Wingspan: The Review

In Wingspan, players try to collect birds and place them in their favourite habitats. Each bird is worth points, can have eggs laid on them and also provides additional actions when players look for new cards, lay eggs or gain bird food. The objective of the game is to combine your bird cards to land the biggest score.

Wingspan is what is known as an engine-building game. With engine builders, you draw cards with actions or abilities on them and try to create combinations that give you the biggest buffs or land you the highest scores. Wingspan stands out from a lot of other games of this type by never really feeling like you're trying to build, but rather you're pulling together the best or most beautiful birds you can find.

How to Play Wingspan:

Wingspan is divided into four rounds. At the start of the game, players have five cards and five food tokens, and must decide how many birds/food they want to start with. If players take five birds, they start with no food; if they take four, they get one food and so on. This means from the beginning, players must decide on which birds are worth keeping and which need to be discarded for the optimum start. Players each have a game mat that is divided into three habitats: woodland, grassland and water. Birds can only be placed in habitats that they would inhabit in the wild. Players also draw two bonus cards and keep one, with the bonuses rewarding players for having, for example, the most birds with an ornithologist's name in, or a colour, or even facing a certain way on the card.

Players start with eight action cubes, and in turns they decide if they are going to play a bird card (which has a cost), gain food from the dice tower bird feeder, lay eggs (of a colour of their choosing) on birds on their mat or draw more bird cards into their hand. Every time they play a bird card onto their mat, they enhance their ability to perform one of these actions. For instance, play a card onto the woodland habitat, and you can take two dice from the bird feeder each time rather than one. Once the action cubes are all placed, the round ends and players add up round-end objective bonuses, discard cards and move onto the next round. Crucially, they must also lose one action cube, which means they have one less action in round two and so on through to round four.

The bird cards are beautiful, but also carry a lot of information on them as well, clearly shown with easy-to-understand iconography. In the top left corner, there is the habitat that the bird can be played in. Some birds are multi-habitat, while others are specialists. Underneath is their playing cost; the Northern Great Hornbill, for instance (from the Asia expansion), costs one caterpillar and two cherry tokens. If a bird is played in column two onwards, they also cost eggs, which means players need to strategically plan out which actions they need to take each turn. As the mat fills with birds, it becomes easier to collect larger amounts of food and eggs, which also means it's easier to play more birds onto the mat - but there are fewer turns, so everything becomes a balancing act to unlock the most points.

On the left of the bird card is the score for that card, the type of nest they build and the number of eggs they would normally have in a single clutch. The designer Elizabeth Hargrave (who also designed Mariposas) has meticulously calculated the scarcity of the bird and researched all of the items on the cards, such as their wingspan, so they are accurate, as well as stunning illustrations. Most birds have a bonus power which activates when their habitat is played, this might be providing more food or eggs, or it might be "tucking" a card behind them to give an extra point at the end of the game. Knowing how to get the most points from each bird card, PLUS the best sequence of activations, is the core strategy of playing this game well.

As well as scoring points from bird cards, players also need to achieve round-specific objectives to add to their total at the end of the game. These could be birds with certain types of nests, or maybe most birds with eggs laid on them. Eggs still remaining on cards at the end of the game add a point each to the total and tucked cards also provide additional points. At the end of the game, players complete the score card, totting up each point-scoring action in turn to give them a final score.