Rating: 5 out of 5 California Quails
11pm on December 31st was not the right time to teach my drunk friends Wingspan, an engine-building board game published by Stonemaier games in 2019. Having barely managed to get them to sit down, I watched reluctant heads droop lower and lower as I kept pulling boards and pieces out of the box and setting them on the table. No amount of enthusiasm on my part could save us. By the time I assembled the birdhouse dice roller, all I could see was eyes and foreheads. “Guys. I swear. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
One week prior, I myself had to watch a video to learn how to play. I didn’t want to. I would have sat there for hours, staring at the instructions, refusing to ask for help had my girlfriend not intervened. There are a lot of teaching videos for Wingspan. There’s this one with game designer Elizabeth Hargrave which I do not recommend. It runs a hefty 36:47 and has the same sort of wincing, don’t-worry-about-this-for-right-now attitude that I tried on New Year’s Eve. You might enjoy it if you’re already a fan. I like this one from rollforcrit. It teaches you everything you need to know to get started in six minutes.
Why didn’t I just show that video to my friends? I don’t have a good answer for that. I guess I was overconfident. I thought I could sherpa the inebriated safely through their first game even as one of them tried to maneuver a French bulldog onto her lap while holding a full glass of wine. A video would have at least relieved me of the burden of two people’s opinion of a very good game. I want people to like what I like. I want to be a salesman for things I believe in, and when it comes to games, I want people to play with (against). So I will try again. Guys, it’s not as bad as it looks.
A game of Wingspan is divided into four rounds. Each round, players start with action cubes that are used to keep track of which actions they’ve taken and how many turns they have left. Players take turns taking actions until all of their cubes are exhausted and the round ends. There are four actions: play a bird card from your hand, get food, get eggs, or draw more bird cards. Birds cost food and eggs to play, and can be placed in one of three habitats. Habitats are associated with three of the four actions so the more birds you play in your forest habitat, for instance, the better you get at food gathering. Then there are bird powers which you can learn as you go. See? Nothing to it.
Ok, how about this. Wingspan is a game about scoring points. Score more points than your opponents and you win. That’s as simple as it gets. Yes, there are many ways to score points, eggs, flocks, cached food, bird points, round goals, and bonus cards, but if you keep the points in mind, you’ll get it. “Why?” they kept asking me after every little thing. “Why would I do that?” The simple answer is, to score points.
I highly recommend you play Wingspan. It’s a lot of fun and once you get the hang of it, you want to play over and over. Games are under an hour and there’s a little diagram on the side of the box that shows you how to put everything away like a little puzzle. It makes cleanup fun! And if you’re still having trouble learning Wingspan, I’m teaching another class on July 4th at 3pm.
criticalmush.com 
Place your left thumb on the ‘n’ key and quickly push once and release, then using your right index finger push down on the ‘o’ key, and from there. just wing it on the following letters, ‘ t’, ‘h’, ‘i’, ‘n’, ‘g’, ‘space bar’, ‘t’, ‘o’, ‘space bar’, ‘i’, ‘t’.
And there you have it.