Wingspan: Americas
- Board's Eye View
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
Americas is the fourth expansion for Elizabeth Hargrave's Wingspan (Stonemaier Games), following on from the Europe, Oceania and Asia expansions. The focus this time around is the birds from Central and South America. As you would expect, there are more standard bird cards to add to your growing ornithological deck (another 111 standard bird cards) but the USP for this expansion is the addition of hummingbirds as a distinct subset.
Appropriately for such tiny birds, the hummingbirds come in a deck of smaller cards than the birds in the standard deck. The Americas expansion is designed to be played with the core game and any combination of other expansions. An overlay to the standard board gives players three spots where they can place out hummingbirds, and they have a small asymmetric board that tracks the five different groups or genus of hummingbird.
Gameplay dovetails with those of the standard game in that you'll be drafting standard bird cards and placing them out in the three rows on your board to activate that row. When you activate a row on your board that has no hummingbird on it, you take a hummingbird card from the display and place it in that row where it will give you the benefit shown on its card (for example, an egg, a card draw or a nectar token that can be used as a wild food). If you activate a row that has a hummingbird card on it, that hummingbird will fly back to the display board. When this happens you get to move up the track corresponding either to the hummingbird that has flitted off or the hummingbird which you placed it on top of. When a marker on your tracker lands on a space with a hummingbird icon, you can take an additional hummingbird action (ie: place out or remove a hummingbird from one of your rows). Finally, the expansion adds some hummingbird goal tiles, bonus cards and a batch of green eggs. Maybe the latter presages an upcoming Dr Seuss ham expansion :-)
The hummingbirds certainly change up the game because you're constantly getting extra actions and benefits because you're either adding or removing a hummingbird every turn, and when you advance up the hummingbird tracks you can effectively trigger a cascade of hummingbird actions. It's further enlivened our plays of Wingspan tho' it's also had the effect of adding to the game's playing time, to the extent that the game is definitely at its best with three players; with four or five players you could find an overlong wait between your turns, tho' that's ameliorated to some extent by the various standard birds in this edition that are activated by actions taken on other players' turns. The rules suggest the option of playing with one less action per turn to shorten the game, but with four or five players we'd recommend abandoning birds altogether in favour of the less attractive but more pacy fish (Finspan) or dragon themed (Wyrmspan) games.
If you're one of the legion of Wingspan completionists you'll of course want to add all the beautiful bird cards to your growing collection but it's the new hummingbird mechanic that makes Americas a must-have addition to the range, to the extent that we can't now imagine playing Wingspan or any of its other expansions without adding in the hummingbirds. Our one gripe is that Stonemaier Games have given us a Wingspan expansion in yet another mismatching box: another reason to invest in the Stonemaier's Wingspan Big Box storage solution.
