Wyrmspan review — Replacing feathers for scales

In 2019, Stonemeier Games released Wingspan. Wingspan was an event in board gaming, selling over 1.4 million copies over the course of its first 3 years, meaning most people in the board game scene have at least heard of the game. More and more have played it, dropped its chunky food dice into the bird feeder, looking at the gorgeous, real life birds. Stonemeier has since released 3 official expansions, adding in more birds and more mechanics.

Wyrmspan looks a lot like Wingspan, but with dragons! There are several differences between the two games, but the dragons are certainly the most obvious. Wyrmspan is an engine building strategy game for 1-5 players put together by Stonemeier Games. Each player will spend the game digging out caverns, enticing dragons into those caverns, and then exploring the caverns, triggering powerful effects.

Each turn, you’ll take one action. There’s 3 basic actions: excavating caverns, enticing dragons, and exploring your dragon caves. Excavating a cavern opens up more room for more dragons. This action requires both cavern cards and eggs to complete, but each cavern card provides a bonus. Enticing dragons lets you put dragons into your open caverns. Like Wingspan, there are 3 different biomes, but each biome is a different kind of cave. Dragons will only live in certain caverns, which means caverns wind up with a certain flavor of abilities on dragons residing within.. That comes into play when exploring the caves. When you explore a cave, you choose one of your three dragon caves, and starting from the left side, which always provides either a basic resource, cavern cards or dragon cards, you then say hello to each dragon in that cave. Each dragon also provides an additional bonus, in between each dragon card, which gives players incentive to fill their caves up to maximize their exploration actions. The top cavern usually focuses on providing resources, the middle focuses on providing cavern cards, and the bottom focuses on providing dragon cards.

This brings out the basic struggle of the game: exploring the caves is how you get resources, but you get points and power by playing cards. Balancing filling out your caves and exploring them is the key to success. This baseline gameplay is familiar to those who come from Wingspan, but the changes are what make Wyrmspan its own thing, and a worthy successor.

There’s a lot of differences for those who are coming from Wingspan. First, actions have changed. In Wingspan, you had a bunch of cubes that were used to mark actions, losing one cube each additional round the game progresses. Instead of cubes, you have coins. Each action you take costs one coin, and you get a flat 6 coins each round. Some very powerful dragons require coins to play as well. It is possible to gain more coins, such as through a space on the guild track or at the end of each cavern.

The next difference is that players will need to dig out caverns before they can play a dragon. When you excavate a new cavern you open up the cavern for another dragon. Each cavern card also provides a benefit, such as resources, cards, or rarely, new coins. Each new cavern you build costs more and more dragon eggs. Perhaps providing dragon-omelets is the cost for having people help you excavate.

Another new addition is the Dragon Guild. The Dragon Guild is a ring of spaces that players will move around whenever they activate a Dragon Guild icon. At the halfway point and end of the Dragon Guild board, players will trigger powerful, limited effects. These effects might allow a player to dig out a cavern for free, or create a large number of eggs. There’s also two high scoring effects on the board. These effects can be swapped out for one of three different guilds, lending replayability to the game.

The final change is that the birdfeeder and food dice are gone. Instead, when exploring the top cavern (similar to the gain food action in Wingspan), you will often be able to gain whichever resource you want! The lay egg action from Wingspan has been replaced with a cavern that gives cavern cards, while the last cavern gives dragon cards, similar to the draw bird cards action. Each of these caverns get more powerful the more dragons you put in them. Not only do the dragons themselves offer effects when exploring, but the caverns gain additional effects for each dragon inside. You can’t explore willy-nilly, though, as it costs eggs for each additional exploration after the first each round. You also want to be careful about accruing too many resources, as you can only ever have 9 of each resource type at a time.

So are these changes good? Yes! Very, very good! Wyrmspan feels like nothing less than a Wingspan sequel designed with all of the lessons that were learned through Wingspan and its 3 expansions. The bird feeder was clever, sure, but it wound up getting in the way of your engine. You might never be able to take the food you needed to get the right birds due to bad luck. Now you just choose what you need. The other additions bring a new focus to gameplay, another route towards gaining points, resources, and other benefits. The caverns eat up the extra actions you get in the game, while still providing new benefits. The egg cost of later dragons instead gets added to caverns as well, simplifying dragon costs.

The other benefit is pretty specific to myself. I only ever played other folk’s copies of Wingspan, and once it started getting a bunch of expansions I felt too late to the party to get my own copy. Wyrmspan acts as a fresh start for players who were interested in Wingspan, but didn’t want to shell out for the expansions. Instead, you get an experience similar to a fully expanded Wingspan, but only for the entry level cost of $60 USD. Certainly, there’s not QUITE as many cards as a fully expanded Wingspan, but how many cards can you see in a single game?

That’s not to say Wyrmspan won’t see its own expansions. We’ll have to wait and see just how many expansions Wyrmspan gets. And it probably won’t replace Wingspan in MANY people’s collection, especially since all signs point to several more Wingspan expansions in the works. Not only that, but the dragons aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. One of the biggest reasons for Wingspan’s success was its devotion to the birds, after all. If there is one weakness to Wyrmspan, it’s that the dragon cards are simply not as fascinating. This is not a fault of the design or art of the dragons, but simply that reality is often more impressive than fiction. The facts about each dragon are somehow just not as important as the little tidbits on the Wingspan cards, and that is emphasized by the fact that they did not print the factoids onto the cards, but instead into a separate booklet that comes with the game. Are we going to check the dragon-handbook each time I draw a dragon? Nope, I’ll just look at the nifty art, see how the effect plays into my board, and move on. I don’t fault the designers for that, card real estate is important, and the factoids would be absolute fiction, after all.

Still, I would much rather play Wyrmspan than Wingspan, and I’m planning to pick up some upgraded components to make my copy really pop in the future (the images here are all base components). The game doesn’t need premium components, of course, and the build quality is absolutely still up to Stonemeier’s usual pedigree, but if I’m going to have silver coins in my game, you can bet I want metal coins!

Most of my review has been targeted at fans of Wingspan already, or at least people who were interested in Wingspan. So what about everyone else? Well, Wyrmspan is a great game! It’s an engine builder with few peers. It plays quickly for the complexity on display, and has enough variety in both the cards and other mechanics that every game you play will be different. My recommendation is without reservations: Play it!