How Do You Span The Gap? Wingspan vs Wyrmspan

Mechanisms

Both games feature card playing, action selection, tableau building and midround objectives. Where the games differ is that Wingspan has a fixed turn count on each of the four round, starting at eight and decreasing to five by the end of the game, meaning you have to be efficient and build your engine to make the most of your remaining actions. In Wyrmspan, you start each round with six coins, with which you can take actions, but you also may spend as a resource, or, crucially, gain more of. This is a huge swing from Wingspan because you can, theoretically, play an unlimited amount of turns, whilst your opponent plays their standard half dozen. However, some cards have a coin cost in order to play them, so you can have a very impressive turn, but just not as many future turns that round.

Wyrmspan has a few mechanical upgrades from Wingspan too. For a start, you can still gather resources and draw cards, of which there are two different types (more on that later), but the choice of resources you can gather to pay for dragons is up to you. This is a huge step up from the random dice roll that Wingspan provides. The second is the cave cards. These are like the rooms in Caverna, in that you need to build these first before you can place a dragon into them, but most have a “when played” ability that gives you some sort of boon. This could be cards, resources, eggs, whatever, and give you a huge amount of flexibility throughout the game.

Finally, you can run your engine by exploring. This is a whole new mechanism for Wyrmspan, letting you walk through your caves, triggering your dragons and the passive abilities of the “when triggered” dragons and contributing to the feeding of your wyrmlings, who just need some milk. Each time you do this, though, the cost increases, so you have to make sure your action is worth it. There are some additional bonuses you can claim as you explore the caves, including the additional mechanism of the guild track. Every step you take on this track gives you a nice little bonus, but every half circle around the track gives you some significant boons, like end game scoring, extra actions, and even more resources. It’s kinda similar to the two player board of Wingspan Asia, now I think about it.

Final thoughts

Here’s the headline. In my opinion, Wyrmspan is the better game at this point, or at the very least, a more polished game. The changes made to Wyrmspan were exactly what was needed and fixed a great deal of the gripes people have with Wingspan. The huge stack of cards produces enough randomness to need you to control the strategy, and taking out the food dice makes everything a lot smoother. The opportunities for extra bonuses is always exciting because it feels like you have things to strive for and us gamers always like little rewards, little treats as we play. Honestly, my biggest critique of Wyrmspan is the name, but I can understand from a marketing perspective why they called it that, even if it did cause such a fervour with the community.

The fact that you can earn more turns as the game goes on is huge. An issue every engine builder can run into is the inability to run the fully fleshed out engine enough times, and by having more actions, you get the chance to run what you’ve built a lot more frequently.

How about the long term though? Wingspan has been very well supported and it’s been confirmed that there will be at least three more expansions which add in the birds of the remaining continents of South America, Africa and Antarctica. Nothing about Wyrmspan suggests that it will be as well supported, if only because there isn’t as many dragons to draw inspiration from. There could be more guilds and objectives, and a few tweaks as time goes on, but I don’t think Wyrmspan will have as many expansions as Wingspan did. What I am interested in though is what in Wyrmspan may be put into Wingspan. Will the additional action be included as an Antarctic expansion? Honestly, probably not, but I’d like to see it happen.

The final question I think I wanted to answer when I looked at doing this post was “is there space in the collection for both?” To me, the answer is unequivocally “yes,” with a caveat. The two games are different enough that there is a capacity to have both, but if you can only have one, I’d recommend Wyrmspan over Wingspan purely for how the game feels over anything else. I’ve played a lot of Wingspan and I’m always excited when a new expansion with a bunch of new birds comes out because I can just dive deeper into the game. Wyrmspan, though, is newer and shinier, which certainly helps wanting to explore it some more. I think if you’re a newer gamer, Wingspan is an easier place to start, and if you’ve never played either, you can take your pick of the theme. It’s impossible for me to say if starting with Wyrmspan and then playing Wingspan afterwards would sour you to the latter because I’ve done it the other way. I don’t think I’m going to be in a position where I wont get the next bit of the Wingspan line for a very long time but Wyrmspan is probably going to be my go to for a while.