10 Board Games in 10 Days - Day 10 - Wingpsan

WINGSPAN

Stonemaier Games - 2019

picture from BoardGameGeek.com

For the past few years I’ve been doing a lot of urban wildlife photography. Most my subjects are pigeons, since there are so many in NYC. As I photographed them I began thinking that they’re a pretty underrated bird. Many people call them “rats of the sky” but I think that’s a little unfair. Yes, they poop on stuff, but humans have done much worse in this city than poop on stuff. I’ve also seen with my own eyes humans pooping on stuff in the city too. I gotta say, seeing something that’s been pooped on by a human is much worse than something that’s been pooped on by a pigeon. Other than pooping on stuff, what’s so bad about pigeons? They are actually secret custodians of the city. I read an article a while back that they use cigarette butts to keep parasites out of their nest. With so many people just throwing butts in the street, it’s nice of these birds to clean it up and put them to use. Also, did you know that pigeons are doves? Everyone loves doves, right? So maybe show the pigeon a little respect from now on, OK? Whew, went on a tangent there but I’m done standing up for pigeons for now. I’ve photographed a lot of common birds in the city and I’ve also photographed some hawks as well. But the pigeons started it all and got me thinking more about birds and reading about their behaviors. Then along came Wingspan.

When I learned about Wingspan I hadn’t bought a new board game in a long time. I had pretty much run out of shelf space and I wasn’t playing the games I owned enough to warrant buying something new. There were plenty of games I wanted, to be sure, but I used substantial self restraint to stop myself from buying them. Just looking at the box art from Wingspan was enough to get me interested. It is absolutely gorgeous box art, arguably the best I’ve seen. Then looking at the components for the game, the beauty continues. There are hundreds of bird cards, all with these amazing watercolor images. The player boards are vibrant with pictographic information. There are dozens of pastel colored little eggs and a bird house dice tower. It was clear they spared no expense on the components. Without knowing anything more about the game I went to buy it. Lo and behold, it wasn’t even out yet. This is the first time I’ve caught a game I was hyped about before it was even released. A few days later, they opened up limited pre-orders and I ordered my copy. Now, I just had to wait.

The day it showed up it was like Christmas. I busted open the box and marveled at the box art even more gorgeous in person. Cracking it open, I was met with the beautiful components. The player boards, when folded, resemble a bird watcher’s field journal. Totally unnecessary detail, it could have just been cardboard and it would have been fine, but that’s what’s great about this game. There is detail all over the place, detail you wouldn’t have expected but they still included. Somehow, this game isn’t $90, I don’t know how they are making money on it. The rule book is a sort of textured almost fabric-like paper. For once I was actually happy to hold a rule book in my hand and read through the whole thing. The rules can be a little confusing for new players, but the rule book is so clean and accurate that it will take only a round or two of playing for it all to click.

The game is all about creating a diverse and thriving bird conservation area. There are 3 habitats for your birds to live in - the forest, the plains, and the water. Each bird card has their preferred habitat listed in the corner along with their preferred food source. Also listed is a nest type, number of eggs their nest can hold, an ability they possess, and an endgame point value. On your turn, you spend an action cube. There are 4 zones on your player board in which you can play your action cube. Along the top, you can place action cube on a space to add a bird to your refuge. This bird must come from your hand of cards and you must spend the required eggs and food to add that bird to the habitat. If you place your action cube in the forest habitat you can select food from the bird feeder to add to your resources. If you place your action cube in the plains habitat you collect some eggs to place in any of your bird’s nests if space is available. Finally, if you place your action cube in the water habitat you can draw new bird cards to your hand. Once you perform the action on which your cube is placed, your cube moves one space to the left in that habitat. If your cube lands on a bird, and that bird has a power with a brown background, you can activate that bird’s power. Some powers allow you to get more food, get more eggs, get more bird cards, or perform predatory actions like hunting for other birds or food. Once that bird performs its action, your cube moves to the left again, activating more birds as it goes until it reaches the end of your board. Then your turn is over and the next player takes their turn placing an action cube and activating powers as it moves to the edge of their board.

This sort of game is often referred to as an “engine building game.” The idea is that your birds can form a sort of synergy between them so when they are activated in succession they empower each other. One bird power might be to lay eggs in another bird’s nest. The next bird in your turn could have the power where if an egg was placed in its nest that turn then maybe you draw another bird card. Some birds have abilities that activate on other people’s turns. I’ve spoken a lot about keeping players focused on the game and paying attention to other people’s turns and these abilities are absolutely crucial to the game. Without them, the game is basically solitaire with friends. There are no actions in the base game which will have direct effect on other player’s boards. You can’t send your birds to attack, you can’t steal eggs, you can’t do much to interact with other players. And yet, this is one game I’ve never really had an issue with people losing focus. Part of it is because the art is just so beautiful people can’t look away. When adding a new bird to a habitat, we also like to read aloud the factoid about the bird on the bottom of each card, which is always an attention grabbing moment.

The European Birds expansion actually addresses a bit of the issues I had with the base game. They added a new abilities which activates at the end of a round if certain criteria are met. There are only 4 rounds in a game, so these abilities are often extremely powerful. They also added some predatory action that can effect other people’s boards. When we first played with these cards some people were upset by the predatory action while others thought it was a great addition. There aren’t many cards that have direct effect on other player’s boards so they’re easy to omit from your own game. I’m on the fence about those cards because while I think it makes for an interesting game it may also take away from the joyfulness of the game. There’s no conflict in the game otherwise. The fact that we’re engaging in wildlife conservation is a joyful experience, sometimes the predatory action can have devastating effects on that joy.

Wingspan is a game that will almost always get played if I bring it to a game night with people who haven’t seen it, and it’s even more likely to be played with those who have already experienced it. Nobody can deny the fascination brought on by the box art. Once I tell them it’s a game about creating a bird refuge, they’re immediately curious enough to play. When I show them the bird house dice tower then it launches in to the must play category. Stonemaier Games absolutely smashed it when it came to designing the look of the game. I can’t think of many other games that generate that kind of appetite to play on look alone. Even people who don’t necessarily like board games want to play this game. My friend Christian doesn’t care at all for board games but she joined us for a round of Wingspan and not only loved it but also won her first game.

For me, playing this game isn’t about employing the best strategy and creating the tightest engine. I just want birds. I select the birds I like most and I try to get them in my refuge. That means getting the pigeon, or rock dove if you want to give them the respect they deserve. The ring billed gull, or seagull as it’s more commonly known. The house sparrow. The Canada goose. All the birds I’ve photographed here in NYC that get no respect from your average passer-by. The rats of the sky. The trash birds. The pests. The birds that will fight you. Those are my birds and they’re always welcome in my refuge.

10 Board Games in 10 Days - Day 9 - Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game

LEGENDARY: A MARVEL DECK BUILDING GAME

Upper Deck Entertainment - 2012

picture from BoardGameGeek.com

One way or another, comic books have always been a part of my life. My brothers both read comic books all the time. All kinds of comics ranging from your standard Marvel and DC comics to weird comics like Sandman and Hellblazer, which weren’t necessarily cool at the time. I also remember thinking Milk & Cheese was awesome cause they’d get drunk and puke on everything. Though, if I’m being honest, comics weren’t really my jam. As a little kid, I often had difficulty figuring out which word bubble I was supposed to read first and would often just end up confused. Instead, I was more in to the trading cards. We had binders full of Marvel trading cards which, just like baseball cards, had bios and powers listed for all the different heroes. This was much easier for me to parse, so I mostly just read those instead. My friends and I would also play a game where we’d draw a random card and we’d run around as that hero. When I learned about Legendary I thought, “I need those cards.”

Legendary is also the type of game that announces its genre right in the title - it’s a deck building game! The deck building mechanic is probably the one that gave me the strongest reaction the first time I saw it. I grew up playing Magic: The Gathering and I often found it cost prohibitive to keep up with other players. A new series comes out with counters for old cards or similar powers with less upkeep and the people with the fatter allowance got those cards first. Or they could just buy the most powerful and rare cards and add them to their deck. As a broke kid, this was often a frustrating hurdle so I eventually stopped playing. With Legendary, all the cards you need to play are in the box. There are expansions, but you don’t need them to keep up with everyone else. There is no everyone else! It’s a cooperative game. You and your friends are the heroes who are defending the city from one of a few villains, which all comes packaged in the box.

Joe Donnelly, of course, was almost always with me when I played, as was my friend Bob Walles, both of whom are avid comic fans. One of the funner aspects of the game, for us, was assembling the cards we were going to play with. At the start of the game, you pull out the cards associated with the heroes you’ll use, the villain groups you’ll combat, and the mastermind behind it all. The villain groups are shuffled and placed to the side, the heroes are shuffled together as well and placed on the opposite side. The mastermind has its own spot where it sits, those cards are also shuffled, and the first card is revealed. You also pick the mastermind’s scheme, which will describes what happens when certain events are triggered, usually by a certain villain making it to a certain spot in the city or when a twist card is drawn.

We’d generally start building the game by selecting a mastermind. Masterminds are some of the best known villains in the Marvel Universe. Red Skull, Loki, and Dr. Doom, for example, are some of the masterminds to choose from. We’d then select their scheme, usually trying to select a scheme the villain my actually attempt in the comics. Then, we’d select the villain groups the mastermind may employ. These groups include Hydra, Enemies of Asgard, Doombot Legion, and a bunch more. Finally, we’d select our group of heroes have arrived to save the day. Captain America is there, Thor, Wolverine, and something like 12 others. Each hero has a selection of cards associated with them, all of which are abilities the heroes will use to defeat the scourge. You are almost ready to play at this point, but now you must assemble the deck you start off with, which consists of a few Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Now that everything is selected and in their places, it’s time to start playing. First, you populate S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ with available hero cards for purchase using recruitment points. Then you draw the top card of the Villain deck and place it in the first rectangle of the city. On your turn, you draw 5 cards from your own personal deck that sits before you. All cards have recruitment points, attack power, or both. You play your hand to either spend recruitment to add one or more of the available hero cards to your own deck, spend attack power to defeat a villain in the city, spend attack power to defeat one of the 5 Mastermind cards, or some combination of those actions. Hero cards generally have additional abilities like allowing you to draw an extra card this turn or recruit a hero card under a specific value for free. This is why it’s crucial to recruit as many hero cards as you can, S.H.I.E.L.D. can’t do this alone. In fact, S.H.I.E.L.D. can’t do this at all. As time goes on you’ll get mad at S.H.I.E.L.D. for getting in the way of more important cards. Some cards have the ability to K.O. cards from your own deck. A K.O. removes a card from your deck and out of play for the rest of the game. This is great for cleaning out your deck from those pesky S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents now that you have Captain America and Wolverine available to mix it up with the baddies. But beware, many villains and masterminds also have the ability to K.O., which could come at an inopportune time and may remove important cards from your deck.

Getting insane combos out of your deck is so satisfying. Having a tough fought battle against a mastermind to just barely eke out a victory will always lead to cheers from the players. While I love Legendary a lot, it’s not without its problems. The main problem is that the base game is missing some key elements. Since my friends and I like putting together scenarios that may play out in the comics, it was pretty annoying to find out that Dr. Doom is in the game but Fantastic Four is not. Not a single member of Fantastic Four are in the base game. Instead, Fantastic Four are available to purchase as an addon. As are more Spider-Man characters, Thanos and Guardians of the Galaxy, and more. I also think it’s necessary to purchase the Dark City addon when you buy the game because it just adds so much to the base game and makes for a richer experience. Overabundance of addons is a problem that plagues the video game world. Companies seemingly withhold content so they can charge extra for DLC later. Sometimes, they’ll even include an NPC in the game on release day which will give you a mission to do something that requires the DLC, just to lure you in to buying it. While I love the presence of addons and it’s exciting to see what designers come up with, I do not want this video game experience of predatory DLC spreading to board games. I do not believe this is what happened with Legendary, however. It was known from the start they’d be adding more content over the years and they’ve added a lot of amazing stuff. I just think they missed the mark a bit with the heroes they packaged in the base game.

Another issue I had with the game is the K.O. system. Obviously, you want to be able to clean out your deck once you get a lot of heroes in there, but if you don’t select any cards for the game that have the ability to K.O. you’re just stuck with these useless S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents taking up space. This made it so we’d almost always have Sentinels in our game as one of the villain groups because once you defeat a Sentinel you can K.O. a card from your hand. Since we almost always wanted to have an in-game story that might play out in the comics, sometimes the Sentinels felt very out of place, but they were often necessary. It’s possible we missed something in the rule book that you can choose to K.O. a card of your choice whenever you want, but I doubt that very much. Making sure we had the ability to K.O. became a burden.

Then, once you’re finished with the game, the clean up time is an absolute slog. All the cards need to be separated and organized after each game. It takes forever and if you lost it’s a real punishment. If you won, it actually gives you some times to go through the cards that were played and recall the epic moments. There are a ton of epic moments in the game, especially if someone can chain together abilities to run through their entire deck in a single turn. Or clean out all the villains in the city and still hit the mastermind. Or recruit every hero card in HQ and then some. Between me, Bob, and Joe, we’ve each done all of these numerous times.

Despite all of this, Legendary is one of my favorite games of all time. And yeah, I complained about the number of addons and I how I feel some are necessary purchases, but I still bought them all. With the amount of time we were putting in to the game, getting the addons was a no brainer. I wouldn’t recommend getting all the addons right away (except for Dark City, get at least that one with the base game), but there’s no denying the add a ton of replay value to the game. Legendary already has a ton of replay value in the base game alone. I lost track of how many times Joe and I played just the two of us, let alone the amount of times we played with other people. I have a few games I’ve played only 2 or 3 times, so even though I haven’t played Legendary in a long time, it still tops the list as my most played in my collection.