Wingspan Is Gorgeous and Also Kind of a Solitaire Engine, Discuss

My sister got me this for my birthday two years back, I think mostly because the box is pretty and she wanted something on my shelf that wasn’t about outbreaks or trains. Fair. Wingspan is you building an engine of birds across three habitat rows, each bird card doing some little forever-action when you play food, lay eggs, or draw cards in that row, and the whole thing is stitched to actual bird facts on the cards, which is a nice touch even if I doubt the accuracy under pressure.

My triage read on this one took longer than most games because the first play is genuinely confusing in a way that isn’t the game’s fault, it’s just a lot of icon language up front. Second play it clicks and by third play you’re chaining bonus cards and goal tiles like you know what you’re doing. That’s a real strength. The engine building is legitimately satisfying, you watch your tableau start doing things automatically that used to take three separate actions, and there’s a dopamine hit to that which I don’t think I’m overselling.

Here’s my actual complaint though, and it’s a debrief-instinct thing. After a four player game I don’t always know what happened. Everyone’s building their own little bird machine mostly in parallel, glancing at each other’s tableau but not really interacting with it beyond food and card competition, so the session ends and there isn’t much to talk through. Compare that to Pandemic where the ending is a shared crisis you all lived through. Wingspan’s ending is more like four people finishing their own crossword at the same table. Good crossword. Just quieter than I want most nights.

Downtime is the other issue at higher counts, waiting through three other engines running before your turn comes back around can drag, though it’s rarely long enough to lose the thread if I get pulled away mid round.

Solo or two player, this is a four out of five easy, gorgeous components and a real puzzle. At four players I still enjoy it, I just don’t reach for it first anymore.