Talk Birdy to Me
Why Wingspan is my new favorite board game
During my freshman year in college I read an article in my roommate’s copy of WIRED magazine that changed my life. It was called “Monopoly Killer,” profiling a niche German board game that was rapidly gaining popularity in the United States. The game was called Settlers of Catan. 65% of Brock family dialogue consists of summarizing articles, so after explaining the WIRED piece to my dad, he agreed to buy it for our family. We brought it to my grandparent’s house in Woodstock Vermont and took it for a test ride after my brother’s college graduation. Those first few games were a revelation.
This wasn’t just the Long Trail Ales speaking. I had never played a game this well-designed before. Instead of the Reaganesque orgy of zero sum capitalism of Monopoly, in Catan I found a constantly changing free market economy that required deft negotiation and alliance building. While other board games tended to devolve into one family member whaling on everyone else, ruining both the fun and parity, Catan had multiple built in checks on a clear front-runner: progressive taxation anytime a seven is rolled and the constant threat of the robber shutting down the leader’s lucrative brick mine. Where games like Monopoly or Risk became less fun once a clear front-runner emerged, Catan stayed gripping until the very end, since everyone was working towards different yet equally viable paths to victory that were interconnected and never guaranteed. While other games become repetitive quickly, Catan was endlessly replay-able, both because you had to get revenge on your brother for cutting off your longest road and also because you’d literally build a completely different island to settle every game. In the past 15 years, I’ve convinced a dozen friends, cousins, aunts and uncles that they shouldn’t settle for lesser games now that Catan is here.
Since the summer of 2009 I’ve experienced the wholesome joy of discovering a new board game exactly twice. The first was when I played Pandemic, a cooperative game where everyone works together to address a fictional global pandemic. I discovered this one right before COVID hit, so my enthusiasm was tempered by the stress and upheaval of the much more real pandemic that our president was assuring us would be gone by Easter or when the weather got warmer, whichever helped his reelection prospects more.
The second was when I played Wingspan for the first time this year. Wingspan came to me via my friend Matt, who also introduced me to Spikeball and Pandemic. However, of these games, Wingspan is by far the most “Matt” of the bunch as he’s the friend most likely to regale you with bird trivia whether he’s on a hike or in the drive through line at an Arby’s.
Yes, Wingspan is about birds. You’re essentially building a vibrant ornithological ecosystem, divided between three biomes (woodland, grasslands, wetlands), each bird possessing special abilities and fun facts written on their beautifully designed and illustrated cards. The mechanics seem a bit intimidating at first but become fairly self-explanatory halfway through your first game. Each turn you either play birds to add to your aviary, gather food from the bird feeder, lay eggs, or draw a new bird. All of these actions end up being essential and interrelated as you need birds to get victory points, food to play birds, and eggs to play birds in the later rounds and also get even more victory points.
Like Catan, the gameplay architecture is remarkably nuanced, textured with multiple ways to win and therefore many valid play styles. It’s also even more pacifist than Catan. Instead of the benign trade disputes and embargoes of Catan, in Wingspan it’s very hard to screw over or negatively impact another player, short of taking a resource from the bird feeder they might need or swooping in to grab a particularly handsome owl they’ve been eyeing. Yet these minor inconveniences are rare and short-lived, often overshadowed by overtly positive effects from your fellow players: communally enriching power ups like everyone getting to draw more cards, get more berries, or lay more eggs.
What’s most noteworthy to me about this game isn’t actually how it’s played, but rather how playing it makes me feel. This is a game that consistently relaxes and delights me.
At times while playing Wingspan I honestly forget that other people are also playing it alongside me. I stop to admire the birds they’re accumulating but seldom view them as competition, much less a threat. The structure of the game encourages a more amicable and harmonious relationship between players than any other game I’ve played. Wingspan both simulates and encourages a sense of grateful interconnectedness.
What I’m getting at is that Wingspan isn’t just more fun than other games; it feels like a categorically different kind of game. While Catan makes extractive capitalism fun and egalitarian, Wingspan doesn’t try to emulate free markets or even the human world at all. Instead, the goal is to make you slow down and truly see and appreciate the breadth of beauty of the natural world. Where other games make you size up your human competition, here you’re encouraged spend a lot of time appreciating the birds in front of you: their striking looks, unique adaptations, and diversity of ecological niches. The way in which each bird occupies a specific part of the ecosystem and feeds on certain resources is scientifically accurate, as are the predator, prey, and scavenger relationships depicted. Instead of modeling the plunder of natural resources, you’re building an ecosystem to witness and enjoy.
It’s truly astounding to me that something as simple as a board game can encourage not only a less antagonistic relationship to my fellow humans, but also a surprisingly empathetic and passionate relationships to dozens of other species. The true victory of Wingspan isn’t that it makes board games fun again; it’s that it makes nature conservation seem self evident. This is something I won’t get bored of anytime soon. I hope I never do.
Do you have thoughts about Wingspan, board games, or birds?
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I want to play this !