I was very fortunate recently to have a conversation with Elizabeth Hargrave, probably best known as the designer of multi-award winning Wingspan, with a brand new expansion, Wingspan Americas, coming soon. Elizabeth isn’t just ‘the Wingspan person,’ but has designed a plethora of great games, ranging from the lightweight Tussie Mussie to heavier and lovingly detailed Undergrove, not to mention about to be released Sanibel. As well as all this, she’s a nature enthusiast and a strong diversity advocate within gaming and elsewhere.
Welcome, Elizabeth, and thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
Thanks for having me!
Wingspan has been a phenomenal success, but I gather it started life in a somewhat different form in 2013 (as Bring the Birds), first being shown in public in 2014, with a 2016 breakthrough when Jamey Stegmaier snapped it up. You’ve said its origin was a desire to have a game that matched your interests (not all spaceships and history like most games at the time, which I confess about half of mine are), and I’m interested in how you got from those initial thoughts to the first prototype, and then how it evolved up until it reached Stonemaier Games. It was clear it was going to be a game built around birds, but could it have been something other than an economics game (I know the engine came later)? Was it a clear path, or were there many potential forks along the way?
Ha, you’ve done your research! It was always about resource management. Which, by the way, has always amused me as a term that is used in both games and parks. In those first few years there were starts and stops but not too many dead-ends. I’d say we went down a lot more wild side quests after it was signed.
(For readers interested in finding out more, Elizabeth’s 2020 NYU Game Centre lecture contains lots more detail about Wingspan’s origin and evolution.)
The game spent another 3-ish years within Stonemaier Games before release, though a year of that was manufacturing and logistics, I gather; what can you tell us about how it evolved to become the Wingspan we all know today? I can’t imagine it was full-time grind, and there must’ve been enforced downtime (e.g., waiting for other people to complete something)—were there ever times you felt things were going too slowly (or even too quickly)? What were some of the side quests?
Well, I signed it at the end of 2016, so really just 2 years. 2017 was a year of full-on development, and then in 2018 the artists still needed a few more months to finish the art, and then the manufacturing and logistics for it to come out at the beginning of 2019. I still had a day job so it was far from a full-time grind. But I was playtesting at least weekly and iterating quite a bit in between. I remember at Unpub that year I had probably the version that was the furthest point from the final design. It involved driving your park pickup truck around a rondel and taking actions in different parts of a park. A lot of the things we were trying were related either to engine building where you were much more explicitly building up the park that’s attracting the birds, and/or trying to create points of interaction with other players. But ultimately it was clear people enjoyed the game more and more the more that it went back to just being focused on your personal tableau of birds. In that sense the final result is probably much closer to my initial design than a lot of the forks along the way. Getting the birds to do the engine building was the key.
I love how the card abilities relate to characteristics of the birds—that must have taken a lot of time to get right, but what were the trickiest aspects of the design? Was it really ‘all’ spreadsheets and complicated formulae?!
The spreadsheets would be meaningless without a lot of playtesting. The formulas are what they are because we’d play and people would say, “it feels like this level of effort should pay off more, or less,” and I’d tweak things until they seemed right. If I had to hand-assign point values to 180 cards without a formula... there’s just no way. But yeah, the card abilities are probably the hardest part. It’s gotten even harder in the expansions as I’m trying not to repeat myself. In the expansions, picking the birds is also really, really hard. Like, half the work. I don’t remember that being as hard for the base game, because the deck grew over time. And it just was what it was. Now with all the expansions I’m trying not to break the bonus cards so I have way too many parameters I’m trying to hit at once.
I think my favourite expansion is Oceania, with the addition of nectar making the first few rounds a lot quicker (that’s my impatience talking, sorry), though I’ve yet to experience Americas. Can you say something about how you settled on expansion designs?
Thanks, yeah. The nectar came from reading a book called Where Song Began, which talked about the importance of nectar and other sugary bird foods in Australia contributing to the evolution of songbirds, who seem to have started there and spread worldwide. It seemed like it would be fun to work out a way to include it. The player mats probably also contribute to your sense that things move more quickly, because you can get food and cards a little faster with those mats. That and the nectar were both sort of love-it-or-hate-it changes. Some people didn’t want it to be any easier or faster!
On Americas, the thing that will feel really new is the hummingbirds, which have their own deck and an entirely new way of interacting with them. There are over 300 species of hummingbirds in the Americas—I think it’s about 10% of the total bird species. So I wanted to include a lot of them, but they’re too similar to each other in terms of a lot of the things I look at when I’m picking the birds for a Wingspan deck. And if there’s one thing I associate with hummingbirds, it’s that they’re hardly ever stationary. So I set out to try to come up with a hummingbird mechanism that would make them feel like they’re zipping around. Over the course of the game you’ll likely have quite a few different hummingbirds on your player mat, which I really love. They’re so beautiful.
Wingspan has really caught people’s imagination, bringing ‘non-gamers’ into boardgaming and converting some gamers into ornithologists. Not many games have as much impact, so what do you think it is about Wingspan that engaged people so deeply? (And can we put it in a bottle to sprinkle over other games?)
Oh yeah, I definitely wish I knew the secret sauce! But it does make me wonder what other boardgames might be unintentionally teaching us. What if it’s not just Wingspan, what if it’s just that becoming a birder is a very noticeable change in behaviour? Like, I would love to see someone test whether repeated exposure to Catan shifts your beliefs about the availability of natural resources or something.
Riffing off that, I think a good measure of a game’s popularity is the amount of fan-generated content, and there’re tons of stuff on BoardGameGeek and elsewhere, perhaps culminating in the recent Fan Designed Packs. Apart from during the fan pack design, do you pay much attention to what people are doing? Are there any bird cards or other ideas you especially like—even some you wish you’d thought of yourself? Were there any arguments—er, intense discussions—about which birds to include/exclude in the fan packs?
I actually didn’t participate much in the fan packs. In addition to seeing all the amazing creativity and inspiration that people are putting out into the world, one of the absolute joys of this fandom is that there are several people out there who actually know the whole body of Wingspan cards better than I do. Like, people come up to me all the time and ask me about a bird card by name, and I will have no idea what its power is. I just can’t hold them all in my head, maybe also because I’ve always got my head in the next expansion. We had already roped in Travis Willse to edit my expansions—because he is one of those people who does seem to have all the cards in his head. He’ll catch inconsistencies or the potential for weird interactions all the time. So I was very happy to let him take on the fan packs.
What advice would you give to fans who want to get started on designing their own cards or other add-ons?
Just do it. There’s no magic to it, really. You have to play with them enough that you get a sense of what’s working and what’s not, and then change them until they work. And you can’t start on that without just making something as a starting point.
Monster Couch has made an excellent digital adaptation of the game. I know you’ve made use of digital prototypes in game design, but how do you feel about playing physical vs digital boardgames?
I have no problem with digital boardgames. I mean, I wouldn’t want them to replace playing with people in real life—I think we need that more and more. But there are lots of times that we can’t do that. I’ve heard from so many people about how they’ve used the digital game to spend time with friends or family who they can’t be with in person. It’s really lovely.
For playtesting I actually do have more of a problem with digital. One thing I learned during the shutdown in 2020 was that I really, really rely on seeing people physically play the game. I want to see their facial expressions and their body language, or when something is physically fiddly. I know some designers find it really useful. I’ve used digital playtesting when I have to because I’m co-designing with someone in a different location, but to me it feels like playing a game blindfolded.
Another game I like is Terraforming Mars, and find it interesting that the original game spawned a card-based variant and a dice-based one. I know you’re working on a light(er)weight card game based on Wingspan, to be released later this year. Obviously, you can’t tell us much about that, but do you think there could be other Wingspan-themed games later, with different mechanisms, maybe even a dice-based one? (Though, perhaps not an RPG version!)
Across Wyrmspan, Finspan, and this new small-box Wingspan, we had a lot of really interesting conversations and gut checks about what makes something feel like a Wingspan game. It’s really hard for me to imagine how you do a game that feels like Wingspan without the beautiful bird art. So probably not a dice game. RPG though—for a game jam, my friend Gene Koo did actually make a solo journaling RPG that uses Wingspan cards!
While I’d love to talk to you about all your games, time’s moving on, so let’s switch gear and head right to Sanibel. Based on videos and pictures, it feels like bits of Cascadia and A Gentle Rain, with an sprinkling of tangrams about it. Am I reading things correctly? Can you describe the game for the benefit of readers who haven’t come across it yet?
In Sanibel you’re almost literally walking down a beach collecting seashells and putting them into a bag, except the seashells are on hexagonal and diamond-shaped tiles, and putting them in your bag is really a tile-placement puzzle. There’s Tokaido-style movement, where you have to decide whether to jump ahead to take more shells or exactly the shells you want—or hang back and maybe take fewer shells but have your turn come up sooner. Then you have your own personal player mat that is your shell-collecting bag, and all the points come from the combination of what shells you picked up and how you arranged them in your bag, with different scoring rules for 6 different shell types. There’s a little Tetris in there, too, because there’s a gravity rule—shells can’t just hang out unsupported in the middle of your bag.
Sanibel is definitely lighter than Wingspan—it was inspired by my dad, and I wanted to make something he could play. I think it will be in a sweet spot where both the subject and the gameplay will be something that gamers can introduce to their non-gamer family and friends. In that sense it’s probably a lot like Cascadia.
Do you set out with a particular audience in mind for all of your games, or do you create the game first, and then think about who it’ll appeal to?
When I’m first thinking about a game I do try to articulate what it’s about and who it’s for. It’s a really helpful thing to be able to say at the beginning of a playtest. It can help keep players from spending the whole time thinking of ways to make something more like Dune Imperium if you’re aiming for Cascadia. And a lot of times if I can see a few different directions to go, asking “what’s it about and who’s it for” often helps me to pick.
From what I’ve heard about your game design process, you choose a theme and then pick a set of mechanisms that can best express what you want to do with the theme—how do you do that matching process to decide what will work and what won’t? Do you have a huge database of game mechanisms floating around in your head to pick from? And how does your meticulous research fit into all this?
Yeah, that’s basically right although the matching process is more a flash of inspiration than it is like sitting down to look for a match. I’d say it as, I have a huge list of topics I think I’d enjoy making a game about, and I start working on a game when I get an inspiration for how that topic would be well-expressed in a set of mechanisms. I try to think through: what point of view would players be playing from? What does that look like in real life, and how can I map that into something players could do in a game.
How much of a boardgame’s appeal is theme and how much is mechanism? You seem to have managed to merge both in your games; how do you achieve that tricky balance?
Maybe that’s because I am really drawn to games that appeal to me in both ways! That probably makes the strongest products, right? There are people who are drawn to Wingspan because of the birds who don’t even know enough about boardgames to know whether they’d like the mechanics, and there are people who are drawn to Wingspan because it is a great engine-builder who don’t care about the birds at all. So it’s got this broad appeal, as well as a dedicated set of fans who really, really love both birds and engine-builders.
I think if I manage to get my games to that sweet spot it’s partly because of the way I work on things—the thing they’re about actually shaped how the game works. When I pull it off I think it makes the whole thing resonate with people.
Can you hint at themes and mechanisms we might see from you in the not-too-distant future?
I’m always working on the next Wingspan expansion. And I have another game set in Florida with some mechanisms that I don’t remember seeing before.
Diversity and inclusivity in boardgaming can be a tricky topic, and it’s something you’re passionate about. I think crowdfunding addresses at least a little aspect, allowing any designers to get their games in front of people—for example, that’s how I came across the lovely game Biomes of Nilgiris from Indian publisher BluEncore and Singaporean puzzler Overparked—but what do you see as the biggest problems and what can we do to improve the situation?
Hm, crowdfunding might be a good solution in parts of the world that don’t have a robust publishing infrastructure. But I don’t think it will address the fact that in the US and Europe, we’ve got a strong publishing ecosystem that is way more white and male than the general population of those regions. And I don’t want to tell underrepresented minorities that the solution is to go it alone, because there’s so much work and risk that goes into crowdfunding—especially right now if you’re delivering to the US market. Is there some bias baked into the pitching-to-publishers route that doesn’t also exist in the pitching-to-the-public route? Maybe, but I think both are just fundamentally unfriendly to new designers—and having the resources of a publisher behind you can actually be the push that you need to break through all the noise.
My strong belief though is that we could be doing a lot more to bring a more representative set of designers to the table way earlier in the process. I don’t actually know whether women who are designing games are less likely to have their pitches accepted when they pitch. But I do know for sure that there are fewer women getting to the point of pitching games, or crowdfunding them. I want to be part of figuring out how we change that. And I think some of it goes all the way back to the beginning, of who is becoming a gamer? Who feels welcomed by the games that are on offer, and the spaces where gaming happens? I like to tell people that the one thing you can do as an everyday gamer is, think about how your own gaming is structured. If you’ve got friends with kids who split up so one can put the kids to bed while the other one plays games, is that split always going to the same person? How can you schedule things so everyone can game? My friend group gets together on Saturday afternoon, and it’s chaos with a bunch of kids running around. But everyone gets to be there.
And then the next step is, out of the pool of gamers, how do we support a wide range of people to become designers? Just like I’m talking about for gaming, the division of household labor comes in, and the structure and timing of playtesting opportunities comes in. And then layered on top of that, it’s even more of a luxury activity than playing games because maybe it means you’re spending less time with friends and family. Maybe it means pushing through uncomfortable circumstances where you’re the only person of your race or gender in a playtesting environment. Maybe you’ve got an extra dose of impostor syndrome layered on top. How do we peel away at all those layers? As we get more women and BIPOC designers published I hope that is at least helping it seem more normal, so all gamers might be able to imagine that it would be possible for them to be designers.
What boardgames do you play, and what do you particularly like about them?
My best friends are very much outside the cult of the new—we play a lot of Dominion, Terraforming Mars, Race for the Galaxy. Clearly I’m a fan of engine builders. But I’m also in heaven when I get to go somewhere and just play new-to-me games all day. My favorite finds this year were probably Bohemians, Take Time, and A Carnivore Did It!. Then I have a whole game design community where I get to play the stuff that isn’t even signed yet. I love playtesting my friends’ games and helping solve the puzzle of how they can be better... but that also takes up part of the time that I can spend playing games.
What else can you tell us about Elizabeth Hargrave, the person outside the game industry? What do you do in your spare time, if such a thing exists?
I really am a birder, and a mushroomer. I have a big garden, but honestly my spouse puts in way more work than I do on that. I like to travel, mostly to places where I want to go birding or just get outside for beautiful scenery. I love all kinds of logic and word puzzles, and have started trying my hand at constructing some—I am doing a set of guest puzzles for Raddle in late January.
Thank you, Elizabeth Hargrave. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.
Thanks!
(Anyone interested in finding out more about Elizabeth’s thoughts on gaming, diversity and a lot more, do check out her interviews and talks page.)
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
