Educational Games Review 3: Wingspan

Game Metadata

The game I'm reviewing for this blogpost is Wingspan, which is a board game designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and published in 2019 by Stonemaier games. Overall the high-level instructional goal could be construed to be about teaching players about different birds and the ecosystems they inhabit.

Educational Goals

The game appears to want to player to learn about different birds, their habitats, and perhaps their food habits, along with fun facts about them. In terms of its educational goals, it seems to be more focused on general statistics about different birds more than the actual relationships and patterns of how birds exist in their ecosystems and the roles they embody. However, as I'll discuss below, there are still elements of the game that may support some learning of the latter.

Game Elements

Wingspan is a competitive board game that consists of building an engine that will allow you to collect the most points by the end of four rounds (points are gained from things like the number of eggs you're able to lay in your ecosystem, the number of birds on your board and their worth, bonus points from round goals, amongst through a few other avenues). The core gameplay loop is largely made up of a player choosing one of four actions on their turn: Playing a bird, gaining food, laying eggs, or drawing cards. Each bird card has a "power," such as allowing the player to draw an additional card or laying additional eggs. Depending on how you've played your birds on the board, where each of the three ecosystems you can play them in is corresponding to one of the four possible actions (besides playing a bird), when you take an action, you activate all the powers of the birds in the corresponding ecosystem. This inner loop then informs the outer loop, which is generally thinking about how you can build the most efficient engine on your board to produce the most points.

I personally found the player experience extremely satisfying and it can get competitive even though you are largely concerned with building your own engine, since there are some cards that give you benefits based on what actions other players take (for example one card's power could be to allow you to lay eggs in birds with certain nests when any other player lays eggs). I played with one another person, which I think is my favorite experience because the rounds go extremely quickly, whereas when I have played with multiple people, going through a set of turns can take a long amount of time. However, its a game where it is heavily dependent on strategy, with a little bit of post-luck thrown in (i.e. when a random event, such as a dice roll happens, and the player is able to make a decision based off of it).

Learning Mechanisms

The primary learning mechanism the game seems to be trying to impact might be sense-making, although I would argue that the game is very loosely integrated with the learning goal I have ascribed it. If anything it utilizes the learning mechanism of interest, by structuring birding content around the common board game mechanic of engine building. However, in general, it's a game where the flavor text on the cards and the theming seems to be the main form of integration. Some of the powers are associated with the actual habits of the birds, such as predators having "hunting" powers, however most of them flew under the radar for me unless I already knew about the real world connection.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoy Wingspan as a game, but I think its a rather poor example of an educational game because it doesn't succeed as a learning experience. My friends and I occasionally read the flavor text because they make a fun part of the social experience of the board game, but the core gameplay itself does not integrate learning. Moreover the rest of the theming regarding the habitats didn't really connect for me in terms of how they were integrated with the actions associated with them. For example, when you wanted to "gain food," that was an action that would activate all the birds in the forest biome, and when you wanted to "lay eggs," it was an action that was associated with the savannah biome. These seemed like arbitrary connections, but a large part of the visual aspect of the board, and also a core part of the game loop. I think its definitively successful as a game, from my own player experience and from its commercial success, but in terms of considerating it as an educational game, I think the designer set out to make a game themed around an interest in birding rather than an experience that would educate people on birding.