Wingspan

My son came to visit yesterday (with the rest of his family in tow, naturally) and brought an unexpected, delayed Father's Day gift:

I know that this is very much one of the 'in' boardgames at the moment, but I have to say that the less than inspiring write-up on the box, plus what looked like a bewildering variety of pieces, board and other components kind of put me off. However having now got a copy I wasn't about to turn up my nose at it, and after everyone had gone home Catherine and I sat down to try and puzzle it out.

And it did take some puzzling. We didn't find the rules very clear at first, but the game does come with a quick-start mode where you set everything up, and then it does pre-programmed moves for up to four players which demonstrate the key principles of the game. We did that and soon worked out what we were doing and were able to finish the game at a cracking pace with very few references to things afterwards.

In the game you play various kinds of bird nuts who are 'collecting' birds on a play-grid. The game has a deck of around 190 bird cards, each one unique and all found in North America*. The birds have various traits; type of next, number of eggs they lay, habitat and (of course) wingspan, plus a points value. You collect birds by drawing them from the deck into your hand and deploying them, but deploying them costs food and possibly eggs. And to get those things you have to spend some of your limited actions acquiring them. Each round (and the game has four in total) a player gets between 5 and 8 actions, which can be to gain food, place eggs, draw new cards or place a bird. If you play certain actions you get to activate the 'powers' of some of the birds on your grid, which can give you various bonuses and scoring opportunities.

So it's all about drawing cards then acquiring and optimally deploying limited resources in order to play those cards in order to score points.

You win by having the most points. You get theses for lots of things; each bird has value, for examples, but you also score for cached food, eggs and building flocks, plus end of round bonus objectives. And each player has a secret goal dealt to them at the start as well. So points come from all kinds of places.

As I said, this isn't a game I would have chosen myself, but it's a theme we could get behind (all three members of our household have some sort of background and interest in biology or ecology) and despite it's intimidating look it was fairly simple to play. So a gift I'm very happy with.

*There are  three expansions which not only add new rules but also add birds for Europe, Oceania and Asia. I think each one is stand-alone aside from a requirement to own the base game.

52 Games - Game 60