Wingspan is a 2019 Eurogame designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and published by Stonemaier Games in 2019. It's an engine-building game where the player attract birds to their wildlife reserves to score points. The game has won several awards.
The core of Wingspan revolves around the following four actions:
- Playing a bird from your hand to an appropriate habitat by paying its food and egg costs. The more birds are in a habitat, the more powerful the habitat's abilities will be. Moreover, activating a habitat will also activate all the brown bird powers in it.
- Gaining food: The action associated with the Forest. You get to remove dice from the birdfeeder and take the corresponding food.
- Laying eggs: The action associated with the Grassland. You can lay eggs on any of your birds as long as they have available nest spots. Unused eggs are worth one point each at the end of the game.
- Drawing cards: The action associated with the Wetland. You can take cards from the shared, public tray and/or draw random cards from the deck.
Additionally, the game has two mechanics for scoring points: The bonus cards you keep until the end of the game and reward you for doing specific things (such as playing a lot of predators), and the end-of-round goals that let players race each other for points bonuses. Most round-end goals in the original game revolve around eggs, but the expansions change this.
The base game revolves around North American birds, while the Expansion Packs are devoted to other continents. So far the following have been released:
- European Expansion (2019): Adds new game pieces without changing the base game's rules much. Notable for introducing birds with teal end-of-round powers. Also adds more interaction between players.
- Ocenania Expansion (2020): In addition to new game pieces, it introduces the wild nectar resource, as well as redesigned game boards that Nerf the Grassland and buff the other habitats.
- Wingspan Asia (2022): In addition to new game pieces, it adds a dedicated 2-player mode, as well as a mode that expands the player count to 6-7. Can be played as a stand-alone 2-player game.
- TBA (2025): An unnamed fourth expansion confirmed to be in development
. Will likely feature either Africa or South America.
From 2020 onward, a video game adaptation was released for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, personal computers and smart devices. The video game version has limited time backgrounds to commemorate holidays.
Wyrmspan, a dragon-themed stand-alone game based on Wingspan, was released in 2024.
Wingspan and its expansions provide examples of:
- Anti-Rage Quitting: The official app uses a karma system, which goes up by 1 point every time you successfully complete an online match. However, you're deducted 5 points as punishment if you're the first to timeout or forfeit the match.
- Author Appeal:
- This is one of many games that reflect Elizabeth Hargrave's love of nature. This one in particular was inspired by her hobby of birdwatching.
- The low amount of player interaction in the game reflects that Elizabeth Hargrave enjoys just building her own thing without worrying too much about what the others are doing.
- Balance Buff: The Oceania Expansion features a redesigned board that makes the Forest and Wetlands more efficient at providing food and cards respectively. This was done because these two habitats (especially the former) tended to be neglected in favour of the Grasslands, which got hit with a Nerf.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience:
- The types of bird powers are colour coded, which makes it easier to scan your board for relevant powers in various situations: Brown powers are activated whenever you activate the bird's habitat, pink powers only trigger between your turns, teal powers only activate at the end of rounds, and yellow powers only activate at the end of the game. Birds without a colour can be ignored, since the ones with a plain white cards are either plain Vanilla Units or have a power that only activates when they're placed (effectively making them vanillas after that point).
- Each food type has its own colour, which makes them easier to tell apart at first glance.
- Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation: The game has a Board Game Arena implementation. It also has a dedicated app that includes polish like animating the bird pictures and letting you listen to their sounds. There's also an official release for the sandbox Tabletopia.
- Diminishing Returns for Balance: Putting more birds in a habitat powers up the habitat, but the more birds you already have in a habitat, the more eggs you'll pay to add another.
- Drafting Mechanic: Downplayed. When players choose to draw cards, they can take one of the three cards in the open display or draw one from the common deck.
- Expansion Pack: The game is intended to have an expansion per continent. As of late 2022, three have been released.
- Flavor Text: Each bird card has a fact about the bird on it.
- Holiday Mode: The official app offers limited-time holiday backgrounds, which can be purchased as Downloadable Content to keep forever.
- Incorrect Animal Noise: Averted and discussed in the official app. The Bald Eagle's cry is the correct sound for it, while the Red-Tailed Hawk trivia points out how its cry is often used in place of the Bald Eagle's in movies.
- Literal Wild Card:
- When you play a bird, you can spend any two food as though it were one wildcard. For instance, if a bird costs one fish, you can play it for two grains instead.
- Several bird powers can take any food from the supply.
- Star nests count as all four nest types for the purpose of bonus cards, end-of-round goals and bird powers that care about nest types.
- The Oceania Expansion introduces the "*" wingspan for flightless birds. These always satisfy wingspan requirements like "less than 30 cm", and can be treated as any value for the bonus cards that ask for wingspans in ascending or descending order.
- The Oceania Expansion adds Nectar, which can count as any food type when paying a bird's food cost. There are also some endgame bonuses that revolve around who spend the most Nectar. However, it has the downside that any unspent Nectar goes away at the end of each round.
- Nerf: The Oceania Expansion features a redesigned board that makes the Grasslands less efficient at generating eggs. This was done to nerf the prevalent egg spam strategies and encourage players to use the other habitats (which got Balance Buffs) more.
- Official Game Variant:
- The manual for the Oceania Expansion acknowledges that the new Nectar resource makes the Common Raven and Chihuahuan Raven powerful, and suggests removing them from the deck if you think it makes them too strong.
- The manuals say that you're free to mix and match the decks as you'd like. It also says that you can use the Oceania playmat even without the Oceania birds.
- One-Word Title: The title Wingspan is a nod to the birds the game revolves around. They even have a "wingspan" property that some game pieces care about.
- Out-of-Turn Interaction: Several birds have abilities that activate once per round when it isn't your turn: most of them are some variant of giving you food if your opponent performs a certain action. A stranger one is the Common Cuckoo, whose ability lets it lay an egg in another bird's nest when another player lays eggs.
- Power Copying:
- Two birds in the base game have the power "Repeat a brown power on one other bird in this habitat", which amounts to copying it. There's also one such bird that only works with predator powers.
- The Expansion Packs introduce birds that copy powers from an opponent's birds. There are also birds that let you copy an opponent's Bonus Card.
- Punny Name: In the official app, the park ranger who gives you the tutorial is named Robin.
- Reduced-Downtime Features: The Asia expansion adds support for 6-7 players. To decrease downtime, it introduces a mechanic that has two players take turns at once.
- Scoring Points: The goal of the game is to score the most points. Most birds have an inherent point value, though there are numerous other ways to score points (tucking cards behind your birds, caching food on your birds, rewards for bonus cards and round-end bonuses, etc).
- Stat Overflow: Two birds in Wingspan Asia have powers that let them lay eggs on other birds and go above the bird's usual egg limit when you do so.
- Symmetric Effect:
- Some brown (activated) powers give every player a resource (e.g. the Wilson's Snipe letting everyone draw from the deck). Whenever you activate a habitat with such a bird, you can choose to activate the ability if you think you'll get more out of the resource than your opponent, or choose to leave it if you don't need it.
- Some expansions experiment with brown powers that give each player an option to perform an action. These are easier to make asymmetrical in practice, as there's a greater chance your opponent won't be able to or willing to use the effect. For instance, the Brown Shrike's power lets every player cache an invertebrate on a bird in their Grasslands. This power is useless to an opponent who (1) doesn't have a Grasslands bird, (2) doesn't have an invertebrate in their supply, or (3) does have an invertebrate in their supply, but they need it and don't want to waste actions re-gaining it.note
- If you use the blue scoring method for end-of-round goals, the mechanic will turn into "at the end of a round, each player will score points according to their number of <targeted item>".
- Tabletop Game A.I.: The solo mode involves an AI deck that chooses simple actions.
- Trivial Title: The game is titled Wingspan. The bird cards do have listed wingspans, but not a lot of game pieces care about them.
- Vanilla Unit: Most birds have some kind of ability, but a few (such as the Wild Turkey) don't. These tend to be expensive, high-value birds that are at their best in the late game, when it's too late to get much out of most abilities anyway. There are also birds with white powers, which only trigger when the bird is played, making them virtual vanillas.
