Wingspan Wins Wall of 'Wards

May 10, 2020 6:53 AM

Wingspan is a pretty popular board game. It got a NYT piece (and a MeFi FPP) after its first two print runs quickly sold out, and last week it came almost as close as a game can to sweeping the BoardGameGeek.com Golden Geek awards, winning (takes breath) Board Game of the Year, Best Artwork Presentation, Best Card Game, Best Solo Game, Most Innovative, Best Family Game, and Best Strategy Game.

Wingspan was so popular among the nearly 10,000 voters (a record number) that its European Expansion deck even won Best Expansion -- the first time an add-on has won while the base game was new enough to be in main contention.

Seven (or eight) awards breaks the record of six set by Gloomhaven just two years ago (which broke the previous year's record of five wins by Scythe). Games "hoarding" more and more awards has been a point of controversy on BGG for a while now, in particular with the nebulous nature of some of the awards, and the comments filled with arguments over whether a "family" game can also be a "strategy" game (Wingspan is the first game to win in both categories), whether there are simply too many games for anyone to vote in an informed way, and what exactly "innovative" means (yes, the dictionary definition was posted).

Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave took to Twitter to address some of the criticisms, attributing most of the problem to "badly-defined categories" and advocating for weight (a community-generated rating of complexity) to be used to sort games rather than the current "I know it when I see it" method.

posted by Etrigan (27 comments total)

Been wanting to give this game a go, and almost pulled the trigger a week ago. It is a pricey proposition though, especially with the Euro expansion to make it regionally appropriate. But yeah, sounds like it is worth it.
posted by St. Oops at 7:04 AM on May 10, 2020

It is a delightful game! Over the years I've found that I would rather add slightly pricier but far more beautiful games to my collection, and this one fits the bill. For the grognards of board gaming it doesn't add much 'new'. Personally, I'm not in the least offended by this as it is a very approachable game for newer or less frequent game players, and an enjoyable implementation of familiar mechanisms for the experienced gamers.
posted by meinvt at 7:20 AM on May 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

This has quickly become a favorite game in our household. We're Bird Nerds so it was an obvious buy once we'd played it and enjoyed the mechanics. It's a great two-player...good for quarantine. We even bought the original artwork for one of the bird cards (the Mourning Dove) for our bedroom. Once the framing shops open again, I'll get it framed and put it up!

As to the BGG categories...I agree that the categories are ill-defined and subjective. I mean, the voting can be subjective (all voting is, unless there's a clear quantifiable winner, like "which game sold the most copies") but when the categories themselves are, it gets murky.

And those snobs that look down their noses at people who enjoy light games can go stick a meeple in their ear. Not everybody's up for devoting an entire weekend to Twilight Imperium. Board gamers are all sorts. We contain multitudes.
posted by Gray Duck at 7:26 AM on May 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

Years ago I saw a T-shirt design to the effect that "When the AIs take over, they will play ColdPlay songs to each other in order to mock humans". E.g. the artistic creation is not just bad, but it is so popular and *so* bad that it makes a mockery of the entire species.

I was reminded that shirt recently when I played Wingspan. It's about as soulless as a game can get, but they've pasted it with BirdFacts and now the NYTimes thinks it is the second coming. Not a fan! It's fine as a light filler game or something, but the press it has received has just been ludicrous.
posted by Balna Watya at 7:38 AM on May 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

The awards are very well deserved. It's a really good game, both for new players and old hands. It's also very well produced. It's also getting a lot of salt from the BGG crowd because they skew very white, very male, and relatively old.

Nobody batted an eye at games coded more traditionally male sweeping the awards, but a game designed by a woman that doesn't have a theme involving killing people? Suddenly everyone's Very Concerned about problems that BGG has had since inception. Its categories have always been ridiculous, with some representing enormous swathes of the gaming landscape and others being like, Napoleonic Wars Games. It has always allowed arbitrary precision ratings from 1.0 to 10.0 (e.g. you can rate a game 3.14159 if you feel like it), resulting in a real range of game ratings from like 5.5 to 8. And the "weight" attribute has always been a complete disaster, again arbitrary precision 1-5 with no real guidance.

All of this has been true forever, but oh noes guys some lady made a game I don't like now it's a problem :( :( :(

And this?

It's about as soulless as a game can get

What the hell does that even mean?
posted by tocts at 8:05 AM on May 10, 2020 [18 favorites]

It's about as soulless as a game can get

What the hell does that even mean?

I assume things got mixed up and he was talking about playing Spades.
posted by hippybear at 8:07 AM on May 10, 2020 [4 favorites]

To be fair, it was also ridiculous that Gloomhaven swept the awards. I have Gloomhaven, and I very much like Gloomhaven, but it is not a game that was so good that nothing else should have got a look in. Azul came out that year! Fog of Love!
posted by Merus at 8:23 AM on May 10, 2020 [6 favorites]

I'm really looking forward to an eventual Norwegian translation of this!
posted by Harald74 at 8:29 AM on May 10, 2020

Social distancing folks! I played this online with friends last weekend, via https://tabletopia.com/

I think you need a subscription to be able to access it, but even the top-level subscription is less than buying the game outright, and then you can play with friends! The UI is admittedly a little clunky (I suspect a mouse would work better than a trackpad) but it's totally functional if you want to try playing wingspan.
posted by quaking fajita at 8:30 AM on May 10, 2020 [3 favorites]

Recently I have been enjoying games more for the art and theme than complexity. I also prefer games where players can't sabotage each other (too much). Wingspan fits this perfectly, as well as games like Everdell or even Terraforming Mars. So good for them!

Has anyone played some of the other games that were nominated? Would you recommend any?
posted by kwartel at 9:07 AM on May 10, 2020

Wingspan is a very good game, but not quite mind blowing. I really really like it - probably split with Sagrada for most played games at my house this year - but it doesn't feel that innovative.

I was also a bit disappointed when I got it, after reading the NYY article, that the theming and the game mechanics just don't line up in a lot of ways. (E.g., using eggs from any old nest to generate new birds.) The cards are also a bit combinatorial, which is great for understanding quickly what a card does, but means that the species don't have a lot of individual character, beyond the bit of flavor text. (Except the cowbirds. They are well designed.) I /do/ love the artwork and the mini facts, and go a bit out of my way to play local birds when I draw them, probably to my strategic detriment.

As always, though, game design is about creating meaningful choices for the players, which this game does a great job of. My other favorite game design problem is choosing the right level of simulation for a system: what parts do you tack on another subsystem for, and which parts do you abstract away or ignore entirely? Wingspan chooses "abstract it away" a lot, which is a big part of why it's so accessible, but also a source of a lot of the criticisms. It's a totally valid set of design choices, which had ultimately led to a lot more people reading cool bird facts, so I count it as a big win overall.
posted by kaibutsu at 9:52 AM on May 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm not really expecting it to be mindblowing, but learning about birds with the kids in this format would be very cool. I know like five birds. Getting to know another one through the game would be a pretty big relative step up for me.
posted by Harald74 at 11:27 AM on May 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

It's just a really light engine-builder. I've played it, enjoyed it, but winning the "Strategy Game" category was just, what??? OK, add "Most Innovative" to that "what???" as well. There's almost nothing innovative about it.

I avoid KickStarter like the plague, so I only could make a handful of votes, but, everything I voted for won! Best 2-player: Watergate. Most thematic: Dune, Best Family: Wingspan. One other I can't recall.
posted by Windopaene at 11:40 AM on May 10, 2020

It stays heavy in our rotation. It's not super thinky, but it is fun to get an engine going, and the art is beautiful. It's a great game for having a drink and chatting with friends. Not too light, not to heavy, just right. Plus all the #BirdFacts are interesting!
posted by xedrik at 11:56 AM on May 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

There's almost nothing innovative about it.

The main argument I've seen in favor of a Most Innovative vote is that Wingspan has brought a lot of people into the hobby who aren't normally board gamers; that its combination of theme and gameplay (and, yes, PR to some extent) is as much an "innovation" as a new mechanic.

For that matter, Pandemic Legacy won Most Innovative a mere three years after Risk Legacy. I haven't managed to play either, but nothing I've read about PL has said it has any particular "innovation" over RL. The award is definitely "This is new to me!" more than "This is a new thing in all of Creation!"
posted by Etrigan at 12:01 PM on May 10, 2020 [3 favorites]

Wingspan is IMO a perfectly fine game, nothing all that special; I don't own it, but I'll play it if suggested by someone else. It definitely got a boost from being published by Stonemaier games (a company run by Jamey Stegmaier, initially founded to publish his own designs), whose popularity skyrocketed with the Kickstarter-funded Scythe some years back.

Stonemaier can be relied on to have great production values in their releases, and for some reason they've got an especially rabid fanbase that is sort of primed to rate any of their releases a 10/10 before they've actually seen the light of day. (See also: Tapestry. Although that one seems to have a near-equal amount of haters.) Had Wingspan come out of basically any other publisher, I find it a virtual certainty that it would not have gained this amount of hype nor the awards that came with it.
posted by jklaiho at 1:48 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Wingspan has been on my shopping list for a while now, but I'm slow to acquire new games out of a desire to get more play out of the games we have already. I do have experience with contests with nebulously defined categories, though.

There's a stage manager who has run a cheesecake bake-off in NYC and brought the idea with him when he worked at DC's Shakespeare Theatre (I'm guessing a few people here will already know I'm talking about James). There are multiple ribbons, like best savory, best sweet, best traditional, and most original (all pretty obvious), but also the vaguely defined "creamiest" and "cheesiest" as well as an overall vote. When he worked on a show my wife was in, I baked a bunch of tiny cheesecake bites in mini muffin tins and got absolutely no traction in voting. James came over to me later and said "those were really delicious but I think people didn't know what to do with them."

The next year he was back for a different show and we were again invited. Having been disappointed by my vote tallies with tiny-but-delicious cheesecakes, I figured I'd just go for best traditional with a New York style cheesecake executed as well as I could. Weirdly, at least that year this seemed to be an ignored niche. I made a raspberry reduction with Cointreau as an optional topping, but the cheesecake itself was just Cooks Illustrated's recipe, as written. I won a bunch of ribbons, including not just the best traditional I was targeting, but the seemingly contradictory "creamiest" and "cheesiest" (it started to get awkward) and then the overall winner crown by the biggest landslide he'd ever seen.

I guess the real question is whether the awards themselves, or the voting, would be helped or hurt by having categories that were mutually exclusive. Even if the categories are supposed to be mutually exclusive, is it possible (or desirable) to prevent a sweep when voting is first past the post? It's silly to compare a cheesecake to a game, but on the other hand if a single cheesecake can be both cheesiest and creamiest, can a game not be a family game as well as a strategy game? I don't feel like the categories would be improved by trying to limit them that way. I'm also unsure how you solve one sort of voting problem without creating at least one new problem in its place. Maybe more.
posted by fedward at 8:07 AM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

To be sure, I'm not sure BGG has done any meaningful soul searching on any questions relating to how humans exist and act in aggregate.

I think if they actually put some time into thought and research about how to run a good awards competition, looking at the past history and mistakes of other trade organizations, they would come up with something great, or at least reasonable. As it is, they made some off-the-cuff dumb decisions ~15 years ago, and have stuck to them like they were scripture. This is BGG in a nutshell, really...
posted by kaibutsu at 10:19 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

BGG has had since inception. Its categories have always been ridiculous, with some representing enormous swathes of the gaming landscape and others being like, Napoleonic Wars Games.
To be fair, there are a lot of games for the Napoleonic era.
posted by doctornemo at 11:21 AM on May 11, 2020

I've been interested in Wingspan since it came out, partly for my family, and partly for my summer gaming in education class.

The $135 US price tag is an obstacle.
posted by doctornemo at 11:22 AM on May 11, 2020

I think the retail is $60, if that helps. :)
posted by kaibutsu at 1:45 PM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

To be fair, there are a lot of games for the Napoleonic era.

I mean, sort of? And you're joking (I think), but seriously, BGG's taxonomy is awful and they've had no interest in fixing it in basically forever. For example, at the same top level unit of organization ("Category") you have both:

Pike and Shot

Pike and Shot games are wargames set in the XVI (16)th century to XVII (17) / early XVIII (18)th century.

The Pike and Shot era is generally considered to have started in the mid 16th century when mixed formations of musket and pike-armed troops came to dominate the battlefield; it is generally considered to have come to an end with the development and adoption of the socket bayonet around 1690.

And:

Card Game

Card Games often use cards as its sole or central component. There are stand-alone card games, in which all the cards necessary for gameplay are purchased at once. There are also Collectible Card Games (CCGs), where players purchase starter and "booster" packs in an effort to compile a more and more powerful deck of cards to compete with.

There are presently 304 "Pike and Shot" games.

There are presently 28,707 "Card" games.

(If you're wondering, there's ~1,200 "Napoleonic" games)

In the case of the Golden Geek Awards, they try to make this less bad by having a set of voting categories that don't map precisely to their normal shitty taxonomy, but they're very vague with a lot of overlaps. Can a card game also win best abstract game? What is a "thematic" game? Can a "strategy" game also be a "family" game? Etc.
posted by tocts at 2:11 PM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Unbelievable how coveted and expensive this game has become.

I'm kind of boggled by people saying this game isn't innovative? Innovation isn't doing something that's never been done before in a new way to a new audience. It can be more of a pastiche...elements that have never been brought together before quite like so or a small twist on a traditional format or bringing some new people into the old fold. In that sense, there's loads to say here.

Even the silly mechanic of sliding the cubes to the left is novel. Not to mention the eggs. And the birdhouse! What other game has a birdhouse? I friggin' love assembling that thing at the start of the game. And then you get to throw dice through it. Did I mention the dice have worms on them?

Can we just take a minute to appreciate the beauty of the cards? And that egg blue case they come in, where the top serves as the bird selection tray?

Did you notice the bit on the side of the box that suggests how you put it all back in to make everything fit nicely?

But the gameplay! I am actually lost in the birds. Sometimes I get distracted from the mission because I really want that bird in my sanctuary. I don't know, I just like it.

I'm a pretty competitive person and that's saying something when I'm holding the placenames bonus but I really want that silly place-nameless bird and am willing to waste a cube just so I can place it in the forest. And put an egg on it!

I dream about this game. I mean, we're all having strange Covid dreams these games, but this is a delightful piece of outside that becomes a joyful little competition.

My world is this and Cities: Skylines right now. If there's some sort of crossover, I'm done for.
posted by iamkimiam at 3:06 PM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

kaibutsu, I found it for $130 on Amazon. What you found is less than half that - awesome!
posted by doctornemo at 3:57 PM on May 11, 2020

tocts, that's a good point about BGG's ontology. I hadn't really looked into its unevenness.

(Usually I dive in for what I see as subcategories, like Napoleonics (1200 *is* a lot! I think I once owned 1/3rd of those...).
posted by doctornemo at 4:01 PM on May 11, 2020

I found it for $130 on Amazon. What you found is less than half that
Board-game scalpers on Amazon are particularly common & frustrating, that way. I've had no shortage of things listed on wishlists with "$XX is list price, please don't buy this if it's above that" in the comments specifically to avoid this issue.
posted by CrystalDave at 4:36 PM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

(ok, ok, I should be done here, but...) The things that I REALLY wish they had done differently is the 'range' maps for the birds on the lower left hand corner of the cards. I get that it's for differentiating the expansion decks, but having something closer to the actual bird ranges than just 'all of north and south america' on every card would be delightful. I've considered going through the deck and marking all of the California birds so people can tell when they've got something local...
posted by kaibutsu at 5:14 PM on May 11, 2020