When I heard there was going to be an expansion for Wyrmspan, my personal favourite of the Span series of games, I was very happy. Given what we’d seen from the Wingspan expansions, I felt like I knew what was coming, and I was not disappointed.
This expansion adds in a whole bunch of new dragon cards, cave cards, guild and objective tiles, a brand new round tracker board and training tokens for raising your new age of dragons – the fledglings. These dragons get trained up, give you little bonuses as you train them, and score based on the number of more fledglings you have in your collection. I’m a big fan of expansions when they develop the game to new levels, so let’s see how Wyrmspan Dragon Academy stacks up!
How to play
Setup with the expansion is pretty straightforward. Shuffle all the cards and tiles into their respective decks, swap out the round tracker board, and add the training tokens to a pile nearby. A few cards have been updated as well, so you’ll need to swap them out. As the game goes on, you will play as normal, but when you choose to pass, you’ll instead pick an income spot, rather than gaining the six coins from the base game.
A quick thought for the new fledgling dragons. Fledglings are teenage dragons—they may require the resources of hatchlings (milk or eggs), adults (meat, gold, or crystal), or both! Unlike hatchlings, however, they are equally distributed among all three caves. Whenever your adventurer walks over a fledgling, you may (optionally) train the fledgling 1time. The first time you train a fledgling, pay the cost shown in the left-most box on the fledgling, then gain a training token from the general supply and place it onto that box. The next time you train the fledgling, pay the cost shown in the next left-most empty box, gain a second training token from the general supply, and place it onto that box. You must always train fledglings in order from left to right. When you have filled all boxes on the fledgling, the fledgling has been fully trained! Once a fledgling has been fully trained, its bottom ability, highlighted in purple, is active. Until it has been fully trained, the ability will not be active. These abilities may be “if activated” abilities, “once per round” abilities, or “end game” abilities. It is important to note that the resources spent to train a fledgling are returned to the general supply; unlike hatchlings, they are not cached on or tucked under the fledgling.
Thoughts
Something I really respect about a lot of Stonemaier games is the intent of an expansion to be “more” and not overly complicated, or throw too much at you so that, once your base game is combined with the expansion, it’s very easy to just keep going with it shuffled in. I would have no problem with teaching a new player this game everything included with this expansion.
The new guild boards give you something new to try, and I love the variety of all the guilds. The training of the new fledgling dragons is very interesting, and gives us more flexibility as the game goes on.
Frankly, if you like the base game, there is no reason to not get the expansion. As expansions go, it’s a very good inclusion, and definitely worth your time. Something to be aware of though, if you already have the Folded Space insert for Wyrmspan, you’ll end up with an extra card holder that wont fit in the box. If you don’t though, you’ve got a handy storage accessory.
About the Author:
You can find more of Luke’s ramblings about board games on his YouTube channel, The Game Imporium and as the host of the Bucket List Board Gamers Podcast.
