If you spent any time within the modern board game world, you have no doubt heard (and played) of the very popular board game, Wingspan.
Wingspan features a simple ruleset that young gamers (my daughter learned how to play this when she was 8 years old) can be competitive at. On the other hand, Wingspan is complex enough for more advanced gamers to have fun playing.
The heart of the game features engine building and resource management — where each bird you invite into your ecosystem provides you extra bonuses if you manage your resources properly enough to use them in your future turns.
As the game name might imply, it features birds. The base set features over hundreds of beautiful hand-drawn birds and excellent components that just makes the game so enjoyable to play. In my opinion, Wingspan is a fine game … with the expansions. A game typically takes my daughter and I just about 30 minutes to play (if you don’t play a lot of board games, you may take longer. My daughter and I both make really quick turns).
There is another bird game that I’d like to highlight. That bird game is called Piepmatz. It is a game about birds fighting over who has reign over the birdfeeder. Smaller birds are pushed away from the bird feeder as larger birds take the top ledge and eats seeds — until another larger bird or the sheer amount of the smaller birds use their numbers to overcome the “top bird”.
As there are many tutorials out there, I am not going to go over how to play — I will tell you why I like it.
It’s small! I can never get enough small footprint games. Games that allow me to easily put into my pocket or backpack and take anywhere is always a big hit. The game itself features just over 100 cards. Because of this, it is also very affordable. At $10, this game can fit within many budgets. Sometimes small games take a long time to play, but this game is quick and typically takes half the time of Wingspan.
There are meaningful decisions. Each turn you have a choice of adding to birds that can take over the top bird for the spot at the bird feeder. If the number on the bird cards below are not greater than the bird on the top, you still get to take a bird from your hand to add to your aviary. When the top bird gets pushed away, it flies to your collection, or aviary — allowing you to score it later.
The artwork is awesome. The hand-drawn birds are very detailed. The artwork is so calming in the midst of chirping birds and birds fighting for dominance. The design and layout of the cards with bird names and their Latin names reminds of Darwin’s work On the Origin of Species. The artwork also reminds me of the book, Beak of the Finch which I read during my first years of post-college working. That book holds very fond memories.
It forces you to do arithmetic. In the days and age of calculators, it’s sometimes faster to do “Windows+R”, type “calc” and do some addition or subtraction than to actually do that work in your head. I feel that many times at work, when I need to add numbers, I use the calculator because of habit.
In Piepmatz, you are constantly doing arithmetic — how much different are the sum of the birds different than the bird on the top? What is the total of eggs do all my birds have? How many more birds of a single type do I have than others? For my grade schooler, this game is a workout — even though the math is simple, it’s like a math drill where you are calculating something every single turn.
I love it because it’s a game that teach.
Ending, if you enjoy board games, even casually, I feel that both bird games belong in your collection. I know that I am comparing apples to oranges here, but I am less likely to recommend Wingspan because in my opinion, it really needs an expansion to be good, and because of that, it’s $60. At $10, Piepmatz is an easy recommend for me — it’s fun, it’s quick, and it’s affordable!
