Dragons and eggs

With all the “Span”-talk around here lately I think it is high time to write about 🐉Wyrmspan, the dragon-themed version of Wingspan. We might not be the biggest Wingspan fans - birds are cool I guess, but I am not particularly excited about them. Dragons, on the other hand, are cool 😁, so we had to try this new version.

As the naming convention suggests, the two games are quite similar. 👉During the game you draw dragon cards with different abilities, and gather resources to be able to play them. You build your tableau over 4 rounds, scoring different goals after each one, becoming more and more powerful as you get more cards in play. There are some differences however. 🧐

💿 First off, Coins! In Wingspan you had a fix number of action cubes that determined how many actions you can do in a round. In Wyrmspan you get 6 coins every round to pay for actions, but these are sometimes also required to pay for effects or cards. You can also get coins through other things so the amount of actions you can do will fluctuate. It doesn’t seem big, but it is impactful!

⛏️ Second, the Caverns. In Wingspan you could just play birds as you wanted to, but in Wyrmspan you need to excavate caves for dragons to live in, so caverns become another card type you need to collect. They give useful bonuses upon placement. 

This is a welcome new mechanic, especially as it removes the “Lay Eggs” row from the tableau that can feel so dull in Wingspan. 👍 Now you have a row for resources, one for dragon cards, and one for cavern cards. Similar to Wingspan, the more cards you have out, the better the actions of your tableau’s rows become, though it works a bit differently. 

🛡️ Finally, each game has a Guild that is a little rondel you can sometimes move forward on, getting bonuses or claiming important limited spots. There are multiple Guilds to choose from each game.

💬 I’d say Wyrmspan is definitely an improved version of Wingspan, but it doesn’t completely reinvent the game. If you don’t like Wingspan, this will still feel quite familiar, though the little added complexity does a great job to make things more interesting.