Saturday, July 6, 2019

Dave Reviews: Smol Bird Lyfe

Wingspan

It's a bird party! And I am super late to it!

Wingspan is a game about birds, birds, and more birds. Birds in the forest, birds on the plains, and birds near the water. Birds that are smol, and birds that eat the birds that are smol. Feed your birds, play your birds, and watch your birds barely survive in the wild, because "take flight" is both too cliche and too positive for what nature does to things living in it.

It's simple to play. You have a hand of bird cards and a pile of food. Feed the birds and play their cards. Except... do you have the right food? What kind of nests do the birds make? Can some of your birds help other birds with the same nests? Do your birds want to eat other birds? Can your birds find more food for your other birds to eat? Do your birds do something right now and then just sit there like lazy buggers, or do they keep working as long as you pay attention to their habitat? How many eggs can they take care of? Who wants to eat the eggs? Should you—

AAAAHHHHH

The pieces of the game make sense. They're not hard to learn or use. Making them work together, though, takes some knowledge of what cards you might see, how much food you might need, and so on, and that makes it a trip for first-timers to learn. If everyone's new, it works out fine. If some people are and some aren't, the noobs better learn quickly. There is time to suss out a strategy, thankfully, so you aren't stuck finishing out a game that you've started to understand but need a second play to make that understanding work for you. But the learning curve exists.

The actions don't take much explaining. You can play a bird to any of the areas in which it can live, if you have the food. If you can't or don't want to play a bird, you can use an action in a given habitat. Taking an action in the forest gives you food. The plains give you eggs, and the water gives you cards. The more birds you have in the habitat, the more of each of those things you have access to with a single action. Playing towards your specific goal(s)—you start with one and can get more during the game—and the competitive goals for each round (ie. have eggs on the most different birds when the round ends) is important for winning, but if you can find a point combo that doesn't require those things, it could still be enough. Understanding the game, and not the "meta" strategies or the few things that will actually work amongst knowledgeable players, is how you do well, which is excellent.

Really, it's so good. It's hard for a game to make someone (ie. me) go from grouchy and lost to realizing what's possible to almost winning in a single playthrough, but this one did. It's very smoothly designed, with a lot of detail about the birds that technically weren't needed but make the game more engaging for their presence. I usually always want to play something new, but I won't mind a second go at this one.

Score: Seven hungry owls out of eight.

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