Wingspan – a solo (Automa) review

If you ever told me I’d go bananas over a game about collecting different kinds of birds I’d call you crazy. Today I’d call you a genius. Wingspan is all about releasing your inner ornithologist you’ve never known was there.

Name: Wingspan (2019)
Designer: Elizabeth Hargrave
Publisher: Stonemaier Games, 999 Games (Dutch edition)
Play type: engine building, tableau building, resource management

What the game is about

Wingspan is a game about attracting birds to your aviary through action selection and engine building. You score points for birds, eggs and tucked cards (you could call this game your birds have gathered), as well as personal goal cards as well as public end-of-round scoring positions.

How the game works

Wingspan plays over four rounds in which each player has a set number of action cubes (8, then 7, then 6, then 5 – more on this in a bit) to take one of four actions: play a bird card, gather food (to pay for birds), lay eggs (to score points), or draw cards. Except for playing a bird card, each action can also trigger bird effects of birds that are in the corresponding habitat – for example, laying eggs triggers birds that are in your grasslands.

Each bird you play into the same habitat costs increasingly more. But on the plus side, it increases the action when you take it. Take, for example, the wetlands, which is the habitat connected to drawing cards. If you don’t have any birds there, you just draw one card when you activate it. With one bird there, you draw a card and can pay an egg to draw an additional card. With two birds, you always draw two cards. The game has a lot of interconnected parts to keep track of. You need food to play bird cards. You need to draw cards to be able to play cards. But the more birds you play, the more eggs you need to pay for additional birds in the same habitat.

Players alternate actions until they run out of action cubes. At the end of the round they check to see who best fulfilled the current end-of-round goal, leaving behind one of their cubes to register this. This means you have one less cube – therefore action – to work with next round.

Theme, art & flavor

This game just looks and feels wonderful – just browse through the rulebook and you’ll know what I mean! The artwork is great and perfectly supplements the flavor of the game. The bird images have something gracious about them and remind me of those old encyclopedias that classify whole genera of plants. Even your player board, when folded, looks like a leather-bound book, further increasing this feeling of being an avid bird collector.

The theme of collecting birds could easily turn into a mawkish affair, but they managed it here with style and grace. Wingspan is a superb looking product.

The game is about as flavorful as Terraforming Mars, so make of that what you will. I never found it to be a detriment, but I never did feel like a bird collector.

How does it play?

If I could use one word to describe this game, it’d be ‘tight’. Each round you have one less action, yet you have so much you want to do and so much you could do that it really requires a good strategy up front for each round.

The solo mode is done by the Automa Factory, so you should expect a decent automa – and it does not disappoint. It works as you’d expect from them: after your turn, you flip a card and resolve the part that corresponds to the current round. Some cards leave the game after certain games, so the Automa starts improving their engine, so to speak – just as you are.

You’re definitely gonna lose a few times as you catch your bearings in the beginning. But as with all Automa Factory automas, you can adjust the difficulty very easily. In fact, the difficulty in Wingspan is just a matter of adjusting the points the automa gains for eggs and cards – so at the end of the game you can even check if you would’ve beaten a higher difficulty.

Talking about this game before playing it inevitably led to a comparison to Terraforming Mars – while they do have similarities, they feel much more different than I’d anticipated. Wingspan wants to you be efficient through a limited number of actions; Terraforming Mars demands efficiency (and a little push-your-luck perhaps) in cutting through all those options and cards that are available to you. I think both games are unique – and good – enough to warrant having both in your collection.

What I like

• Tight engine builder that wants you to optimize your actions
• An all-female production – I hope Wingspan will encourage (aspiring) women in this industry
• Nostalgic and unique artwork and no duplicate cards
• This game plays quick – you should be able to play two games in an hour
• At the end of game you start thinking of the things you could’ve done to increase your score, leaving you wanting for more (in a good way)
• The game has different parts that fluctuate in importance based on the choices you make, but you can’t really ignore any of them

What I didn’t like

• This might be just me, but I just can’t remember what the symbols on all the Automa cards do
• With all unique cards, there’s bound to be some luck of the draw involved

Expansion

The first expansion was recently announced and will be hitting retail soon. This expansion contains new European birds (the base game has only North American birds), extra eggs, extra food tokens, and new end-of-round scoring tokens and new objective cards. If you like the game, this looks like a no-brainer. Even more so for me as a European.

Conclusion

Was the game hyped? Yes. Was the hype justified? Yes. Is this game for real? Definitely yes. Like I said before, Wingspan used to be compared to Terraforming Mars. For me, that comparison faded away as soon as I started playing this game. Wingspan is able to stand on its own as its own game with its own strengths. Wingspan does its own thing and does it admirably. If you can survive the comparison to Terraforming Mars and differentiate yourself from it, you’re a (bird) keeper.

Right now I’m giving this game four stars, because if I was forced to keep one I’d still pick Terraforming Mars. Expansions can change that (whereas I’m not buying any more of those for Terraforming Mars since I feel my game experience is complete with Prelude, Venus Next and the two extra maps) – I can see Wingspan becoming a five-star game in the future.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Thank you for reading! If you like my content, please consider buying me a coffee.