Wingspan is a game that I want to like more than I actually do like it. It's incredibly charming–the art of the birds, all the little sounds, the way the menus move, the factoids about birds you can read, all the aesthetic choices in the UI are all wonderful. But actually playing it feels a little... dull? Not exactly dull but it's a little un-engaging? While the gameplay is satisfying on its own, the biggest problem I have is that you have almost no interaction with the other players. Which, for a board game, I think is a pretty big negative! There's very few card effects that let you interact with the other players and even the ones there are are relatively minimal (and most of them are pretty simple things like "if a player does X then you gain Y"). The deck of card and the dice are shared and so you could potentially maybe strategically take things to try and deny them from other players but that is either not a great strategy or a strategy that goes way over my head because I couldn't really see a way to make it work.

To me, board games are largely about the ways in which the game makes you interact with the people you play with. Maybe you broker alliances or make deals with people or choose to backstab them. But there isn't really any of that to be done here. So it's a little disappointing to go into a board game and then not get the thing I expect out of them. But, hey, at least there's cute birds.

There is one interesting mode, though, where you play against a single AI opponent with a set RNG seed and compete against other players to see who can use the identical setup to score the most possible points. It let's you play the game (fun) and optimize strategy (also fun) so it seems like it's kind of the best way to play.

Did I mention the birds are cute? Because the birds are cute.