One of the things we’ve always wanted to do is incorporate reviews on the site. Without a budget and no desire to ask people to write for free, we’ve been kind of at a standstill on how to move forward with it though. What we’ll be trying are previews of the work other locals in the Edmonton area are doing. If you like what you see on our page, you can click through to the full review on the original site. Hopefully it’s a win for everyone involved?
First up is Dice Wife Life with a review of Wingspan. If you’d like to read their full review, check it out by visiting the link here at http://www.dicewifelife.com
“Wingspan is a pretty classic example of a tableau-building, action selection game. During the course of the game’s 4 rounds, each player spends a turn taking one of four actions–gathering food, laying eggs, drawing cards, or adding birds to their tableau (we refer to ours as our “sanctuaries”).
As a player’s tableau begins to fill with birds, these cards cover up weaker action spaces, allowing players to access more powerful actions on their turn. The bird cards themselves offer players additional actions, as well, leading to some exciting engine-building opportunities.
Each round, players are working towards one shared scoring objective while simultaneously trying to maximize points in their tableau. These shared objectives can lead to greater player interaction, by ranking end-of-round points based on most to least, or can contribute to a calmer, more solitary game by merely allowing each player to score what they have, independent of what their opponents may have obtained.
A players place on the score track is marked by one action cube, reducing the number of actions they can take in future rounds, and the game ends once the fourth round is complete and players have placed their fourth action cube on the objective board. Points are scored in six different ways; by totalling end of round goal placements, by scoring victory points on the bird cards themselves, through the eggs, cached food, and flock sizes of the birds in a player’s tableau, and by players’ bonus cards, individual secret scoring objectives distributed at the beginning of the game and sometimes obtained throughout play.
…Oof, that all sounds a bit dry, doesn’t it? I promise, Wingspan is anything but.”
