Wingspan

I think that oftentimes, board games struggle between the balance of mechanic and aesthetic. Usually, the beset games focus on one of those, building beautiful games that are great to look at but just fine to play, or building games that fascinate in gameplay but could be reskinned as just about anything without making much of a difference (looking at you with much love, Dominion). Wingspan manages to toe the line between these two factors, making a game where you take care of a variety of nice-looking birds also a very fun game to play. I generally care only about the mechanics of a game, and so that is what I will focus on for the rest of this analysis, but I will draw some comparison to how the game mechanics play into the general aesthetic of the game.

The base game of Wingspan (since that is what I have before me, as I’m left without nectar and the other quality of life features added in later expansions) has some fascinating aspects. Firstly, the game basically surrounds only three different resources: food, eggs, and cards. Food allows for more eggs, eggs allow for more cards, and cards allow for more food. It has a nice way of balancing between these things in its own way, but that’s what makes it so interesting that the real strategy of the game often revolves around eliminating the need for one of these resources. That’s because the real resource of the game is turns. The total number of turns is set from the beginning: 26 turns to maximize your points. The less turns you spend trying to get one of the above resources, the more turns you can spend getting a resource that will provide you with points. This true focus of the game provides us with the most major design flaw: the Common Raven.

The Common Raven is the epitome of the strategy I have listed above. It allows one to entirely ignore one of the three resources. At the cost of one egg, it allows one to gain two foods, meaning that one can place it in their egg area and no longer have any need to use the ‘gain food’ action. Since eggs is the only resource which the game provides points for having at the end of the game, this allows a player to continue to use the egg action repeatedly, placing down more bird cards as needed and entirely ignoring the entire food economy and food dice. This strategy is absurd no matter what the game, making its card and others like it something akin to an automatic win in most scenarios. This has been fixed, luckily, in official Wingspan: according to tournament rules, the Common Raven—and other similar cards—are banned from the game. A rather elegant solution, no?

I think that the best part of Wingspan, though, is that it fits a strange niche of being a well enough designed game that it is fun to play and a simple and fun enough game that people who don’t really like board games like to play it as well. Although I might be hard pressed to find family members who will play a game like Dominion with me, which often devolves into strategies so powerful that people not familiar with the game have no room to compete, Wingspan allows for people who aren’t brilliant with board games to have some space to compete and have a fun time reading bird descriptions, feeling like they’re keeping care of birds and placing them in optimal positions. Because the game is just inherently fun to play in that way, it means that there are reasons to improve and become better—the activity is fun in and of itself, and then the player can improve as time goes on. This means that when I play this game with my family, they win about as often as I do—they have improved and learned the game at the same rate and at the same time that I have.

In the end, Wingspan is an interesting game. It is well balanced and designed. It is a little far from being my favorite board game—it doesn’t fit with some of my favorite things involved in board games, like deckbuilding and more intensive strategy. It has some variety, especially with the later expansions, but not what might be my favorite type of variety in games: the cost—and complete alteration—of later game strategy by needing to have great early game strategy. That’s what makes games like Slay the Spire (not a board game but close enough) or Twilight Imperium so fantastic. But Wingspan is a good game, and I’m almost never disappointed by such.