Stonemaier Games: Wingspan (Base Game) by Elizabeth Hargrave | A Relaxing, Award-Winning Strategy Board Game About Birds for Adults and Family | 1-5 Players, 70 Mins, Ages 14+

antastic game! Wingspan is beautifully designed with stunning artwork and high-quality components. The gameplay is smooth, strategic, and engaging without being overly complicated—great for both casual players and board game enthusiasts. Every play feels different thanks to the variety of bird cards, and it’s just as fun solo as it is with a group. Easily one of the best games in my collection—highly recommend!

The artwork on every piece in this game is truly remarkable. The level of detail in this is incredible and it’s obvious how much effort went into crafting this. The game is definitely complex and hard to pick up at first but their are game cards that walk you through the first few plays and it made it a lot easier to get started. The variety of birds to play with is super fun and as a birder, it has been a great addition to our family’s game collection. I like the ability to play multiple rounds and gives you the ability to modify how long you want to play for, could be a short game or long game depending on time. The wooden egg pieces feel great and overall quality of all the components is very well designed and crafted. I highly recommend this to birders, nature enthusiasts, or even just seasoned board game players.

Background: I've played a ton of board/card games in my life, enough to call myself a board game enthusiast.First of all let me say that this game is beautiful. Everything from the gorgeous bird artwork on the cards to the box itself is stunning. If you're like me, you'll probably be gawking at at least some of the artwork when you play for the first time (and long after that too).Wingspan oozes theme. The board is made up of three different habitats that birds commonly live in, and you're placing birds in the specific habitat that they belong in. The actual bird cards themselves, while being beautiful, also have an interesting fact about the bird, along with their wingspan in cm. I'm definitely not a bird person, but this game really pulled me with the bird theme, and I love it. Every time I drew a new card I would say things like "Oooo would you just look at that bird!?" or "Damn, that's a nice bird right there", and would look forward to reading it's little factoid. Drawing a new bird was just as exciting as making a strategic move to gain an advantage.I won't go into the gameplay much (you can look up a how-to-play on YouTube for that), but I will say that literally every facet of it works, and exceptionally well at that. You only have a few things you can do each turn, so typically turns don't take too long, as long as you're planning ahead when others are playing. This is GOOD, as you won't be sitting for 10 minutes waiting for your next turn (at least once everyone has played once). You'll be drawing birds, playing birds on your habitats, collecting resources, and laying eggs. Your birds have effects that can be triggered in future turns, doing cool things like getting free eggs or swallowing another bird for a victory point as long as it's wingspan is small enough to fit down your gullet. You can get a bit of an "engine" going later in the game, where you can trigger a ton of effects back to back, doing a bunch of awesome bird stuff at once. There is some player interaction with some of these effects, so it pays to pay attention when it's other players' turns!This is a "point salad" kind of game, meaning you have a ton of different ways to score victory points at the end of the game. It's great because you're always looking ahead at what you think will be the most efficient way to earn points at the end, and your options are going to be different each game depending on your starting birds or playstyle. There's also different universal goals and secret individual goals that you're working on that are different every game, which greatly adds to replicability. If you're secret goal one game is to play a bunch of birds with wingspans under 40cm, you'll probably be biased towards playing a bunch of tiny birds in your habitat, which effects differ greatly from most larger birds.I would say this game has a moderate learning curve. About halfway through your first game you'll start to get the feel for what you should be doing, and by the end you feel pretty good about it. It's really not too difficult to learn, but it definitely takes plenty of time and strategy to master.Quality of game pieces is exceptional. Even the game manual is made of a thick textured (vinyl?) material that feels amazing to flip through.Overall this bird game is well worth the money. If you enjoy board games and birds, you need to own this. If you enjoy board games and don't care about birds, you should still probably own this, it's just that good.PS If you do end up enjoying this game, I would highly recommend "Parks" from Keymaster Games (a Barnes and Noble exclusive in the US). It's gameplay is different, but it has equally beautiful artwork/design and the strategies you'll employ are very similar to Wingspan.

I love Wingspan!This game has become the go-to for board game night and I definitely recommend adding it to your collection (or starting your collection with this game). Ideal for experienced board gamers and novices alike. Everyone will have something to like about this game ranging from beautiful art, in-depth engine building game design, or just learning about birds. Seriously, after playing this game a lot, I am finding I can identify more birds and recall names better.The construction of the player mats, cards, food tokens, egg tokens, and 3D birdhouse (!) are fantastic looking and high quality. The packaging comes with plenty of plastic bags and containers to hold and organize the tokens. Even the player manual is gorgeous to look at and has a delightful texture to hold. The artwork across all of the printed material has a pleasing watercolor brushed theme.The game is not very competitive in the sense of interacting with the other players - it tends to feel more like a mildly interactive game of solitaire with friendly competition to see who can rack up the most points. I found that even in games where I didn't win, I genuinely felt good about the gameplay and enjoyed trying to create an efficient point-generating flock of birds. The 40-60 minute gameplay keeps all players engaged throughout 4 rounds with a different randomized goal each round. Nobody is left out as the winner takes all here, everyone is still having fun laying eggs and playing bird cards each turn until the very end when all points are tallied up.There are enough changing elements built in to make you feel like you're playing a new type of game every time - the individual and group goals change and enough cards are shuffled to give you a fresh experience every time.After 20+ playthroughs with my board game group, we decided to buy the Oceana expansion and it made the game even better! We will definitely be buying all of the expansions.Lastly, there is a single player mode called Automa that is included in the box. I haven't had the opportunity to try it out but appreciate the inclusion of a single player mode by Stonemeier Games.

Real amazing game and well designed. The whole family can sit down and spend hours playing and learning a lot about birds. Highly recommended!!