Wingspan Pocket
review by Alapai
Wingspan Pocket is a card game from Stonemaier Games for 1-5 players based on the board game Wingspan also made by Stonemaier Games. In it, you collect a variety of birds and activate their powers in order to try and have the most victory points at the end of the game.
To set up the game, each player is given a Nest card and 6 cards to form their Reserve, 2 of which are turned face up from their food side to their bird side. You also shuffle all of the bird cards together and divide them into 4 decks, each of which gets one bird flipped face up in front of the deck. Each turn, you take a Nest action, then activate all of your bird cards from left to right, then refresh the supply. There are 3 different Nest actions you can take: play a bird, draw 2 cards or lay 3 eggs. To play a bird, you choose a bird in your Reserve, pay its cost by discarding food from your Reserve and eggs from your cards and then place the card into your Flock to the right of your rightmost card. To draw cards, you choose 2 bird cards, 2 food cards or 1 of each and add them to your Reserve. The other Nest action is to lay up to 3 eggs. They each have to go onto a different card that is not at its egg limit. Once you’ve done your Nest action, you activate your bird powers. Starting with the leftmost bird of your Flock and moving right, you can activate any of your bird powers when you are on that card. Once you’ve gone through your Flock, your turn ends. Any missing bird cards get refilled from their respective deck and play continues to the next person. Once somebody gets to 6 birds in their Flock, you trigger the end of the game. Play continues until everyone has taken an equal amount of turns, then you add up points from your bird cards, eggs, tucked cards and for the goals in the game if playing the advanced version.
The obvious comparison to make is to the original Wingspan. In that regard, Wingspan Pocket is a simpler, faster game. The mechanics are similar, but Pocket condenses everything. Instead of a player mat with 3 unique rows and abilities that grow throughout the game, you have one row of cards with the same basic abilities throughout. And while you activate all of your birds every turn in Pocket, which basic ability you pick determines which row of birds you get to activate in the original. The original also plays out over a specific number of turns, where Pocket goes until a player has played enough birds to their Flock. Ultimately, Pocket plays out very similarly to the original in that you are collecting birds, food and eggs and activating your bird powers each turn, but is simpler as there are fewer options throughout. Does Pocket replace Wingspan in a game library? I don’t think so, as it is a lesser overall experience, but I do think that it is great for when you want a Wingspan-like experience with less time than a normal Wingspan game or when you are traveling and want to play a Wingspan-like game on the go.
I enjoy Wingspan Pocket as it has a good amount of strategy with balancing various resources while still having a good amount of luck with every card being unique and randomized into multiple decks of cards each game. It’s a game that’s also simple enough to learn and plays quickly, games take around half an hour, so you can either play multiple rounds in a night or play before, in between, or after longer games during a game night.
While Wingspan Pocket’s box is pretty compact, it also is poorly optimized to hold sleeved cards and I’m going to be sleeving every game I get. Being able to get the game into a compact space is generally pretty easy, as it is mostly just the bird cards and tokens. The reminder cards are the problem as those aren’t Standard American like the bird cards, but Dixit-sized which are larger and fit poorly into most boxes. Fortunately, I found something that was perfect. Gamegenic’s Star Wars Unlimited Twin Sun Soft Crate was a perfect fit, with the bird cards fitting into the card spot and the accessory box being able to fit the egg tokens well. And then the rulebooks (when folded in half) perfectly fit on top of the bird cards and the reminder cards are the size of the box. It’s like the box was made for Wingspan Pocket!
If you are looking for a short, compact card game with a good amount of strategy, Wingspan Pocket is a great, little game!
Wingspan Pocket is available now from our webstore.
