Wyrmspan Review

Specifications

Categories: Hand Management, Engine Builder, Objective Based Scoring, Card Combinations, Variable Points Scoring, Dragons (lots of them)
Number of players: 1-5
Typical game time: 90 mins
Age rating: 14+ 

Wrymspan has been one of the most eagerly awaited games at the beginning of 2024 but following from the huge success that is Wingspan its arrival does not come without a huge amount of opinion and division. Is this something fresh from that fantastic producer Stonemaier Games or did the cute birds just get a makeover? It is fair to say that this is one we have been really excited to open up at Gathering Games and it did not disappoint.

The Big Bird in the Room - Wingspan

Wingspan was released by Stonemaier Games in 2019 and has become a modern day classic of the board game world with its beautiful art and components and bird theme that attracts both regulars and those new to the board gaming world. So when Wyrmspan was announced a few eyebrows were raised from behind their binoculars. 

In Wingspan you play a bird enthusiast/collector attracting birds into one of 3 habitats in order to improve your actions, lay eggs and meet your objectives (the short version). With a huge deck of birds, card combinations, and variable objectives it created an enjoyable and replayable experience. The game also boasts a number of expansions that don't seem to be stopping or losing their popularity. So with that in mind, where does Wyrmspan fit? Is this just a reskin of Wingspan with a fantasy based theme? Is this a game worth buying? These are all the kinds of questions that the board game community was asking as well as producing a huge amount of memes inspired by the new game! Hilariously, Jamie Stegmaier from Stonemaier Games released his top 10 favourite memes on Stonemaier’s YouTube account just recently on the 1st of April.

We will try and answer some of those questions and give you our thoughts on the game in this review! 

What is Wyrmspan?

You are an amateur dracologist in the world of Wyrmspan, a place where dragons of all shapes, sizes, and colors roam the skies. Excavate a hidden labyrinth you recently unearthed on your land and entice these beautiful creatures to roost in the sanctuary of your caves.

During a game of Wyrmspan, you will build a sanctuary for dragons of all shapes and sizes. Your sanctuary begins with 3 excavated spaces—the leftmost space in your Crimson Cavern, your Golden Grotto, and your Amethyst Abyss. Over the course of the game, you will excavate additional spaces in your sanctuary and entice dragons to live there, chaining together powerful abilities and earning the favor of the Dragon Guild. 

-From the Stonemaier website

According to Stonemaier Games, Wyrmspan has been inspired by the mechanics of Wingspan, but with 16+ unique elements this is a standalone game not compatible with Wingspan. 

That would be my first reflection of the game. If you have played Wingspan previously, this will feel very familiar, bringing you a lot of the same mechanics that made that a good game but with tweaks and new ways of playing that change the gameplay and in many ways improve on the original. You can tell they have taken some of the stuff they learnt previously and implemented that in Wyrmspan off the bat. If you liked the first game then, theme aside, you will enjoy the gameplay here. We will come back to this later. 

The theme will divide people because you have a direct comparison. Personally, the fantasy theme appeals more to me, but if you love Wingspan because of the beautiful bird theme, that may be a sticking point. I would definitely urge you not to dismiss the game, though, without trying it. 

Right, enough of the comparisons (until my final thoughts). Let's look at how this game plays.  

Wyrmspan Gameplay 

The core concept of Wyrmspan is in attracting/enticing dragons into your cave system. This brings you victory points, helps to fulfil criteria on objectives, and improves the action efficiency when you explore your caves. Essentially you are creating an engine that improves as you add dragons to the tableau and benefit from their additional abilities. This creates some really interesting choices as you may have a number of reasons to select a dragon. It may have great ability but does not fulfil the criteria you are looking for in an objective, or might come loaded with points but just takes up space in the engine. Wait too long though with so many dragons in the deck (183) and the perfect dragon may never come.

So first things first, in Wyrmspan each player has a player mat in front of them with 3 cave systems shown: The Crimson Cavern, The Golden Grotto, and the Amethyst Abyss. Each cave has enough room for 4 dragons which you always place from left to right. You start the game with only one accessible space in each cave (the far left space) and will have to excavate in order to create space and attract more dragons into each cave (more on this later).

The player mat also gives a great action summary of the 5 available actions to you, which makes it pretty easy to pick up and reminds you what you can do:

• Excavate - For 1 coin initially, this action allows you to place cave cards from your hand onto your player mat increasing the capacity of your caves and often giving you, and maybe others, a bonus. Without excavating further, you are limited to 1 dragon in each cave so this one is pretty key! The deeper into the cave you excavate, the more costly the action with spaces 3 and 4 costing eggs as well. 
• Entice - Again for 1 coin plus the printed cost on the card, you can play a dragon into one of your available cave spaces. Each Dragon is attracted by certain resources, usually gold, crystals, or meat but some could require eggs, additional coins, or even milk (fact). There are 4 sizes of dragon ranging from hatchling to large, each with unique traits, points, cave preferences, and abilities. 

Resources in Wyrmspan can be pretty hard to come by. There is no ‘collect resource’ action and so it’s vital to maximise resource collection either through the abilities of the dragons you place or by exploring your caves. There is nothing worse than having awesome dragons in your hand and no way of playing them. Action efficiency is key in this game, making it a really clever resource management experience.

The other 3 actions are to explore each of your caves. For one coin (the first time for each cave, each round) you can send your explorer into the cave system. At the bottom of each cave space is a bonus which could include collecting resources, moving on the dragon guild (more to follow), drawing new dragons, drawing new cave cards or laying eggs. These actions are vital for your success in the game and it's an action that increases in strength as the game goes on. You can explore the same cave twice in a round if you really needed resources, for example, but the second and third time cost more each time. 

The Cave Conundrum - Under each cave space is a resource, but after the first space, each is preceded by a stop sign. So the first time you explore the cave you have to stop on the first space, gaining just one thing - either a resource, a dragon card, or a cave card. Once you place a new dragon into the next space in the cave the stop sign is covered up, so this time if you explore the cave you gain 2 bonuses and so forth. So the exploration action is pretty weak at the start of the game but gets better the more dragons a cave houses. As well as the cave bonuses some dragons have an ability that is triggered when their cave is explored, so selecting the right kind of dragons will create more powerful exploration actions and potentially strong combinations. I thought this was a really good new mechanic in Wyrmspan and makes a huge difference in gaining new resources. 

The other type of bonus seen in the exploration action is the Dragon Guild. The dragon guild is effectively a rondel mechanic and every time you trigger the guild through a cave exploration or a card ability you move your piece one space along the track. Each space will provide you with a bonus or allow you to add your pieces to the guild tile. This is another way to gain victory points and bonuses, and there are 4 guilds to choose from at the start of the game with different bonuses so each game is unique. 

You continue to take actions one at a time until you have each run out of coins and the round comes to an end. You start the game and each subsequent round with 6 coins although there are some ways to temporarily increase your coins and extend your turns. Some of the more valuable dragons can cost an additional coin though and can represent a difficult choice! 

The game consists of 4 rounds each having a scoring objective, at the start of the game you pick 4 objective tiles at random and place them on the round tracker board from 10 double sided objective tiles. These objectives might give you some idea of how you might want to plan your strategy but be careful not to be swayed too much by these as, like so many good games, there are multiple ways to score points and win the game!  Once everyone has completed their actions, you score those objectives and move on to the next round. This brings another interesting set of choices. At the start of the game you can see each of the 4 objectives and the points available, so as you start to build your caves up and entice dragons you can be thinking not only of the current round objective but what do you need in the 2nd, 3rd or even 4th round! 

Once the 4th round is complete the game ends and you start the scoring process and the player with the most victory points wins. Points can come from the dragons themselves, markers on the dragon guild, end game abilities on certain dragons, eggs, cards that allow you to cache resources or other cards for points, public objectives, and finally excess items and coins.

There are so many ways to score points, and that lies the strength of Wyrmspan. Despite the objectives being public, the strategy to win can vary completely. The variety of objectives, the vast amount of dragon and cave cards, and the different guild options bring such a different experience every time you play that you will need to adapt your strategy each time in order to win. 

Components

Wingspan (sorry I went back there) was well known for its beautiful components, and Wyrmspan has delivered yet again. The player mats and the artwork is beautifully done. I really love the style on the dragon cards. The artist and developers had gone above and beyond in designing 183 different and unique dragons, each with its own name, traits, and abilities. They have even created a guide to the 183 dragons with a small piece about each one. My daughter loved looking through and learning about them. The only strange thing is this wasn't something they did for Wingspan, where there were real birds you could learn about! The eggs are lovely in their design and look great on the board. In fact, the design of all the game pieces and components was well done. You can even replace the standard cardboard tokens with an upgrade kit giving you wooden components and metal coins but there is no real need to do this - it just looks awesome! The only constructive feedback I might give here is that the colours could have been more vibrant, they are lovely but fairly subtle in places. 

Like the original, the quality of the components really adds to the game experience. 

Final thoughts

I am going to do this in two parts: first, what I thought about Wyrmspan, and second, how I compare this to Wingspan. 

Do I Want to Entice Wyrmspan into My Cave? 

It is safe to say that I really enjoyed this game. Its strategy is deep and complex but is not actually that difficult to learn. The rulebook is well written and easy to teach. It goes without saying that having played Wingspan previously was a huge advantage, as you were looking at the differences but were able to gloss over where the mechanics were the same. As I said at the start, this brought a real familiarity with the game from the get go. 

The actions are simple to learn but will leave you scratching your head wondering what the best order is to do things. You will find yourself regretting your life choices as you look at a leftover coin and realise you spent the egg you needed to explore your cave a second time earlier in the round. Well, this was me – I never had enough eggs and looked at the pile on each of my opponents’ boards with envy realising I had not thought it through well enough!

The dragon cards have so many values, meaning that you can play them for different reasons. I fell into the trap of focusing on great end game scoring options but did not do enough to create a good resource/egg generating machine which gave me challenges in the final round when action efficiency is so key. I managed to accrue 5 additional coins but really struggled for eggs! 

The game has huge replayability! No two games are going to be the same and what worked in one will not bring victory in the next. Public objectives will change. The dragon guild will bring different bonuses, and with so many dragon cards you could play a number of games and possibly not see all the cards! 

As a standalone game, Wyrmspan was a really good experience. I enjoyed it and will definitely be adding to my collection. 

If I had any criticism, I wonder how the game time would hold up on 4 or 5 player counts, I think this could have the potential to play much longer especially if people are completely new to the gameplay. 

What if I Own and Love Wingspan? 

Is Wyrmspan a better game than Wingspan’s base game? I would say yes. It does add new mechanics (16+ unique mechanics according to Stonemaier) that are not in the original, which I think adds to the experience. Most notably the cave exploration mechanic. You cannot just add additional dragons to the board but have to complete an action to excavate and can only do this if you have acquired cave cards first. There is now more that needs to be planned through in that sense. 

The dragon guild board adds something new. I don't think everyone will love this element of the game, but it provides other options for gaining resources and scoring points. The different guilds bring more options as well. 

I thought the cave exploration action was well engineered. Again, you could argue that in Wingspan when you completed an action you triggered each card but this just made more sense. The cave itself produces bonuses for getting to each space in the system and as you visit each dragon, there is the potential of triggering an ability. It just felt a bit more like you are doing something to gain the bonus, almost giving something to the dragon first which was nice. I also liked the fact you travelled left to right from the mouth of the cave to the end rather than triggering the cards right to left in Wingspan!   

Interestingly, there are no personal objective cards in Wyrmspan but it felt like there were more opportunities for end game scoring through the dragon cards themselves. In fact, the abilities and triggered effects of the dragon cards just made more sense than those in Wingspan. I felt this had been better developed and designed in Wyrmspan. 

On the whole, the engine felt more important than in Wingspan. It was not so easy to gain resources or lay eggs and you had to really think about combinations. In fact, in Wyrmspan they have removed the dice tower and the selection of 5 random resources available. When you gain resources you can now just choose what you want, which I preferred.  

There is definitely more complexity and depth, providing more of a finished game without any expansions but still giving that familiar strong game play. 

But Should I Upgrade?

I think this is the million dollar question and I am going to give a similar answer to Dune Imperium: Uprising. As I have said, I think Wyrmspan is actually a better game than Wingspan, but if I owned a copy of the original, especially if I also had the expansions that go a long way to improve the original, would I upgrade to Wyrmspan? I am not sure it is a big enough change to warrant picking up Wyrmspan, as an upgrade. If someone asked me which they should buy having not owned either I would definitely recommend Wyrmspan as the stronger game. I will say, obviously, that the theme is completely different and that it will appeal to different audiences and give you a different experience when you play it, soooooooo……  if you love Wingspan but also love dragons you are not going to go wrong buying Wyrmspan too!

Score Rating

8 out of 10

As always, if you're not sure and want to find out more, please do not hesitate to contact us at Gathering Games. For more board game recommendations check out our best board games of 2023 or our list of great games for two players.

Why not check out Wyrmspan and our full collection of board games, including strategy games, family games, children’s games, and party games, at Gathering Games?

Wyrmspan

£44.99 £54.99

Description Welcome to Wyrmspan, a world where majestic dragons soar across the sky in a dazzling array of colours and shapes. You are a novice dracologist who has discovered a hidden labyrinth on your property. Explore the ancient tunnels and… read more

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