Wingspan is a new game I just ran into last night. It was the sort of game that I needed to play a second time right away because I had to know if my thoughts about strategy were correct. This is a good sign.
The easiest comparison I have to it is Terraforming Mars. However, I think Wingspan actually does it better, and that is saying a lot since I have been playing a ton of TM and I want to play more. The main points of comparison are that they are both engine building games with a mix of group and solitaire elements, and they both have extremely strong thematic elements that speak to a lot of research.
Wingspan is a game about running a bird sanctuary. You collect types of birds, and then have to put them in your sanctuary by collecting food that they like. Each bird has a bunch of different attributes that interact with point generation but they also have a special ability of some sort, and these special abilities form your engine. You can set it up so you have specific actions that are extremely powerful, and then use them to generate a ton of points.
The cards are beautiful and show great attention to scientific detail. Birds have habitats, nest types, wingspans, and other attributes to keep them unique, and the pictures and flavour text really bring it all in. It also does a great job making the mechanics fit the theme, which I appreciate. I think the numbers in the game are quite well done too, as we consistently ended up building engines that did powerful stuff, but the game ended just a touch before we could do everything we wanted to. There was always a sense of urgency and desperation on the last few turns trying to squeeze out every last point, and I quite liked that.
There were a couple of issues. The first is the readability of text and icons. Black text on dark brown is tough to read at a distance, and the icons are small. There was a lot of people picking up bird cards and staring at them to make out what the card did and its attributes. While I do like the pictures of the birds on the cards, I would really appreciate the designers shrinking the pictures by 30% and increasing the size of the font and icons to help people see the cards from further away.
The second issue was a balance issue. Most of the cards work equally at any number of players. They do stuff on your turn, so whether it is 2p or 5p is irrelevant. However, there are a few cards that do stuff on your opponent's turns, so when there are a lot of players those cards are extremely powerful. Certain ones seemed completely crazy powerful in large games, especially when dropped on turn 1. A normal good card might generate 5 resources over the course of a game, and you would be happy to play that card. One of these 'on opponent's turn' cards could handily generate 15 resources over a game, and that seems completely out of line.
I like the theme of these cards, and I am sure there is a player count where they are completely fine. Unfortunately if you play with a lot of players the game looks like it will hugely favour the person who gets one of these power cards in their opening hand. I am not so much a fan of that.
Still, this balance concern is just a fact of life in games like this. Just as a TM player can choose Interplanetary Cinematics and drop down Advanced Alloys, Aquifer Pumping, Nuclear Power, and Strip Mine on their first turn and waltz to victory, some bird draws in Wingspan are a huge engine right out of the gate.
Wingspan is a ton of fun. I am sure bird enthusiasts will enjoy the flavour, and even someone like me who pays no attention to that stuff generally can enjoy how well the fluff is baked into the crunch. Also I can't stress enough how important it is that the engine building have an appropriate investment and payoff timeline in this sort of game and Wingspan does that to perfection. There might not be a lot of variance in the general way the game plays out, but there are tons of small decisions and little tweaks you can make that will be different each time, so I suspect this game has a lot of plays in it for me.
My one concern is that it feels too well balanced. There aren't enough paths with high variance, it's all eggs, food or cards. Mars has a lot more archetypes. And more combos.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I've only played it 2.25 times.