Have you ever wanted to own an aviary? You could fill it with all kinds of birds: big ones, small ones, colorful ones, hungry ones, ones which lay tons of eggs, ones which eat different kinds of things.
While we may not be strangers to a large variety of birds here in the Rio Grande Valley, creating an aviary isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do.
It’s pretty easy, however, in Wingspan, a board game from Stonemaier Games. After being awed by the beautiful components, from multiple-colored eggs to wooden dice and even a cardboard dice tower, Wingspan emerges as a very smart engine-building game.
An engine-building game allows you to, little by little, begin building out a system in which each turn you start to acquire more and more of some sort of resource.
In Wingspan, the primary resources are food, eggs and bird cards. As you attract more birds to your aviary, you can get more of these primary resources. The more birds you have, the more you get.
On top of that, each bird also has some sort of ability, other than a few which are just worth a load of extra points. Some birds have simple abilities, such as allowing you to lay additional eggs or get more food. Others are more complex, moving between the three different terrain types in your aviary.
Core gameplay is pretty simple: play birds, get more stuff, win the game.
In order to attract a bird to your aviary, you need to have food for it. This is where the food tokens come into play. Each bird card has a cost associated with it. One may eat insects and grains, for instance. In order to play it, you would need to have the associated food.
The other stipulation for birds is the terrain into which they can be played. Your aviary includes three types, woodlands, grasslands and wetlands. Some birds have options to be placed in multiple areas, some can only be placed into a single one. All this information is provided directly on the card, as well as the amount of points the bird is worth and any abilities it may have.
What’s nice about Wingspan is how wonderful the components are. Not only does it come with containers for each of the various items, but everything is so detailed and informative. After a quick look at the rules, gameplay becomes pretty clear and the manual should only be needed for clarification.
Gameplay takes course over four rounds. Each round, players will take turns performing one action. You can play a bird, get food, lay eggs or draw bird cards. Each of these actions corresponds to a specific area of terrain, save for playing a bird, which can be done depending on rules for the bird being played.
The more birds you have in each terrain type, the more powerful the action associated with that terrain becomes. For instance, having no birds in your woodland terrain means you can only draw a single food resource token. After playing your first bird in the woodlands, you can still only draw one, but now you have the ability to discard a bird card in order to draw a second token. A second bird allows you to draw two food resources without needing to discard. Each terrain type follows a similar system.
Once all players have taken their turns, the round ends and bonus goals are calculated for additional points. The bonus goals for each round are determined by random selection at the beginning of the game, so keeping an eye on these as you develop your aviary is important if you want to score extra points.
When the calculations are done, the new round begins, but with one less turn. Play continues exactly as before, but slightly shorter, for three more rounds.
At the end of the game, calculation begins. You add up points on bird cards, the number of eggs you have in all locations, any cards or food resource tokens which may have been held by birds due to a special power, and any bonuses you may have received.
As might be expected, the person with the most points wins the game.
My wife Deb and I have played this game more times than I can count. While it was a tad confusing at the start, everything really starts to fall into place as you play and it becomes something you can play casually without paying too much attention. We’ll play it as we watch television at the end of the day or the digital version while on road trips.
Wingspan is incredibly well made, beautiful to look at, and a whole lot of fun. It belongs in everyone’s board game collection, as far as I’m concerned.
