October 5: Too Many Eggs?
While strategies in Wingspan can vary vastly from game to game based on which cards you play, the order in which you play them, your bonus cards, and the round-end goals, one commonly discussed approach is to play a lot of birds in your grassland habitat and activate it as much as possible in the final round. If played correctly, this can be even more lucrative than playing a high-value bird in the final round.
Elizabeth and I (Jamey) discussed whether or not this was a problem, and for the most part we decided it wasn’t–as with any strategy, you need to work towards the egg strategy for it to benefit you.
However, we wanted to widen the spectrum of final-round strategies, so Elizabeth designed some birds and goal tiles that direct players towards other options. Some of these options actively discourage players from laying eggs, while others enable players to stock up on cards or food and then convert them to points.
In the game of Wingspan I played on Thursday with the expansion, the impact was so dramatic that the winning player had exactly 1 egg at the end of the game, as did I! I made sure it was a purple egg, though.
October 4: Round-End Abilities
While there are a ton of new abilities on the European birds, we wanted to include one new featured mechanism that spanned across a number of birds. This new mechanism is on 20 bird cards via a teal background.
These round-end abilities trigger at the end of each of the 4 rounds in Wingspan. We’ve included a little round-end reminder tile so it’s clear that these abilities trigger before you do anything else at the end of the round (in player order).
Because these abilities trigger at most 4 times per game, Elizabeth designed them to be very powerful. The earlier you play them, the better, but I’ve found that they’re still quite good even if they only trigger once or twice.