This bird-themed game won a lot of praise and awards a few years back and I’d always been curious about it though I’d stopped playing physical boardgames by then. So when they made this digital version, I thought I’d at least learn the rules and check it out for myself. I’ve read that some players have had synchronizing issues with multiplayer but that doesn’t concern me and I have to say that this is an exceptionally pretty and slick digital conversion.

I’m familiar with so-called engine building games of course and this one is actually simpler than many of the others I’ve played despite its lavish, big box presentation. Each player has their own tableau consisting of three habitats and the objective is to fill it with birds. Each turn you can either play a bird card onto a matching habitat, paying the food and egg costs to do so, or take an action associated with a habitat. In this way, the forest lets you gather food, the grassland lets you lay eggs and wetland lets you draw more cards. When you take such an action, the special powers associated with the birds usually activate which is how you can build interesting combos. After a fixed number of actions, you tally up points to determine the winner. You get points for the birds, eggs, cached food and in order to add a bit more competition, achieving end-of-round goals. This might include things like comparing which player has the most eggs on birds in the forest habitat. I’d consider this to be a fairly short game and so playing this digital version against the AI, it’s even shorter.

Naturally when I first started playing, the AI absolutely thrashed me as I had little idea of the relative value of the different ways of earning points. It’s easy for example to forget about the end-of-round goals which are random each game and to even have a chance at achieving them you need to be planning from the start. But the mechanics are simple enough that I was handily beating the AI very quickly. Like all such games, the key is to get the most out of each action. Wingspan already does this naturally as the action associated with each habitat becomes more powerful the more birds you stuff into it, regardless of the birds’ individual powers. Pack the right birds into that habitat and you can build some cool combos. So in one particularly fortuitous game, I could use the laying eggs action to not only get lots of eggs but also trade them for food and cards at the same time.

The AI here knows the basics and can work towards the end-of-round goals. But it doesn’t recognize synergistic combos and doesn’t even play high-value birds enough so I got bored of it fairly quickly. Even against other people, I’m not sure it’s that interesting as there is almost no interaction between players and the game isn’t that deep. While there is a huge number of bird cards, you’re limited by the cards that you can draw and by the time you’ve built up a decent engine, the game is almost over. You interact with other players only in getting food which is represented as dice from the dice tower and by racing for specific goals. There isn’t any kind of ongoing upkeep cost for the birds so you don’t feel any pressure from building up a large aviary. Finally, I’m no expert as I’ve only played this game so few times but it seems to me that the egg laying action is much more powerful than the two other actions. Not only can you gain more eggs per action which can be traded for other resources as needed, but they also count directly as points at the end of the game.

All in all, this is a very pretty game and there are so many bird cards! As this digital version keeps track of the cards that you’ve seen, I can know how many more there are that I’ve yet to run into. Yet the powers all seem to be variations of the same thing so it’s mostly the names and the art that are new. Mechanically, this game is much simpler than I’d expected and my opinion is that it’s inferior as an engine-building game to other titles that I already own such as Dominions and Race for the Galaxy which are also cheaper, more compact games. I’m a bit sorry to say this but I think this is overrated and it’s the bird-theme and the art which won over so many fans.