Wingspan Pocket is a streamlined adaptation of Wingspan for 1-5 players that is highly compacted in size, complexity, and time. You can now suggest “a quick game of Wingspan” without getting glared at.
Big Bird in a Small Nest
I have to congratulate Wingspan Pocket in how well they’ve squashed the game into the smallest box and components. I do have to raise some questions on how big they think pockets are, but it’s definitely pocket-sized in comparison.
The components are reduced down to a stack of cards, some player tokens, and a bag of eggs. The main cards have the birds on one side and various combinations of food options on the other, which handles pretty much every aspect of the game in one go. There are a small number of other cards for the rest of the admin and player aids, but that’s it as far as components go.
No really, this is everything
The bird cards have a lot of information, but it’s immediately recognisable to existing Span players and easy enough to follow for newcomers. The only real difference is that the powers at the bottom have been heavily simplified. The manual explains everything clearly regarding cost and powers.
Building the Nest
Setup is equally minimal. There are simple and advanced versions, but the differences are minimal, so I’ll just put the advanced parts in italics.
Shuffle the cards (food side up) and deal 6 cards to each player. With the remaining bird cards, create 4 roughly equal stacks. Flip the top card of each stack and place the card below to create the bird selection.
Place two random Goal cards on the Goal display. These are additional scoring criteria.
Each player grabs a Nest card and a player token and puts an egg on their Nest. They then flip the top 2 of their cards over to the bird side (or choose which two to flip). All cards are then kept visible on the table as a Reserve, and stay the chosen face up.
That’s it. It’s a nice change of pace when setup takes longer to read than to do
Hatching a Plan
Gameplay is yet again something that will be instantly familiar to Wingspan players but shaved down considerably. It also takes away some of the dilemma in Wingspan by letting you both build and use your engine each turn.
The first thing you do is one of the following three Nest actions:
1. Play a Bird from your Reserve.
Pay the food/egg costs on the bird with any number of your food cards in your Reserve and eggs on your birds/nest.
Now add that bird to the right side of your Flock (the row of played birds, starting from your Nest). If the bird has a green permanent power, then it is now immediately in effect.
2. Draw 2 Cards.
Take any two cards from any combination of bird and food decks and add them to your Reserve. Do not flip any of them; they stay the same face as they were when taken.
3. Lay 3 Eggs.
Take up to 3 eggs from the supply and place them on your Nest or any of your Flock (as long as there is room on that card based on its Egg Limit)
The options are really simple, but there’s still a good level of strategy and some decisions to make. You have to optimise grabbing the right birds, playing the right birds, and gaining the resources to play the right birds. The eggs are worth points and are vital to scoring goals (see later), so you also need to create space and take the time to grab more eggs when viable.
After you have chosen your action, you now get to Activate all your birds. This is a huge but welcome change from the usual Span games, where each turn you either build your engine or use it. In Wingspan Pocket, you get to do both.
Running from left to right, activate the brown power (if any) of each bird in your Flock. These are simple powers, and the manual is great at explaining how they work.
The nest never gets too crowded
The game continues until a player has 6 birds in their Flock. At that point, the game continues until everyone has had the same number of turns. Now we go to scoring.
Counting your Chickens
Scoring is again a simplified version of the usual process.
Flip over the Nest card for this excellent scoring aid
First, add up the score of all the birds in your Flock.
Next, score 1 point for each Egg.
If you’re playing the basic rules, the final stage is to score 1 point per card tucked under any cards in your Flock.
If you’re playing the advanced rules, you also score for the two Goals.
Each Goal card has a particular rule (e.g. Birds worth 3 or fewer points, or Birds that have particular food in their cost). In a little twist on the expectation, you don’t score for each bird that meets the rule. Instead, you score 1 point for each egg on each bird that meets the criteria.
This small twist is very much appreciated. With a maximum of 6 birds, you’re unlikely to score enough for just the birds to be worth bothering chasing the goals. Now that an eligible bird can score multiple points, this is a viable tactic. If you look for a bird that meets both Goal criteria, instead of scoring 2 points, it scores 2 points multiplied by the eggs on it. As eggs also score 1 point each, the Lay 3 Eggs is a great action as long as you’ve created the right circumstances.
Birds of a Feather
It’s very easy to compare this to the previous games… so I will.
I’ve played every previous Span game, and I will admit I was not a fan of the original Wingspan. The food was a little too luck-based and could leave you stranded, a few strategies were too unbalanced, and I didn’t like that as the game progressed you had a better engine but had fewer opportunities to use it.
Wingspan Pocket is a much better fit for me. It sits in a complexity level that makes it very distinct from the others, as does the pared-down gameplay cycle.
The massive reduction of rules and components could easily have felt like a limited version of Wingspan, but actually it feels more like a concentrated version. You get a smaller engine, but play it every turn as it gets gradually stronger. You get the same system of birds and food, but more control over how to play them. You get the same scoring system, but reduced to a smaller number of criteria to juggle.
I would say that the most dramatic change in Wingspan Pocket is the table space. Each iteration of the Span games appears to have inflated in table space, to the stage where Finspan might require planning permission to make room for the full 5 players.
Wingspan Pocket is a centre tableau of 8 decks and some eggs. Each player has a Flock row of up to 7 cards and a (usually) similar number of Reserve cards below it. It’s gone from a difficult dining table to an easy coffee table in size.
Is it as deep as Wingspan? Definitely not, but it comes remarkably close for how much they’ve removed. I happily have this as an addition to my collection, an easy game to get out in order to scratch this particular itch without all the effort.
Also, with no fixed number of turns, there is less panic in building your flock as quickly as possible. You’ll want to get your Flock started ASAP so you get to activate it each turn, but beyond that everyone is able to better pace themselves collecting resources when necessary. The game seems well balanced, even at the full 5 players, with final scoring being quite similar despite very different Flocks.
First Flight
That said, this game is not just for existing Span players. This is also both an introduction to the genre and a game that happily stands alone.
Taking Wingspan Pocket in its own right, this is a very clever game in a surprisingly concentrated form. It’s an engine builder with a small number of moving parts that are intricately meshed together. Also, consider that it’s hard to find many non-party games that can play up to 5 players in such a small box and playing space.
While I do still have quibbles over this being “Pocket”, it’s easily a game that can be brought with you with very little effort. It’s really good fun while having decent strategy, and it only takes about half an hour to play so it doesn’t outstay its welcome.
I definitely recommend Wingspan Pocket as both a game in its own right and as a very light Wingspan variant.
