When playing Wingspan I have found that playing lots of cheap birds early feels great. Your engine purrs along, your actions feel powerful, and the game seems sweet. However, I didn't know if that was just an illusion, and I wanted to figure out how good expensive, high point value birds were in comparison. I also figured I should test out engine cards to see how they compare to point cards. I designed the following experiment to test these theories out:
1. Play Wingspan by myself, pretending the other players do nothing relevant. Every bird is reduced to a 5 point bird that eats a single copy of any food and has no abilities otherwise. I get 11 points from end of round goals and my bonus card. Go!
This assumes some things. Obviously the deck isn't full of birds like this, but this test can tell us if such birds are actually good. It also assumes values for bonus points that are hard to rigourously defend. While playing I won't have to actually work for any end of round goals, which helps a lot, but I also can't benefit from any opponents using abilities that give me stuff. I will assume those two things cancel out since I don't know how to account for them properly.
The result was that I scored 77 points. Not a great game certainly, but not a disaster either. This score would come in 2nd or 3rd in most of the games I have played, which isn't too bad. It won't win any tournaments though, that is for sure. I have never personally scored below 77, so clearly this isn't a powerful strat.
2. Do the same as 1. except play 5 point, 1 food birds until I have my basic 6 bird slots covered, then switch to 9 point, 3 food birds.
The result here was a score of 81. Better, largely because the expensive birds are more efficient to fill the later slots that are mostly points. However, having less birds on the board means I would likely make less points from bonus cards and end of round goals, so the real difference is likely miniscule.
3. Do the same as 1. except every bird I play is a 9 point, 3 food bird.
This style felt awful with weak early plays and a terrible engine. I was expecting a terrible result. I scored 84, which is the highest so far with these tests. Again though, with only 7 birds on the board I would actually do worse on the goals and bonus scores, so it probably is just about as good as the other two strats.
I was quite surprised at how tight it was. Expensive birds score more, but get less goals, and the numbers seem like they should be tight. Well done on balance!
This does tell me some useful things. First is that even if a strategy feels bad because you are pumping out points in the beginning instead of engine building it isn't necessarily a problem. You can still get a strong result from high point birds early on, definitely in part because filling your board with cheap bad birds means that the late game birds require two eggs to play, which is awful. Playing expensive stuff means you never have to pay that price.
However, playing birds that just have raw points is not going to win you games against good players. Scoring 80 just isn't enough. It will beat people who have a bad game or newbies, but it won't be a dominant strat. To score a lot of points you need cards that can consistently generate value and hit them over and over. There are lots of ways to do this from tucking cards to cacheing food to generating eggs, but the key to scoring 90+ is to get a powerful engine and run it. You probably want to stop building an engine halfway through round 2 though, and just punch the good buttons and play points from then on out. This is a good way to have an engine builder work though - figuring out when to stop building the engine and switch to points works as a core concept, and is certainly dead common in this style of game.
I do like that my simple tests support a style of play that the game is clearly striving for. You *need* to build an engine, and you *need* to stop partway through and focus on points. The cards absolutely enforce that, as engine cards are trash in the last two turns of the game, and you clearly can't generate a big score without playing them. The numbers conclusively support playing the game in a way that is both intended and generally fun. Yay! Game not broken!
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