In 2019 Wingspan took the world by storm with it’s charming bird artwork and engine building mechanic. The game has sold over 2 million copies world wide at the time of writing this, making it one of the best selling hobby board games out there.

What makes it special? A calming theme about birds, accessible and thematic rules, and satisfying gameplay. On a turn players can play a bird cards from their hand, gather resources needed to play bird cards, lay eggs on their played bird cards, or draw more bird cards to hand. With only 4 options each turn the game is super approachable. Players also compete to achieve round goals and have personal goal cards as well.

All the bird cards are gorgeous and have fun facts about the bird pictured. There are a ton of bird cards in this game, 170 in the base game and over 400 when you throw in expansions to the game.

Finspan takes the idea of Wingspan and replaces the birds with fish. There are some differences to the gameplay but for the most part players have the similar 4 actions: play fish card, gain resources, lay eggs, or get more fish cards. The card art remains beautiful and fun facts can be found on each card.

Where the games differ is Finspan’s unique spatial elements. In Wingspan there were 3 environment types to play your birds into. Finspan has 3 columns to place fish into but separates each of those into 3 depths. This makes sense thematically because you wouldn’t find an angler fish or other abyssal fish in the sunlight zones of the ocean.

The other spatial element Finspan adds is schools of fish. The eggs in Finspan can hatch to create young which you can move around with some of the board actions. When 3 young meet up on a space of your board they become a school which doubles the points they are worth!

We do not have nor have we played Wyrmspan, but it is the dragon variant of this franchise of games. It is often touted as the heavier game of the trilogy as you must excavate the caves for your dragons to inhabit before playing them. DRAGONS!

Not a game we plan to seek out, but definitely one we’d try if given the chance.