Tag Archives: Wingspan: Swift-Start Promo Pack

18th Movember 2021

The evening began with news—the landlord of our beloved Horse and Jockey , Charles, and his wife Anna, who have been trying to retire for years, are finally succeeding. This time next month, the pub will be under new management. In due course, we will find out what this means for our little group, but in the meantime, we Keep Calm and Carry On Gaming. And Blue and Pink, who were first to arrive started off with a quick game of NMBR 9, with Pink aiming to get his revenge for last time (before the Quiz).

– Image by boardGOATS

NMBR 9 is a very simple tile laying game, but the pieces cleverly fit together, except when they don’t. The idea is that tiles must be placed in layers with pieces placed on higher levels worth more. Each tile is a stylised number and the number multiplied by the “storey” is its score. Each numeral, zero to nine appears twice in the deck of cards, so players can place each twice during the game, with the order dictated by the order the cards are drawn. This time, Pink scored more than last time and Blue scored less, but sadly for Pink, even with Burgundy’s assistance, he was unable to beat Blue’s score of eighty-eight.

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue, Pink and Burgundy were joined by Pine who’d had a particularly tiring week, and was therefore delighted to be able to avoid cooking. As they finished, Green popped up and started setting up Praga Caput Regni. In this game, players take the role of wealthy citizens who are organizing various building projects in medieval Prague. By expanding their wealth and joining in the construction, they gain favour with the king. Players choose from six actions on the game board, the “action crane”. The actions are always available, but are weighted with a constantly shifting array of costs and benefits. By using these actions, players can increase their resources, improve the strength of chosen actions, build “New Prague City”, the Charles Bridge, the city walls, or participate in the construction of St. Vitus Cathedral.

– Image by BGG contributor PZS69

Praga is one of those games with lots of pieces and takes a little while to set up. Green had agreed to play it with Ivory and Lilac in advance, but were one person down and there was less enthusiasm to play it from the others, so in the end there were just three with Black joining in. There was quite a lot to explain: Green had played a few times and Ivory had watched a video, but Black came into it completely cold. When the game finally started, random selection gave the first turn to the least experienced player, Black. Although there a lot of things that can be done in this game, each turn usually only provides a small choice (unless you want to pay for the chance to do something specific that isn’t available for free). With a little advice Black was able to make his choice reasonably quickly and the game was underway.

– Image by BGG contributor PZS69

Black’s game was a tactical one, trying to do the best that he could each turn rather than following a recognised strategy. With only one upgrade to his actions tile (building The Kings Road), he ended up with four wall tiles and made it to the top step of the City Walls. Although he had upgraded his Kings Road tile it was late in the game and he only managed the third step along the road, not quite reaching the Charles Bridge. He did not try for the education tracks, but his mines progressed reasonably well. Green tried to go for a City Walls/Cathedral strategy, but didn’t manage it very well, reaching only the second tier of the Cathedral and only one step on the City Walls.

– Image by BGG contributor PZS69

As that strategy just wasn’t working Green switched to completing the King’s Road and managed to get his piece onto the final step of the Bridge. He upgraded a couple of actions, stone mine and (much later) Town tile actions, but could only manage two walls (rather surprising considering he built his first wall early on). Green did manage to reach the top of the University track and half way up the Knowledge path though. In contrast, Ivory went very quickly for the Kings Road strategy, which he completed as well. Like Black he ignored the Learning tracks, but did manage to get his Gold mine to the top, although (strangely) never managed to unlock his six gold bonus cube. He also only did one Upgrade (the Gold mine action), but completed three walls.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ivory also concentrated on the City Walls and manage to climb to the top tier, but completely ignored the St. Vitus Cathedral. Within the Town, Green placed most tiles, but only two plaza’s were ever completed, and no one built on the Old Town section North of the Road. Ivory won the game, with Green a second on a tiebreaker. Everyone kept forgetting the extra point bonuses from the Upgrades and Books, but it was clear that Ivory was the victor.

– Image by BGG contributor PZS69

Everyone enjoyed the game, Black in particular liked it much more than he thought he would. Ivory also liked it as did Green though the fact that players seem unable to do very much through the game frustrates him. Overall it appealed to the group’s idea of strategy planning. Although it seems complex with lots that can be done, it is actually relatively straight-forward to play, with the complexity coming from working out what they want to do and which route will provide the best outcomes later in the game. It is possible that the key is getting the Golden Arches and therefore extra free actions, but they seemed very lacking this time.

– Image by boardGOATS

The prior arrangement to play Praga meant there weren’t enough people to play the “Feature Game” (Nusfjord), particularly as neither Pine nor Purple fancied it. Unfortunately, there was no alternative mid-weight game that everyone felt up to playing, so, after half an hour of debate, Pine insisted on sitting out leaving the rest to play what is now a bit of an old favourite, Wingspan. We’ve played this a lot as a group since it was released two years ago, but Pink and Blue had not yet had the opportunity to play the newest, colourful birds expansion, Oceania.

– Image by boardGOATS

Wingspan is a fairly straight forward, card driven engine-builder with players collecting bird cards and playing them into their reserve. To play bird cards in their reserve, players need to encourage them to stay by providing the right food as payment. Thus there are four actions that players can take on their turn: Play a card; Collect food, Lay eggs and Pick up cards. The last three of these are associated with habitats. Each card has a special power, some come into force when they are first played, some when the habitat is activated, and others when another player carries out an action.

– Image by boardGOATS

In addition to special powers, each bird card also gives points and holds eggs. At the end of the game players receive a smorgasbord of points for each bird, for “tucked cards” (those placed under their bird cards as part of an action), for food stored by birds on cards (also as part of an action), for eggs laid on cards, all added to any end of round bonuses achieved and any bonus points from character cards. The first expansion, with European birds, additionally adds cards which take effect at the end of each round, some of which are very powerful, and the new Oceania Expansion adds a new food type—Nectar.

– Image by boardGOATS

Nectar can be used as a substitute of any other food type, but it is used in a different way and cannot be carried over from one round to the next. There was no need to go through all the rules because everyone was familiar with the game, it just needed a summary of how Nectar worked and how the game changed, including the scoring with players who use it the most picking up bonus points at the end. The expansions mostly add more cards, and although these change the flavour of the game they don’t significantly add to the complexity, so both expansions were included this time along with the cards from the Swift-Start Promo Pack.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, there were almost no birds of prey cards in the game, which was unfortunate for Pink because his Black-Billed Magpie went hungry. He had the help of Pine, however, who stayed long enough to see his favourite bird, the Black Woodpecker put in an appearance, landing in Blue’s reserve. Pink went on to concentrate on using Nectar and Character cards, the Omnivore Expert and Fishery Manager, both of which give points for the type of food birds eat. Burgundy also focused strongly on his bonuses from Character cards (Citizen Scientist and Bird Counter) and both he and Pink scored more than twice Purple’s and Blue’s bonuses.

– Image by boardGOATS

This is a relatively small part of the scoring, however. Purple concentrated on making sure she had plenty of eggs at the end of the game and the purpleness of her reserve with all it’s purple eggs was a sight to behold. Everyone made good use of Nectar, but Pink cleaned up winning two of the three categories and coming second in the third. Burgundy took a lot of points for his tucked cards and had lots of his scoring birds in his reserve. Blue had more birds and more valuable ones too, nearly filling her reserve. The question was whether her huge pile of eggs was enough to offset the points others had taken elsewhere. In the event it was, and she finished with just enough to knock Burgundy into second place, slightly ahead of Pink. And with that, it was home time.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Don’t put all your eggs in one nest.

4th February 2020

Blue and Pink were first to arrive and, while they waited for others and their pizzas to arrive, they tried to squeeze in a quick game of Ganz Schön Clever (a.k.a. That’s Pretty Clever). This is a “Roll and Write” game, that is to say, players roll dice and use the values they roll to fill in spaces on their score sheet. So, it is an abstract game where the active player, rolls all six coloured dice and chooses one to keep and use, discarding all dice with lower pip values. They then roll any remaining dice, again keeping and using one and discarding the rest before rolling the rest one last time keeping and using one final die. The other players can then use one of the discards, before play passes to the left.

– Image by boardGOATS

Filling in some of the boxes gives a bonus action, enabling players to fill in other boxes or gain the opportunity to re-roll their dice or even use an extra die. The player who wins is therefore the player who makes the best use of the dice they roll and usually, the player who manages to build the most combinations to take advantage of the bonuses available. This time both Blue and Pink started off slowly, but as they were coming to the last couple of rounds, both food and people arrived and their focus drifted a bit. Pink managed to keep it together better though and as a result finished with a nice round hundred and fifty, some twenty more than Blue.

– Image by boardGOATS

As they finished eating, Green, tried to organise players in an effort get a group together to play Terraforming Mars. It was quickly clear that it was not going to happen, as Burgundy, Black, Pink, Pine and Mulberry expressed an interest in playing the “Feature Game”, Fast Sloths. This is a race game where players are sloths travelling around a holiday resort on the backs of other animals. The rules are quite straight forward: on their turn the active player takes cards from the face up piles that make the market; optionally play cards, and then discard down to conform to the hand-limit (which varies depending on how players are progressing). When taking cards, they must all be different animals, and the number they can take depends on their position in the race.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is a pick-up-and-deliver type of game, but unusually the sloths are the cargo being delivered. Movement on the central board is the heart of the game and each player must try to optimize their movement to win. When playing cards, they must all be of the same animal – the player then moves the animal corresponding to the cards played towards their sloth, so they can pick it up and drop it somewhere else on the map. Each animal has their own characteristics, the type of terrain they can cross and how they move etc.. The aim of the game is to collect leaves and the first sloth that can gather eight leaves wins.

– Image by boardGOATS

Burgundy got off to a flying start – by both playing first and (even though he was last to pick) securing a good corner tree as his starting location, with a ready-made parade of ants he could bounce over on his way to the next tree. It was a very tight game, which, after the first few turns while people built up their hand of cards, progressed rapidly with players aiming for a new leaf every turn, or at worst every two turns.

– Image by boardGOATS

There was much discussion about the accuracy of the terrains allocated to each transport animal. Donkeys, for example – in Fast Sloths they can’t travel in the mountains or through water, but surely the reasons why donkeys make such good pack animals is that they are great at climbing mountains and wading rivers? Pink suggested that as this was a “game” perhaps such comparisons weren’t relevant? However, this suggestion was not received well and went down like a donkey in a river… Attention then turned to “how true to life” was the representation of unicorn transport.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game carried on, with only an occasional call of “Summon the Eagles!” from Mulberry (just imagine Brian Blessed in the film Flash Gordon). Despite being the first time most people had played the game, all players had clearly got to grips with the mechanism and made speedy progress through the forest – a compliment to the designer it was felt. In the end, with everyone so closely matched, it came down to marginal differences and Burgundy, after his initial flying start, stayed out in front to win after collecting eight leaves. Hot on his heals were Mulberry, Black and Pine with seven.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, on the next table, Green and Ivory had settled on Wingspan, and were eventually joined by Purple and Blue. Since it won the Kennerspiel des Jahres award last year, this has proved a very popular game within the group. The copy belonged to Burgundy, and he had integrated the European Expansion and Swift-Start Cards, as well as “pimped his bits”; the artwork on the cards is beautiful and the additional pieces just add to the aesthetics. The game is functionally very simple, though playing well requires planning and just a little bit of luck.

– Image by boardGOATS

On their turn, the active player can place an action cube to do one of two things: pay food to play a bird card from their hand, or activate one of their three habitats and all the birds in it. The three habitats, allow players to collect food, lay eggs or add more bird cards to their hand. At the end of each round there are bonus points available for players who are most successful with the targets set out; at the end of the game players score points for each bird card they’ve played (value dependent on the bird), food and eggs on their cards, and flocking birds. The difficult part is to efficiently build combinations of birds with synergistic special powers that will ultimately yield the best score.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, Blue started by playing a White Wagtail in her Wetland, which gave the opportunity to place a bird card at the end of the round so long as she had activated all three habitats and placed a card during the round. She still had to pay the food needed, so she concentrated on making sure she had all the bits required to make it work for her every round. Ivory focused on first playing his Savi’s Warbler and then using it to acquire a lot of cards, many from the face-down draw pile, hoping to draw something good. Green struggled a bit from the start, partly because he was arguably the player with the least experience, but the fact he was distracted by a bird of a different sort tweeting by phone certainly didn’t help. Purple on the other hand, quietly concentrated solely on her game, and made excellent use of her Double-Crested Cormorant which allowed her to tuck two cards in exchange for one fish.

– Image by boardGOATS

As the game progressed, Green increasingly needed prompting to take his turn, and explained that he was getting side-tracked because Blue, playing immediately before him, was taking so long on her turn. While it was true that Blue’s turns were getting longer, this was almost entirely because the number of birds in her reserve was increasing faster than anyone else’s, largely thanks to her White Wagtail which she was busy putting to good use. The contrast was quite stark Green’s rather meager reserve and Blue’s, although by this time, both Ivory and Purple, also had a good sized reserves. As the game entered the final round, Fast Sloths was coming to an end and those players wondered over, so the last few turns were played with an audience.

– Image by boardGOATS

At this point, the Wingspan players were putting the finishing touches to reserves. Green kept commenting how he knew he was coming last and it was clear who had won, but Ivory was not so sure. In the final accounting every bird in Purple’s reserve had a good point value adding to her points from the tucked birds and Ivory did best in the end of round goals. Blue had the most birds giving her the same amount of points as Purple (though the individual cards were not as good) and she scored slightly fewer points that Ivory in the end of round goals. In every other area, however, Blue led the pack giving her the lead overall with ninety-eight points. Ivory was twenty points behind, and just pipped to second place by Purple.

– Image by boardGOATS

Mulberry, Pine and Ivory Ieft to get an early night, leaving everyone else to play something short; the game that fitted the bill and was on the top of the pile was For Sale. This is a very clever property auction game that we played for the first time in years at New Year. The game comes in two parts: buying properties and then selling them. So, each player starts the game with $14,000 to spend on property cards. There are thirty properties, numbered to reflect their relative value and these are auctioned in groups equal in size to the number of players. The clever part of the auction is that when a player passes and withdraws, they pay half the value of their final bid and take the property with the lowest value; the winner takes the most valuable property, but pays their final bid in full.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the second part of the game, cheque cards equal in number to the number of players are laid out, with values from zero to $15,000. Each player then chooses one property card from their supply and everyone reveals them simultaneously: the highest value property earns the highest value cheque with the second most valuable property earning its owner the second largest cheque and so on. The winner is the player with the highest total from the sum of their cheques and any left-over cash. This time, Black took the most valuable property, the space station and with it, on of the $15,000 cheques while Burgundy took the other.

– Image by boardGOATS

At the other end of the scale, Pink took both the void cheques, but despite this still managed $33,000 for the rest of his properties. This was nothing compared to the winner, Green, who finished with $53,000, $2,000 more than Burgundy in second. The night was still young, however, and there was still time for one of our favourite games, 6 Nimmt!. Although this is often derided as a game of chance, it is clear that it is not pure luck. The idea is that everyone has a hand of cards from a deck numbered one to a hundred and four. Simultaneously, everyone chooses a card from their hand, and, starting with the lowest value card, these are then added to one of the four rows of cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

Each card is added to the row with the highest end card that is lower than the card they have played. If the card is the sixth card, they take the five cards in the row and their card becomes the first card in the new row. Each card has a number of bull’s heads on it—this is the number of points they score. The player with the fewest points at the end of the game wins. We play with a variant that half the cards are dealt out for the first hand and the rest for the second, which gives us a score at half-time.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time Burgundy and Black were in the lead at the half-time with a single nimmt, with Blue a couple of points behind. Pink set the competitive high score of thirty-one. Black picked up a handful of cards in the second half, indeed, only Purple, Blue and Burgundy managed to keep their second half scores to single figures. In the end, it was Blue who just had the edge, beating Burgundy by three nimmts. At the other end, however, Pink had no competition finishing with a very respectable high score of forty-five, not a record, but a substantial total nonetheless, and a good end to a fun evening.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Donkeys are not as versatile as you might think.