Wingspan

Elizabeth Hargrave. Art by Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, Natalia Rojas, Greg May, Beth Sobel. Stonemaier Games, 2019.

1-5 players | 40-70 mins | Age 10+

Wingspan is an engine builder game in which players are bird enthusiasts who compete to build the best bird sanctuary within four rounds. Each player has their own personal board made up of three different habitats: forest, fields, and wetlands. These habitats also correspond to three of the four actions players can make on their turn: Gain Food, Lay Eggs, and Draw Bird Cards. By performing the fourth possible action, Play a Bird Card, in any of the three habitats, the player increases the rewards received by taking the corresponding action. For example, a player who plays a bird card in the wetlands is able to draw more bird cards when they decide to take that action. In addition, each bird added to one of three habitats extends the combination of card effects which take place when taking the corresponding action. The card effects can include, for example, drawing more bird cards, caching food, laying more eggs, moving birds between habitats, hunting for smaller birds.

At the beginning of the game players are given a bonus card which includes a personal long-term goal that, given their board meets certain criteria by the end of the game, will award the player with bonus points. As well as these personal long-term goals all players are competing for the end-of-round goals. These are randomly selected at the beginning of the game and can include goals such as total number of birds, eggs on ground nests, or birds in the forest habitat. The player with the most instances of the current goal takes first place and the corresponding number of points. By the end of the game, players will have points spread out all over the board in a variety of areas. Each bird card has specified points listed on them that are awarded at the end if they are populating your sanctuary. Points are also awarded if you have birds that match your bonus card (for example two points per ground nesting birds), and for scoring on the end-of-round goal board, the number of eggs on your birds, number of cached food, and number of tucked birds. For the solitary board gamer, Wingspan also offers a single player mode where one player takes on the Automa, a non-human opponent that operates through a special pack of cards included in the standard game. For the human player turns run the same as a multiplayer game, however the Automa has no board, hand of bird cards, nor food tokens. Instead, players turn the shuffled pack of Automa cards and follow the instructions to calculate how the Automa acts each turn.

The game situates the players as bird enthusiasts, ‘researchers, bird watchers, ornithologists, and collectors’ all of which are groups of people with very different goals in their interactions with birds. These different goals appear in the bonus cards which are all named after someone who might be interested or interact with birds, but the majority of the embodiment of this role comes from a player’s personal narrativizing of their own play experience rather than being embedded in the game’s systems. This is a point of tension between the game’s theme and mechanics, where the enthusiasm for birds is replaced by a process of evaluating birds for what they can bring to the table (a large number of points, the ability to hold many eggs, or a power that works well in the player’s engine). Actual bird enthusiasts may feel unable to play a bird they like or think would help make a “good” sanctuary as doing so may hamper their chances of winning. During play there is also little reason to focus on the bird sanctuaries the other players are building as there are very few instances where players can interact. The players may be playing bird enthusiasts but the only birds players are incentivised to engage with are their own.

There are 170 bird cards in the standard game and each illustration is beautiful to look at and reminiscent of the drawn examples of birds in a guidebook. Each bird card also includes a small fact about the bird shown as well as where they can be found in the world and their common and Latin names. These cards could easily be taken from the game and incorporated into a different game, for example, an improvised game of bird top trumps. In the standard game the birds are heavily North American focused with only 18 birds in the deck being found in Europe. There are also expansions which include European birds and Oceania birds which rebalances this particular bias. However, at the price point of £25 per expansion that makes a full copy of Wingspan cost just over £90.

This game is fertile ground for hacks. Possibilities include creating a cooperative mode of play by asking players to collaborate on one board or amending the mechanics to award points to players who build a sustainable ecosystem. Rule-based hacks might also work towards simulating a living habitat. There are rules which reduce the amount of turns a player gets per round (in round 1 players have 8 turns per round which is reduced to 5 turns in the final round). There are four rounds so this could be easily reskinned to represent the seasons. The habitats in the game are affected by climate change, deforestation, floods, wildfires, local conservation efforts, governmental policy, and so on. A new deck of cards could therefore be created to explore anthropogenic habitat effects which alter gameplay and then drawn on a per-round or even per-turn basis. Throughout the game players are discarding bird cards. What happens to these unwanted birds? Maybe they will start their own bird-owned cooperative sanctuary. The YouTube channel, Dragon’s Tomb, offers a fun set of alternate rules that remakes the game into a transmogrifying engine during which birds compete to become human (see video below). Such an irreverent hack punctures the mainstream conception of nature perpetuated by the game, which presents bird sanctuaries as spaces for aesthetic pleasure, and represents birds instead as uncanny, wild, even dangerous creatures. These alternative conceptions of ‘nature’ are useful for helping us question didactic moral norms implicit in mainstream environmentalism and popular notions of ‘nature’. As Nicole Seymour (2018: 77) suggests, delight, irreverence, perversity, and other ‘bad’ affects might be valuable in cultivating different ecological attitudes that recognise the intrinsic value of animals, rather than evaluating them based on human tastes and needs.