking they looked pretty.

Now, there’s a lengthy dragon encyclopedia filled with lore for each dragon included in the game. However, there’s a tangible difference between being told a dragon is scary and learning that the Australian pelican has the longest bill of any bird in the world.

Another big difference between the two games is how tightly coupled everything is in Wyrmspan.

In Wingspan, you could work on a single habitat. Ignoring one or two rows when you don’t need eggs or bird cards.

Doing the same in Wyrmspan is disastrous.

Each of the three rows now offers you something you desperately need. Be it hard to get dragon cards, resources or cave cards, you require all three to Entice dragons into your caves. As a result, I found myself Exploring all three locations a lot more frequently in Wyrmspan than in Wingspan.

Another incentive to diversify your Exploration is the increasing egg cost of repeated visits to the same cavern. This is a direct response to another strong Wingspan strategy where you max out one habitat and run it each turn.

Those are the major differences between the two games. But many smaller changes are sprinkled throughout, such as the fun new addition of the Dragon Guild board and the not-so-fun addition of silver coins.

Final thoughts

Overall, Wyrmspan is another solid title from Stonemaier Games. The engine-building, or cavern-building, is satisfying enough to outweigh the game’s flaws. Chiefly, the lack of interactivity and the volatile nature of cards in the market.

When it comes to asking where Wyrmspan sits within the Wingspan universe. From the versions I’ve played, Wingspan plus the Oceania expansion is still my favourite. The interactivity of the bird cards and rebalancing of the player boards brings out the best of the original game. Especially at the two-player count.

In saying that, I would rate Wyrmspan above the original Wingspan in terms of gameplay. Since this new game has more to offer experienced gamers, and those comfortable playing the original.

However, it does lose a bit by removing the bird-based theme. So for those new to board gaming or worried that Wyrmspan might be too complex. Then Wingspan is a great option for a night of fun board gaming.