First Look at Wingspan

With little more than a gentle flutter of feathers, and a tremendous “CAAAW!” Stonemaier Game’s Wingspan descends from the skies. This beauty was one of my most anticipated games and by sheer chance I got to play a game of it recently. Do you want to make a home for it?

Wingspan is a game about birds. Dozens and dozens of individually illustrated, uniquely powered, birds. Looking at a game in play is like looking at an ornithologists office and takes me back to looking at bird watching books as a child. Those same watercolour-esque paintings adorn each card. And that is wonderful. I’m developing a real appreciation for real world themes and being stuck in a polluted city certainly give a me a yearning for nature.

But a delightful theme doesn’t mean guano if the game isn’t interesting but Wingspan? Oh Wingspan, you beauty! As hinted at, Wingspan features an astonishing number of cards, each featuring its own special rules and various properties that interact with one another and the various scoring opportunities, making a game that need never behave exactly the same twice. But it’s the central mechanic of the game that makes it so blissfully satisfying to play.

Each player’s Avery board features rows that will build up with cards as they are played. Each of those rows though is also associated with an action, and when that action is performed the special abilities on all the cards in that row also trigger! Navigating the wonderful maze of opportunities and synergies this incredibly elegant system presents just lifts Wingspan into the air and let’s it soar.

Engine builders always feel good. But I don’t think I know one that feels so satisfyingly deep and varied with so little rules overhead tying it down. There is a certain degree of luck of the draw when gaining cards that might feel frustrating to some but wasn’t for me. Indeed, in a weekend that also saw me playing Teotihuacan and Underwater Cities for the first time, I think I enjoyed Wingspan the most. Which is stunning, even if with more familiarity I might expect that to change. It still made for an exceptional first impression.