Wingspan: Educational Games Critique

Game Metadata

Wingspan is a competitive engine building board game created by designer Elizabeth Hargrave and Stonemaeier games. A digital version of the game is also available on steam.

https://stonemaiergames.com/games/wingspan/

An engine building board game is a game where players acquire and use resources to build an “engine” that will generate more resources or points over time.

You play as a bird enthusiast (Researchers, bird watchers, ornithologists, and collectors) seeking to attract the best birds to your network of resources. The game can be played alone, or with a group of up to five people.

While the creators of Wingspan have not explicitly defined educational goals for the game, the game teaches players about various aspects of ornithology.

Ornithology is the scientific study of birds, including their behavior, physiology, and classification. It is a field that encompasses many different branches of science, including biology, ecology, and zoology.

Educational Goals

The game elements of Wingspan contains a great deal of information about ornithology, teaching players about different species of birds (the original version of the game, which I own, has 170 unique bird cards), their natural habitat, their wingspan, their diets, and reproductive habits, all of which are scientifically accurate.

Example of a wingspan bird card

As someone with minimal interest in ornithology (with the exception of knowing a few popular species and simply enjoying birds as beautiful animals), the game is very accessible for players with little background knowledge. However, I played the game with someone who was an avid bird-watcher, and their enjoyment came from recalling species of birds they already knew, learning about new ones, and simply appreciating the aesthetic beauty of the game art.

With these factors in mind, I believe the main educational goal of Wingspan is simply to get players interested in birds and learn more about them.

More specifically, to be able to recall different bird species and its different properties. Because the game is scientifically accurate, the knowledge gained from the game is immediately transferrable into the real world.

Game Elements

Nouns

• Bird cards with information on different bird species
• Dice and eggs for tracking resources
• Player mats for organizing resources and tracking points
• Various tokens for tracking bonuses and other game effects
• Bonus cards: players start the game with 2 bonus cards that will grant them extra points if they fulfill its conditions.
• Scorecard for keeping score
• Other elements (see picture below)

Game Loops

The rules of wingspan are quite complicated, and it took me and my friend about half an hour to try to understand how to play the game. The descriptions below are an abridged version of the gameplay loops.

The inner loop of Wingspan involves the acquisition and management of resources to attract birds to a player’s network. This involves strategizing to acquire and efficiently use resources, such as dice and eggs, to play bird cards and score points.

A step by step run down of Wingspan’s core gameplay loop

• Wingspan is played over 4 rounds. each round, players take turns until each player has used all of their available action cubes.
• Players start the game with 5 food tokens and 5 bird cards, which they can keep if they discard 1 food token for each bird kept.
• On a player’s turn, they can take 1 of 4 actions. They can play a bird from their hand, gain food and activate forest bird powers, lay eggs and activate grassland bird powers, and draw bird cards and activate wetland bird powers.
• Laying eggs: Every bird card is able to lay different amounts of eggs.
• Get food: Food is gained from a central feed pile.
• Draw a bird card:
• Activating bird powers: Every bird card comes with special abilities that you can activate. (see images)
• Playing a bird: Players pay in food tokens (the amount and type of which is defined on the bird card) to play a bird.
• At the end of each round, players score the end-of-round goals. This is a score sheet containing different combinations of goals that players can try to fulfill at the end of each round. For example, one end-of-round goal could be the total number of birds on a player’s board, or the number of eggs in a grassland habitat. Players that accumulate the most points in the end-of-round goals will gain points that contribute to winning the game.

The outer loop of Wingspan involves the accumulation of points over the course of the game, with players working towards long-term goals, such as attracting birds with certain characteristics or accumulating certain resources. Players can earn points in various ways, such as by playing bird cards, collecting eggs, or fulfilling end-of-round goals. In this way, the outer loop provides a larger context and overarching goal for the inner loop resource management gameplay.

The first time I played Wingspan, I was more focused on understanding the rules of the game rather than positioning my strategy around a longer term goal. More experienced players will have a sense of how they plan on winning in the first 1–2 rounds of the game, while some may split their efforts into multiple win conditions.

Learning Mechanisms

The main learning science principle that Wingspan aims (and can) impact with its content is memory/fluency building. If you are a hobbyist bird watcher, the bulk of your fluency in that domain of knowledge comes down to being able to identify bird species and recall details about their food, habitat, and behavior.

My one criticism of Wingspan (if I were to critique it as an educational game) is that it doesn’t facilitate recall very well, particularly when you are transferring knowledge from the game to real life. I wasn’t able to identify any learning science principles in the memory building category that I felt were being used in Wingspan.

Because Wingspan is a resource management game, I found myself referring to bird cards as I strategized. However, coming out of the game now, and writing this blog post, I think I only recalled 5 out of the 30+ species that were involved in my game. While I enjoyed recalling knowledge in the moment, I had little reason to remember it afterwards. However, this situation would definitely be different if I was a hobbyist bird-watcher or an ornithology student, people who would otherwise have more incentive to recall information they learned from the game.

With that being said, I believe the learning mechanism that applies most closely to Wingspan is Quizzing. Because the game is a strategic resource management game, my strategy is defined by the bird cards I have in my hand. Because of this, I am constantly prompted to recall what is on my bird card in order to execute my strategy properly. For example, if I want to win by having as many eggs on my board as possible, I would have to recall which types of birds on the table are able to lay the most eggs.

Conclusion

Jamey Stegmaier, president of Stonemaier Games, had this to say about Wingspan:

“The key for me wasn’t the birds, but the satisfying feeling of collecting beautiful things,”

I don’t believe that Wingspan was designed with the intention of being an educational game. Elizabeth Hargrave, the creator of Wingspan, said that she wanted to make a game that was tied to a topic she found interesting, but with scientific integrity. At its core, it’s a game about collecting beautiful things and being to appreciate that beauty in the moment, in which case, I think it does very well. The gameplay elements along with its stellar visuals all come together to create a very engaging and aesthetically pleasing game.

The learning experience of the game comes if the player has a genuine interest in learning more about birds outside the game. I could imagine a bird watcher playing this game, drawing an interesting bird card, and deciding to keep the bird at the back of his or her mind for the next bird watching trip (This is just a guess. I don’t know how bird watching works). For someone who is only mildly interesting in birds however, I would probably have to get very deep into the gameplay and its strategy to be able to actively recall any birds outside of the game. However, this is definitely a common outcome if you’re really interested in the game. There is a very active Wingspan subreddit where players share gameplay strategies. Apparently, crows are very overpowered.