Wingspan: thoughts on design and theme

I played Wingspan the weekend and in addition to being a good game I think it provides some really good examples of game play and an interesting perspective on theme.

 

Wingspan is a competitive, medium-weight, card-driven, engine-building board game. You are bird enthusiasts—researchers, bird watchers, ornithologists, and collectors—seeking to discover and attract the best birds to your network of wildlife preserves.

 

You have a pile of action cubes which you use to do one of 4 actions.  Play a card (a bird) into one of your environments by paying some food (and maybe some eggs) or you activate one of three environments.  Each environment gives you one of the three main resources of the game- food, eggs, or cards.  The more birds in an environment the better the action is, and sometimes you can trade food, eggs, or cards for another type of resource.  If a bird has a brown action you get to do that brown action when you use that environment.  Once all your action cubes are done the round ends, you get scored on some end of round scoring thing, mark how well you did with an action cube and then do another turn.  4 turns in total and it’s all over and you score game end card(s).  Most points win. That is basically it.

 

The first thing to talk about is just how much this game delivers with a simple rules set.  3 main resources (cards, eggs, food – of which there are 5 sub types), and 4 actions (one of which is play a card) and the other three work the same way they just deliver different stuff.    That’s not a lot but it delivers lots of choices, with the value of a card being very much determined by what you’ve already got down, your resources, the bonus scoring for that round, what other people have down.  Lovely.

 

Each individual card is simple and the language clear, and even when combined with other cards abilities they never get complicated or unclear but they do get interesting and effective – finding a sweet combo is *kisses air*.

 

Let us take the moment to appreciate the design that went into the decision that you start off with lots of simple actions – but as the game goes down you lose actions but each action increase in effectiveness.  Brilliant. 

Another nice touch is that your abilities fire in an order right to left – so no trying to work out if you can eek out a better result with a different order.  Make that decision when you play the card.  Or how the action is kept moving because you can draw blind or you can draw from 3 face up cards but those face up cards don’t replenish until after your turn.  So the amount you have to consider on your turn lower, and things keep moving no matter how many cards you are drawing. 

 

If Innsmouth Escape got me into board game design by making me go “I can do betterthen that”, Wingspan makes me go “I should give up – I will never be that good”.

 

Now I want to talk about theme and this gets supper nerdy.

This is a game that drips with theme.  It is about birds, and the cards are covered in bird related details.  Wingspan, max egg numbers, nest type, what they eat, where they can live.  I have absolutely no doubt that these details are informed by the real world and not by what the designer wanted.  So nothing is pasted on about this theme.

 

So why did I sit there playing it, enjoying it and think “you know this system would work really well for an economic engine builder?”

 

I think the answer was because I was experiencing Ludo Narrative Dissonance – which is a term normally used for video games but in this case means the decisions and the theme were not in accord. 

 

It’s what I tend to think of as “how evocative is it”?  Do I feel like the person, thing, or entity the game is telling me I am?  On that account Wingspan sort of falls down because honestly I don’t feel like a bird enthusiast – I feel like somebody looking for efficiencies, eeking out synergies to get ahead of the competition.  Just how and why do "bird enthusiasts—researchers, bird watchers, ornithologists, and collectors" - "build engines"?  I mean the dissonance is right in the description at the top.  With a lot of consideration I did come to the conclusion 'by creating an eco system' was the answer to what sort of engine do twitchers create.  But personally it never felt like an eco system.   

For me this is far from a deal breaker.  I want a copy and will happily play your copy until I get my own.  Heck I played it 3 times over the weekend because I enjoyed it so much.  But it felt a really interesting example of why the term “theme” in board games is a lot more complicated then people seem to think it is.

 

As a side note I did start sketching out what a reskin into an economic game would look like (food = resources, eggs = population, cards = research) but I very quickly found my self going so what sort of building could be built in all three of the areas?  How do you produce the sheer range of different buildings/cards all with there subtle little differences?  Which is an indication to me just how much birds really did drive elements of the game design.