Is Wingspan really that good?

Boardgames
21

Couldn’t agree more. It’s not a great game, but its broad appeal is hard to argue with.

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22

Thanks for all the replies! Confirmed some of my suspicions. I’ll maybe give it a go if someone else I know picks it up.

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23

I think I’ve seen it available on TTS. I think only one person playing needs to own it, so you may be able to give it a virtual-try if you can find somebody with it on Tabletop Simulator.

24

I’ll be sure to post once I get them played! :grin:

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25

Yeah, there’s an offiicial DLC for Wingspan that’s actually pretty slick. Only one person needs to own it.

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26

Im glad that the replies are very diverse and hopefully you can make a decision out of this

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27

I played it once, had a good time, and remember nothing about it. It’s just extremely okay :joy:

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28

I played a two player on TTS last night and the module is really well done while still we had to

improvise a few things
  1. the feeder really is impractical so we put the dice outside it to roll and inside to mark that they were used
  2. putting cards under other cards… too much work, we just made a separate stack each…
  3. The eggs kept falling over and nests bigger than 4 eggs can get out of hand…
  4. It would be nice if the scoring sheet would also allow editing names not just the numbers

overall it is just a good mod for a good game.

Anyway. It’s just such a nice game to play. It has some depth but not too much to make it stressful to play after a long day (of whatever). We both had not played in a while and we didn’t have to look up any rules. It’s that kind of game.

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29

I forgot to mention this part. Last time I taught Wingspan, I hadn’t played in several months and had no trouble (outside of my usual struggles) to teach and setup the game without opening the rulebook.

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30

After watching the Boardgame4K reaction to the Golden Geek 2019 Awards

GoldenGeek Awards 2019 - Reaction

Its clear that being underwhelmed by Wingspan isn’t a unique viewpoint :grinning:

For my part I do like the game; as other have said it does a lot of this stuff very well. However I feel that it’s an Engine Builder where it’s all too easy to building something that never gets out of 2nd gear. I’m glad I own it and I play it fairly regularly but it’s not as perfect as the awards would make you think.

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31

Just further proof that awards are not as discriminating as we sometimes ascribe. Especially “peoples’ choice” awards which judge broad appeal rather than critical assessment.

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32

I think Wingspan is a perfectly nice little game. I have a couple friends who own it. If they want to play it, I’m perfectly willing. I have no desire to add it to my collection or to encourage them to bring it to meetups.

On the question of awards, I think the designer of Wingspan, Elizabeth Hargraves, is correct that part of the problem, if there is a problem, with the BGG awards is the lack of clear definition of the award categories more so than the nominating or voting process. See her twitter thread here for her analysis:

On awards given by popular vote more generally, popular is the key. People are voting for the best thing they’ve heard of. A Salt Lake City news organization recently did a bracket style Best Board Game vote. Monopoly ended up in the finals with Ticket to Ride even though many games the people here would consider to be much better were in the running because your average news consumer has never heard of most of the other options. Something like Wingspan, as with the actual winner of that vote, Ticket to Ride, is more accessible than some of the other “hard core” strategy games favored by BGG rankings and has a chance of making it to mainstream popularity.
https://www.ksl.com/article/46737759/bracket-challenge-what-is-the-best-board-game-winner

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33

Yup. I’ve been very mildly involved in the Hugo awards from time to time (by which I mean making an effort to read a substantial number of the nominees in several categories), and they mostly manage to avoid category overlaps. (Related Work is a bit of a gallimaufry, and sometimes the same person can win pro and fan artist if they’ve worked as both.) On the other hand, Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) has to nominate individual episodes, and very often more than one from the same popular show will appear; sensible nominees decline for all but one, because some people are going to want to vote for the show rather than for the episode.

Best Series has had a positive effect in that people mostly no longer nominate for Best Novel book 17 of a series where books 1-4 were great but didn’t win an award.

I think that if I were doing this (and depending on what SU&SD do with the Pearple’s Choice I may try to set something up) I’d define some exclusive category sets: a single game can be nominated in no more than one of the categories in a set. (Some of those might have other eligibility restrictions too.)

2 Likes
34

meh…

Thought I’d like it more