The SUSD Wingspan review

Ok! Hang on. What did he say about New Zealand birds? “Indolent chicken nuggets”? Well come at me bro!

We have a parrot that disassembles cars for fun, at ski fields. Because it lives there.

Until humans brought over rats (and later cats), NZ had approximately 3 species of mammal, all bats. So birds fill every environmental niche we associate with mammals. Like the six foot tall Moa functioning as cows or deer. Mildly interesting, but let me tell you about the NZ equivalent of the wolf.

The Haast eagle.

The biggest eagle who ever existed. Mainly ate the six foot cow bird I mentioned above. Depending on who you believe it either hunted on the wing or, (and this is the one I prefer) chilled out in our stupidly tall trees and casually fell out of them onto a meal, like a cinder block with claws. I imagine the truth is probably it did both.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) humans arrived, and we’re generally better at eating Moa than the eagle was. So they’re extinct now. There’s also stories about them attacking / killing humans, except for some reason they don’t count cause it didn’t happen to a European. Anyway…

Yeah, na. New Zealand birds are pretty cool. I guess some of them do kinda look like feathered chicken nuggets though. I’m looking at you Pukeko.

Anyway, wingspan looks fine. I have no strong opinions. I expect I’ll never play it cause shipping to NZ is… Luxurious. For the package.

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In fairness to TFM, if you play the solitaire mode it plays really fast. I can setup, play two games, and have it back in the box inside an hour.

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I thought the review was really interesting, because it was a good case study of how nebulous the level of enjoyment of a game can be. Many of Quinns’ criticisms could easily be leveled at other games SUSD has recommended (RftG can easily have runaway leaders, Pipeline’s pipe mechanics are entirely divorced from its theme, Azul’s scoring is completely inscrutable for its first game or two), but they get by simply because he enjoys them more. And I don’t mean that statement as a criticism–all of the points he made were completely fair and reasonable, and I could see any of them turning off someone on this game–but I think it’s interesting how hard it can be to describe what makes a game resonate or not. It reminds me of the gang’s thoughts on Marco Polo, Clans of Caledonia, or Teotihuacan, where they could appreciate the quality of the game, but couldn’t muster any real enthusiasm for it.

That said, I do have a disagreement with the review, and it’s with Quinns’ assertion that point salad games aren’t good as introductory games. To a certain extent, this is true; if you toss someone into a viscous miasma of rules soup without a life preserver, they’ll probably flounder a bit before they learn to swim. However, I think a hidden strength of point salad-y games is that they allow for a wide variety of play styles without punishing any of them. In a lot of board games, even gateway games, it’s very possible to make a strictly bad decision; you don’t cluster your tiles in Azul, you frivolously place all your meeples in Carcassonne, you focus too much on movement in El Dorado, et cetera. And these easily noticeable and accessible errors do give the game an easy handle to grasp on to, but they also punish players for not thinking exactly how the game wants them to think. When I put Wingspan in front of players, on the other hand, there’s not really a “wrong” way to go about things. My grandmother’s strategy is to just play as many bird cards as possible, without regard to the other aspects of the game. And she probably won’t win, but she won’t just be knocked out of the game because she didn’t know the basic strategies, and it’ll feel like a fun, tight race the entire time. It’s one of the reasons why drafting games are so good as introductory games–when there are so many varied paths to victory, it’s easy for someone to just do what they want to, and still be rewarded for it. And yes, these kinds of games do take one or two plays to reveal their intricacies, but during those one or two plays, any new players aren’t just going to get beaten around by their lack of understanding that “this is how you’re supposed to play”.

Overall, I think games with this kind of freedom can be excellent for introducing people into the gaming hobby, especially people who don’t have a strong competitive streak. It can be a bit awkward when someone asks “How do you win?” and you have to give a noncommittal shrug, but it means new people can explore the mechanics at their own pace, even as the experienced players fiddle with all the knobs and levers of the Rules Machine.

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They are, it is such a shame Haast Eagle got extinct, they had to be awesome. Like the Moa. They made my day when I went down to Wellington’s Te Papa museum.

Not to talk of the neighbouring Emus from Australia… that won a war against the Australian Army in Western Australia!! In the XX century!!! And they already were facing machine guns!!!

Even the teddy bear looking kiwi, lays an egg that is … 25% its body weight!!! If that isn’t mind-blowing, I don’t know what is.

Sorry Quinns, but Oceania’s birds are cooler than cool. Probably the coolest in the world with South America closely second by variety and colourfulness.

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I thought that was emu? I mean cassowaries are scary enough, but emu are like their bigger dumber brother. Won’t intentional hurt you, but they’re taller than me and have feet like Freddy krugers hands.

Edit: I should have googled first, it was emus.
As seen here, for facts.

Or here, for entertainment.

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I got confused, and I think I edited just before you published yours. The moment I sent and reread it, I realised.that I had the wrong feathered beast. Apologies for the lapsus.

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I understand the confusion. I feel like the cassowaries would win that fight easily.

I only hope cassowarys and emus don’t team up to take over… well, Australia. I guess it’s no great loss.

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I’m a bit behind, having only just watched the review. I think there’s a lot of valid criticisms in there… but sometimes I just want to play a chill game about collecting beautiful birds :slight_smile:

I’m not sure I agree with the recommended alternatives, at least for the given reasons:

  • The Quest for El Dorado - I’ve admittedly only played this once, but it was with experienced players who knew the deck and the strategy, and believe me when I say that it sucks to be lagging really far behind and know that you can’t catch up. At least with Wingspan I’m distracted by the lovely art when that happens :grin:
  • Istanbul - I’m usually the one kicking new players’ butts at this one, and I don’t think they enjoy it any more than when that happens in Wingspan! You also have to explain what every single space does, so it’s a bit of an information overload for non-gamers.
  • Azul - depending on the people I’m playing with, I might choose this over Wingspan as an introductory game, but people seem to really struggle to get their heads round the scoring.
  • Race for the Galaxy - I really feel like I should give this game a try, but it just looks SO BORING. I’ve played Roll for the Galaxy a few times, and found it to be decidedly “meh”, so perhaps my view is being coloured by that. If anyone wants to teach it to me to prove me wrong, feel free!

There was a comment under the video that I liked - the commenter noted that they refer to Wingspan as “Terraforming Marsh”, which seems fairly apt. If you don’t like the deck-enforced unpredictability in Terraforming Mars, there’s probably a good chance you won’t like it in Wingspan either. I happen to like both games, but then I like games that force you to react to unexpected events, and I don’t mind whether that comes from the other players or from the game itself. I also like crashing stuff into Mars…

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The thing everyone says is: argh, the iconography. There’s a trick for that: play on BGA, where you get pop-up explanations of what everything means. The situation there is a bit weird - as far as I can tell the base game is free to play, but any expansions make it premium.

I could offer to explain the rules but I’m rubbish at the game itself so you might do better to learn from someone else. :slight_smile:

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Agree on both! Istanbul is a big “what?”. For a light game, you explain a lot. I can do a teach of El Grande and then Irish Gauge, and finish before my teach of Istanbul.

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I found Roll to be dull and Race to be great - although Roll has its faithfuls.

I have BGA premium if anyone wants to play Race.

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There’s no reason to think you won’t like Race if you don’t like Roll. I think Race is excellent and Roll is not something I would choose to play again.

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Sounds like I should give Race for the Galaxy a go on BGA then :+1:

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I’ve not played Race for the Galaxy but I did enjoy San Juan the one time that I’ve played it.

Wingspan is one of my most played games this year and I absolutely adore it. The European Expansion really helps. It encourages good feelings as you get a good engine going - even if you’re losing, the possibility of an “a-ha!” moment never completely goes away and that is not an easy design feat at all.

I’m yet to watch the review so I’ll reserve most of my judgement till afterwards, but I’m personally really glad to see it sweep all the categories and very disappointed in the trend I’ve observed in other established podcasts and reviewers to enter this silly contest to see who can piss all over Wingspan’s chips the most.

I finally got around to watching this review with my partner, and she has played Winggirth. Being inducted into games but not considering herself an ‘expert’, I asked her what she thought of Quinn’s take on it. She had some similar opinions as Quinn’s did and ultimately felt: ‘If someone brought it out to play, sure, let’s play. But I don’t think we should buy it.’

She also thought he overlooked a big part of the game, the solo experience. The friend who owns the game solos Winggirth frequently. I figured the pear would have whispered that in his ear…

My big comment though about the review that I do not think was mentioned is this: He was struggling on how to describe the game… It is Bird Stock Market!


Some other thoughts I had about a comment in the thread.

Yup, I think this is totally it. Didn’t they originally point people to NPI’s Wingspan review because they decided they did not want to review it as they felt they were going to express the same ideas? Or am I imagining this?

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I do remember something similar to that. And it’s definitely likely considering that Quinns makes an appearance in that review.

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If you want to check it out the original NPI review, it’s here:

The two facts worth pointing our are:

  1. The NPI review was carried out 15 months before the SU&SD one. Before Wingspan won all those awards.
  2. Quinn’s input into the NPI review were two bird facts. The second of which was “Did you know that eggs are really really really really small houses!”…
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The criticisms of the game in the susd review didn’t feel like they were new criticisms or surprising ones for me. The 150 Pokemon conveniently lining up seems very unlikely to me so as an engine builder it seems hard to do something good compared to making the best of a bad situation.

My own take on why this review is that i don’t think a game as big as this (SdJ, BGG, Sales) can stay off what is one of the top 2/3 board game sites in the world. That game must get hella big numbers of searches on YouTube.

I think with engine builders the veneer is theme does vanish fast for me. I like animals but I know I’ll play this game looking not at the birds but how many eggs there are in a shockingly fast fashion. I felt Ava’s coda was an overly romantic depiction of the game - the game you want it to be when you buy the birds game but not the game that is ever played, especially by solid players if we’re honest.

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