I've played Wingspan five times now. Notably, five times within the space of 6 days ... which is a pretty rare thing for me to do for a proper, non-filler, non-roll-and-write, full-size board game that takes more than an hour to play. In fact, there's plenty of games in my collection that haven't managed to get that many plays in 6 years, never mind 6 days. So Wingspan must be doing something right.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a triple-A, "best-thing-since-Agricola" kind of game. But it's a perfectly good card-tableau engine-builder, which is perhaps elevated to a slightly-higher level of appeal by (a) the overt level of comes-in-the-box component bling, and (b) the way that the mechanical effect of every card has been linked to the behaviour/physical characteristics of the specific bird that it depicts; there's definitely a sense of "aaaahhhh, I see what they did there!" every time you make the mental connection between a card's effect, and the the real-life bird's behaviour.
And there were many such "aaaahhhh, I see what they did there!" moments when we played it with David, our 80-year-old bird-enthusiast friend, last Friday night.
David was a good friend of Mrs Shep's parents. Sadly, Mrs Shep's parents passed away a few years ago ... but we stayed in touch with David, and pop round to see him every now and again, and normally invite him over for tea at some point during Christmas. At one such Christmas meet-up, board games were introduced (because it was Christmas, and it doesn't take much of an excuse for me to reach for board games) to great success ... and then one thing led to another... and now board games have become a bit of a focus for every visit. Light-to-medium / family type games like Bärenpark, Azul, That's Pretty Clever and Deep Sea Adventure have all proven popular ... and Wingspan seemed like it might be a perfect option for this week's visit.
As anticipated, David loved the theme ... but he had a bit of a problem getting to grips with how the special effects on cards in the tableau were triggered in response to actions taken on the board, and the way you could chain combos together. Although a lot of people are quick to cite wingspan as being a bit of a gateway/beginners kind of game, I think it's sometimes easy to forget that a lot of euro-typical mechanisms which we -- as experienced gamers -- take for granted or consider to be a bit old hat, can seem entirely alien and impenetrable to people less-used to "our" kind of games. David was definitely struggling with this one... though not insurmountably so; he managed to limp through to the end of the game, and didn't score too badly in the final reckoning. (and at the end of the evening, he did mention that he'd quite like to play Wingspan again one day... preferably before he forgets all the rules!).
In an attempt to follow up with something a bit lighter, we opted for my new copy of Bucket King 3D. Which somehow turned into 4 games of Bucket King 3D (way more popular than I expected, that one!) ... and then a game of Azul to wrap up with.
All in all, a good evening of (lighter) gaming, I think.