Verdict
Wingspan Pocket doesn’t make my heart flutter as much as its older brother, but it’s still a worthy spin-off of the engine-builder. Plenty of rules have been stripped , but the core feel of the game remains in-tact. What we’re left with is a simpler, snappier Wingspan that still manages to feel strategic despite its compactness.
- Authentic Wingspan feel
- Surprisingly strategic
- Perfectly paced
- Simpler, for better and worse
For years, smash-hit board game Wingspan has been getting bigger. Bigger in popularity and bigger in complexity thanks to its globe-trotting expansions. If we’re counting the Fins and Wyrms in the family, that’s even more span for your buck. Now, Elizabeth Hargrave’s game is getting smaller. Wingspan Pocket gives us our simplest, most table-shy version of the birdy board game.
This being a Wingspan game, there are assumptions a board game audience can make about it. Some of them are correct. This is, for example, still an approachable engine-builder where you spend food to play bird cards.
Each bird still has a unique power, a points value, and an enthralling illustration. You’ll even recognize most of the birds, as they’ve been modified from the original game.
‘Modified’ is the key word here. This is still Wingspan, but not as we know it.
Bird cards are now double-sided, with a food value printed on the back. You begin play by drawing six cards and deciding which two to keep face-up as birds and which to place face-down as food. These, and all other cards you acquire, go into your Reserve, and you can’t change your mind about what they are after. The card is always bird or always food.
Wingspan senior’s player board is gone, replaced with a single nest card. When you play a bird, paying its food and egg cost, you’ll place it to the left of your nest. This saves a lot of table space, though not as much as you might think. Wingspan Pocket will sit snugly in a backpack on travels, but you might struggle to get a game in on public transport.
If you can’t or won’t add a bird, you can instead lay three eggs or draw two cards from the Supply. There are always four birds to choose from, plus four decks of food-side-up cards, and you can mix and match as you like.
Whatever you do, you’ll trigger all birds in your Nest after your chosen action, so long as they have brown powers. These resolve from left to right rather than Wingspan’s usual right to left. Any green powers (something entirely new to the series) are ongoing rather than trigger-based.
That’s pretty much it. Advanced games include two end-of-game scoring conditions, but the rules are egg-like, simple and unblemished.
Games wrap up in under 45 minutes, no matter the player count, thanks to Wingspan Pocket’s impeccable pacing. A game ends when one player adds a sixth bird to their nest (and everyone who’s owed one gets a final turn). I’m yet to play a game where anyone falls drastically behind, so it’s a consistent, close race to the finish line.
Perhaps ‘race’ isn’t the right word, because Wingspan Pocket’s minimalism encourages careful plays. When you only have six birds to flock around with, building an engine is a delicate, deliberate process. Those brown powers can mean additional eggs, food, tucked cards, or birds in your Reserve. Or perhaps they mean a meaty chunk of points that’ll put you ahead of the crowd. There’s more strategy here than the pocket-sized box might suggest.
It’s not quite as thrilling as setting up a system of combos in the original. Bird powers are far less diverse, and player interaction has been culled almost entirely. It makes sense. When you’re handling one row of birds rather than three, there’s simply fewer decisions to make.
That might be enough to send strategy lovers flying for fresh pastures. For many, however, simplicity is a good thing. Stonemaier and Hargrave have pitched this as the ideal Wingspan for families – or anyone who simply wants a less taxing time.
On that front, it succeeds in spades. It’s impressive how much the feel of Wingspan has been preserved in Pocket, despite so much complexity being stripped away. It’s the perfect fledgling experience. It doesn’t succeed the original, but I’m glad it exists. I can see it being the perfect game for Christmas, when everyone is too full of food to optimize turns.
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A copy of Wingspan Pocket was provided by Stonemaier Games for review.
Source: Wargamer
