From Tip to Tip-Taking Measure of Wingspan: A Wingspan Board Game Review

I think "gamers" are having an issue wrapping their head around the fact that this is a very simple engine.

Food>Birds>Eggs

The round goals and card goals may inform some of your decisions, give you a little direction, and you can't ignore them entirely. However, you also can't let them distract you from your primary goal - produce the most eggs.

@Jeb
I've been playing with my daughter, my neighbor and her daughter. We have a requisite bit of time that must be spent ohhing and ahhing when a particularly pretty bird comes out. And time at the end to admire what each other built.

@Gary Sax
I'd never play Wingspan with just Al, or a table of experienced competitive gamers. It would be boring as hell, because so much of what needs to be done is rather obvious to us, and we could be playing something else.

I've been playing with two intermediate level gamers, my daughter and her friend, and I'm guessing Jeb is playing with his pile o' children. So I think we are just looking for more congenial games where we don't totally trounce our kids. I have beaten them every time we have played, but not by an enormously discouraging number of points. They now have the goal of beating me, and have been inching up on my score with every game. A couple more games and they will figure out it is all about the eggs, and then a few games after that they will figure out how to maximize those eggs while still being able to squeeze out a few extra points from the goals. Then we will all be on a level playing field. They will beat me a few times and then we will probably move on to a more challenging game (but return to Wingspan when we want to play something more relaxed).

I think that games like Wingspan and Pan Am are a new generation of games. Family games level the playing field between children and adults, who are at different stages of cognitive development. Whereas, these games level the playing field between players with the same cognitive abilities but different levels of experience. I think there is a need for these, as we now have, shall we call them "expert" or "advanced" gamers who have been playing worker placement, deck builders, networking, whatever games for 15 years, sitting down at the table with other adult, shall we call them "intermediate" level gamers, who have been playing Pandemic, Ticket to Ride, Catan and CAH for maybe 2 years.

Matt Thrower wrote: I've actually been asked to write it up for T3 .

T3 the magazine? Awesome! When it is published, start a new thread with a link so we can all head over and read it.

Wingspan only seems that way to you because simple engine building is second nature to you. Zoe still ends up with a shit load of un-played birds in her hand and a pile of unused food, which she has wasted turns collecting instead of doing things that will improve her engine or set her up to score points. It all hasn't clicked with her yet. It's still a challenge to her to identify and play to the primary objective.

Excuse the pun, but a lot of these types of games is about learning that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. So figure out how to optimize what's in the hand, rather than wasting turns digging for that perfect combo.

@RobertB

I agree. Players with the same level of experience and skill tend to cluster within a 5 point spread, and those 1-5 points can usually be attributed to luck of the draw.

What I'm seeing is that any game has a maximum number of points if someone plays a perfect game, and a minimum number of "give me" points that a person can score even if they just flail through and play procedurally without totally fucking up. The minimum and maximum depend upon player count, what goals come out, and how many cards that gift things to other players are in play. However, that minimum and maximum are always within 20-25 points of each other. Assuming no one can play a perfect game, and no one is a total flailer, and that there is a bit of a swing due to the luck of the draw, what you usually get is the inexperienced players clustering together about 10-15 points below the experienced players' cluster. That's not overwhelmingly discouraging. As more games are played, the experienced players' scores don't get better, because of that max points ceiling, but the less experienced players' scores quickly creep up and close the gap.

And yes, there is always the possibility that you will have a game where someone pulls a way awesome combo on the first draw and runs away with it, and someone else can never get anything going, but those games are rare.