A brand new Wingspan expansion will be arriving soon: Wingspan Americas will be available from Stonemaier Games later this month and hitting retailers in February/March.
The expansion brings along another 100+ bird cards as well as 40 smaller hummingbird cards and a ‘hummingbird garden’ board (which acts as the drafting space for the new cards) along with player mat overlays, hummingbird track boards and associated tokens.
While the additional ‘normal’ birds have a few new abilities and there are a few extra bonus tiles, the major addition is the hummingbird mechanism, so I’ll just focus on that here.
The overlay adds a hummingbird space on the left of the habitats, such that when you complete a habitat row action, you ‘attract’ or release a hummingbird in/from that space.
If the hummingbird space is empty, you choose one of the birds from the garden and place it into your player mat space (rather, the player mat overlay space). You also gain the benefit marked in the bottom left of the card—the usual sort of thing like lay an egg or gain food, though you can also advance along a hummingbird track, which I’ll talk about in a moment.
Conversely, if there’s already a hummingbird in the space, you return it to the garden, either in an empty space or covering another in the garden. The hummingbird cards have a ‘group’ icon at the top of the card: bees & mountain gems, brilliants & coquettes, emeralds, mangoes, and topazes, jacobins & hermits—5 different evolutionary groups. The hummingbird board contains 5 tracks, and when you return a hummingbird, you advance the token on the track corresponding to its type. If you covered an existing card, you can use the track corresponding to either the covered or the covering bird.
Some points on the track have hummingbird silhouettes, and if your token lands on one of those, you get to take another hummingbird action.
Any spaces in the garden at the end of a player’s turn are refilled from the deck.
At the end of the game, the token positions on the hummingbird tracks contribute to players’ final scores, higher being better, as one might expect. Additionally, any hummingbirds on your player mat at the end of a round can contribute to relevant bonuses.
The Wingspan expansion also includes an updated automa, which takes hummingbirds into account too.
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.
