I never tried Wingspan but I hear very mixed things about it. Some love it, others state its a multiplayer solitaire game. Could you elaborate how Wingspan is more solitaire than lets say Terraforming Mars, Ark Nova, Everdell or similar?
In Wingspan there are only very limited ways of “destructively” interacting with other players, to me only two come to mind:
You take away birds someone else wants to draw, either by taking them yourself or by refreshing the birdbath with an ability. You can’t steal from someone’s hand or board (not that I think you should be able to). This usually hasn’t that much impact, because there are many birds with similar stats and/or abilities and there are so many birds, you can’t really play for a certain combo anyway.
You limit someone’s ability to take or use the food they want by (a) taking it from the pool of rolled dice, but similarly to 1., there are several ways to roll them again or generate them directly. Or (b) take their acquired food with a bird’s ability, but they always get something in return, either a specific resource or they can draft from the pool, it’s rarely punishing und usually at least neutral.
Apart from that there is nothing that would impact your gameplan that is in the hands of another player. You always get the same amount of turns, always at the same time and the first player marker moves predictably.
The last round is also pretty lame if you play with the basegame, because laying eggs if you’ve got the space is the best move to take at the end - the expansions fixed that though by giving you less eggs.
Terraforming Mars on the other hand (I haven’t played the others more than once) let’s you compete for bordspace and the resources on them, which already makes it way more important and competitive to get established on the board early on, at least if someone else is doing it. You also compete for the progression track bonuses that directly give more VPs and influences the game’s length. If everyone pushes temperature/O2/oceans early on and you know the game will end around round 11 instead of round 14, you will have to adapt your strategy quite a bit.
I still think Wingspan is a great game, but it certainly isn’t for everyone. Imo it would have fit in better into the normal “Spiel des Jahres”-Category instead of the “Kennerspiel” one, that probably rubbed some people the wrong way/set wrong expectations.
I never tried Wingspan but I hear very mixed things about it. Some love it, others state its a multiplayer solitaire game. Could you elaborate how Wingspan is more solitaire than lets say Terraforming Mars, Ark Nova, Everdell or similar?
In Wingspan there are only very limited ways of “destructively” interacting with other players, to me only two come to mind:
You take away birds someone else wants to draw, either by taking them yourself or by refreshing the birdbath with an ability. You can’t steal from someone’s hand or board (not that I think you should be able to). This usually hasn’t that much impact, because there are many birds with similar stats and/or abilities and there are so many birds, you can’t really play for a certain combo anyway.
You limit someone’s ability to take or use the food they want by (a) taking it from the pool of rolled dice, but similarly to 1., there are several ways to roll them again or generate them directly. Or (b) take their acquired food with a bird’s ability, but they always get something in return, either a specific resource or they can draft from the pool, it’s rarely punishing und usually at least neutral.
Apart from that there is nothing that would impact your gameplan that is in the hands of another player. You always get the same amount of turns, always at the same time and the first player marker moves predictably. The last round is also pretty lame if you play with the basegame, because laying eggs if you’ve got the space is the best move to take at the end - the expansions fixed that though by giving you less eggs.
Terraforming Mars on the other hand (I haven’t played the others more than once) let’s you compete for bordspace and the resources on them, which already makes it way more important and competitive to get established on the board early on, at least if someone else is doing it. You also compete for the progression track bonuses that directly give more VPs and influences the game’s length. If everyone pushes temperature/O2/oceans early on and you know the game will end around round 11 instead of round 14, you will have to adapt your strategy quite a bit.
I still think Wingspan is a great game, but it certainly isn’t for everyone. Imo it would have fit in better into the normal “Spiel des Jahres”-Category instead of the “Kennerspiel” one, that probably rubbed some people the wrong way/set wrong expectations.
Thanks a lot for this explanation! I am still considering getting it but I think I will watch some how to play video or similar