Wyrmspan Game Review

Wyrmspan is a game that looks and feels a lot like Wingspan. This is purposeful, since the designer took the Wingspan mechanics and used them as the baseline for this new game. There is a lot here that will be familiar to a Wingspan player, and just enough to throw them a curve once in a while. This was anticipated.

Wingspan is a game with almost universal acclaim and recognition. If you are not one of those people familiar with the game, please check out our previous reviews of Wingspan (Mark Iradian’s review of Wingspan, or Logan Giannini’s review of Wingspan), or perhaps Tom Franklin’s wonderful review of Wingspan digital, or our Wingspan strategy guide.

Stonemaier Games has a Rules and FAQ page that discusses where Wyrmspan differs from Wingspan. Below is a summary of these differences:

• Your personal game board starts with three places where you can place dragons. Additional locations in each cave must be excavated first by placing a cave card there. Doing so activates a one-time power. You explore and excavate the caves from left to right. Completing the exploration of a cave has some additional benefits.
• Actions are paid for with coins (and sometimes eggs) rather than action tokens. It is possible to acquire additional coins and take more actions in a round than other players.
• You start the game with your choice of four cards (from three dragons and three caves), and any three resources. At the start of each round, you discard down to 9 cards, 9 caves, and 9 resources. You start each round by gaining 6 coins and 1 egg.
• There are no dice. Every time you gain resources, you gain a specific resource, or you have your choice of the four resources.
• You have two dragon nests at the start of the game which hold eggs. Thus, you can store eggs even if you do not have any dragons.
• There are four guilds, one of which will be involved in the game. These guilds offer the players opportunities to acquire end-game benefits.
• Dragons have personality tags to differentiate them. They are not copies of Wingspan cards.
• Some dragons are hatchlings which can grow up over the course of the game.
• There are no bonus cards. The bonuses normally associated with those are incorporated into the dragon cards.
• There are no between-turns (pink) powers.
• The 2:1 exchange rate applies at all times, not just when buying a dragon card.
• Card abilities are optional, unless they benefit other players.
• End-of-round scoring is friendly (ties players all gain the points of the tied position).

What’s wrong here?

I like Wingspan considerably more than Mr. Iradian. That said, I am even less enamored with Wyrmspan as he is with the OG. In the FAQ, each of the changes described above are presented in such a way as to suggest that these are improvements over Wingspan. In my humble opinion, they are not. I listed a couple of things that rubbed me wrong in my Quick Peaks write-up. There, I said:

“It is my impression that Wyrmspan is the sort of game you would design if you were someone who was a fan of Wingspan, but had a list of one or two dozen things you didn’t like about the game. Wyrmspan is a good game. It is one that has some great ideas (the Guilds, the two-step growth model that requires you to excavate a space before a new dragon can be enticed into your caves, etc.). But there are some things that were lost in the efforts to remove elements the designer obviously did not care for.”

I felt then that the changes made serve to render the game into a sort of generic soup. Subsequent plays have not altered my view.

Wyrmspan has a plethora of interesting and cool ideas, but they are all hamstrung by the fact that the game does not lean into its theme. Theme is important and my colleague Tom Franklin likes to ask “could you replace the theme with something else and have the same exact game?” In other words, if one were to replace the dragons in this game with farm animals, or insects, or plants, could the game remain essentially the same? For Wyrmspan, I say yes. This would indicate that the theme is not really important to the game, it is just so much window dressing.

No mechanic reinforces (or even establishes) any sort of depth. Dragon cards have beautiful dragon images on them. They have different costs, different characteristics, and different abilities. In the end, however, the application of those characteristics and abilities are handled in such a way as to drain any kind of meaning from them. They end up being as bland as a bowl of plain white rice.

Example: Suppose I have a dragon with two pieces of meat and a bottle of milk cached on it. Why? Why that dragon? Why those resources?

The answer is that there is no rhyme or reason, they are points. Nothing more. I could just as easily have put any or all of those resources on any other dragon on my board. Nothing stands out the way it does in Wingspan. Nothing gives me the impression that dragons are anything more than the painting on the card. The same can be said of the cave cards (they are a one-time power and nothing else). And the guilds (they have some variation, but nothing that makes them shine). And so on.

The game comes with a Dragon Facts booklet. And it needs it. Because none of the flavor is on the cards.

What can be done?

Wingspan has a lot of bird cards. Thanks to its multiple expansions (like Wingspan Asia), there is a lot going on here. One can hope that the good people involved in this design can do things in future releases that will add in the missing flavor and do it in enough abundance so as to infuse the game with enough theme to make the original Wyrmspan cards fade into the background. (If I could work my will, every single one of the original cards would be replaced).

For instance, they could try any of the following:

• Make the costs of the dragons feel like they belong to that dragon, rather than just a random collection of resources.
• Find some way of making the different resources distinct. Wingspan does this with the dice (e.g., fish, fruit, and rodents are a little tougher to come by than invertebrates and seeds). Right now the resources are virtually interchangeable.
• When a dragon card caches something, or has cards tucked under it, make it mean something other than “this is a point.”.
• Make the caves more interesting.
  • Give me more than just a one-time power on some cave cards.
  • Restrict some to a particular area.
  • Have caves that can only hold dragons with specific characteristics.
  • Something. Anything! Just make them interesting.
• Make new guilds! Make them distinct and different, not just a variation of a basic template.
• Make new round goals that are more interesting! Have them delve into more aspects of the game.

Wyrmspan has potential. Unfortunately, it fails in all the ways that make Wingspan so engaging.