Saturday Morning Gaming: Wingspan
Last week, doughty commenter JHG recommended the board game Wingspan.
Now, as someone who plays a lot of games with the tag “boardgame” on Steam, this is also a game that I’ve seen recommended by the algorithm there. So I looked up Wingspan on Steam. Very positive reviews, very positive recent reviews… and it was 40% off. Okay fine. That pushed me over.
So I booted it up and went through the tutorial.
First off: You will need to go through the tutorial. The game is fairly complex and isn’t yet another Parcheesi variant. (You know what I’d compare it to, actually? Magic: The Gathering.)
The Steam version is downright gorgeous, though. Let’s walk through some stuff:
First off, the game is GORGEOUS.
Seriously, it’s calming to just sit and look at it.
Okay. There are four rounds. Each round gets 8 action dice to mark the 4 turns in any given round (turn 1 gives you 8 actions, turn 2 gives you 7, turn 3 gives you 6, turn 4 gives you 5… and then it’s time for round 2). There are three habitats: Forest, Grassland, Wetlands. In the forest you get food, in the grassland you lay eggs, in the wetlands you get more cards. The birds in your hand can only be played in certain habitats (the pine siskin can only be played in the forest, the bald eagle can only be played in the wetlands, but the mourning dove can be played anywhere).
You need different kinds of food to cast your bird and you need to have the right kinds of food available in the bird feeder. (If you have only fish and rodent-fed birds and nothing but wheat in the feeder, you’re going to have a bad time.)
Grab the appropriate type of food from the feeder, cast your bird, have your birds activate their powers, lay eggs to cast more birds, draw some more cards, and holy cow, I’m out of turns already. Count up the points. You get points for all kinds of crazy things. The number of birds you’ve played, the number of birds in a particular habitat. The number of birds that have a particular type of nest that have an egg in it. The number of opponents’ birds that you have predated with your predator birds.
And then, at the end of the game, most points win.
It’s kind of an engine game. You need birds to make birds. And, of course, you need the right birds. But the food dynamic makes me think of Magic: The Gathering. “I need bug mana and wheat mana to cast this bird… oops, I don’t have enough egg mana.”
There are enough different ways to generate points that there are different ways to play… do you want to get points from food? Do you want to get points for predating your opponent? Do you just want to make birds, birds, and more birds?
It’s a beautiful game to look at, it’s got some complex mechanisms in there for the hardcore gamers in your group to chew on, and the theme is actually a nice one instead of one involving zombies or explosions or global pandemics. And, if you’re playing the Steam version, the game will give you information about the birds you play. Hummingbirds eat small insects! Huh. I did not know that.
So… what are you playing?
It makes me happy that you enjoyed the game. It really is different in some ways, and so much deeper than it seems at first.
I also had the same feeling about MTG in regards to food. Boy, rolling the dice into the feeder (actually, you just drop them in the back of a cardboard birdhouse and they roll out into the front tray) is very harrowing sometimes when you really need 3 rats or 1 of each for your bird cards.
To me, there’s also a bit of the feel of Cataan in the blocking other players, limited resources, limited board spaces, or how the random “point systems” (I don’t recall what the game calls them) you draw for each of the 4 rounds drags some competitive decisions into the game sometimes (oh wait, next turn is birds with this kind of nest, maybe I should play this bird instead. wait, they already have 2 more than me. Ok, let’s see…). The cards make a difference. Also, I really like that the cards are visible, not random. It makes you really have to look at things, and you always (always!) want more actions each round.
And, yeah, I agree, it really is just a beautiful game. I can’t wait to play it with the Wingsong app to play the calls of the birds.
It might not be a game about zombies, but if you really think about it, it’s a game about dinosaurs. 😉
(really glad that you enjoyed it)Report
Things I like about Wingspan:
*It’s very nicely made.
*They went to some effort to make the birds’ “powers” appropriate for the birds instead of just being random
*The game rewards repeated sessions, both to see all the different abilities and to see how the huge number of possible layouts results in very different endgame states
Things I don’t like about Wingspan:
*It’s VERY random
*The cards are specialized for specific roles, but this doesn’t become apparent until you’re familiar with them (either through extensive study or through multiple play sessions) and you don’t always get the cards with the roles that match your gameplay requirements
*There’s no “catch-up” for players who fall behind and someone who makes no gameplay errors can still get stuck in an unwinnable state
To expand more on those latter points:
You don’t get to pick which bird cards or food tokens are available; that’s all random, either dealt from a card deck or the result of dice rolls. And the bird cards have some that are “engine builder”, which help you get more resources more quickly, and “points scorer”, which does what it says on the tin; but the problem is that if you’re in the early game and all you have are “points scorer” birds, you might end up having to take those just to try and boost your engine at all, and you end up stuck with an underperforming engine that doesn’t give you enough resources in the endgame to get much out of your points-scoring birds.
Also, because of that randomness it’s hard to execute a long-range plan successfully, so things like “gameplay objectives” often resolve more as random bonuses than as rewards for achievement; and even going for those objectives requires total dedication to the effort, which usually leaves you behind in other ways. (i.e. if you see a bird card you want, it usually takes two turns to get it on the board — one to draw the card, and the next turn to actually play it, and that’s if you even have enough food or eggs to do it. Meanwhile, the guy next to you did three “get five points” turns, and the objective usually isn’t worth enough to match that.)
Without a good “bird engine” you end up with unsatisfying gameplay (the classic Wingspan gameplay loop is “well I guess I can do Get Food; okay, I get one food token. The guy next to me takes five minutes to resolve his turn, which ends with him scoring 500 points…”) and the sharp limit on the number of turns means there’s not really a way to get out of that hole, and the lack of balancing or “rubber-banding” means that someone who gets ahead usually stays ahead.
I think that it’s fun to actually play but that it’s not a game you can enjoy with just one or two sessions every couple of weeks; you need at least three sessions per game night to really feel like everyone has had a chance for the dice to fall their way.Report
I’ve played once IRL and a few times on the app against the computer, and i definitely don’t have a sense of the best strategy — sounds like I probably never will, as it’s unlikely I’d be playing enough and with enough attention to get a sense of the full bird inventory.
Our work gaming group has gotten going again over the last couple of months, partly in person and partly online (boardgamearena.com). We’ve tried several new (to us) games, and they’ve all involved decks of cards and randomness in what happens to be available — they’ve been fun but they all have a high element of luck regarding whether you happen to get the opportunity to draw the cards that will work well together. Not sure if it’s just the latest fad in gaming or just what this group is drawn to. We haven’t played any of them enough yet to get to the point of understanding the probabilities and accounting for them.Report
The thing about super-random games is that the designers (and fans) will often tell you that you’re supposed to play them a whole bunch of times, so that the randomness “evens out”.
The problem is, Wingspan doesn’t feel like a game I’m supposed to be slapping stuff down and getting the whole game done in ten minutes so we can play another round. It feels like something where I’m supposed to be taking my time and being careful and planning things out six moves in advance and thinking really hard before making any decisions.Report