Wyrmspan tweaks the core gameplay of Wingspan, the engine-building game about birds. It adds a fantasy theme (ever a popular choice), making the game about dragons instead of birds. Mechanically, it brings in the concept of "guilds," a track where players advance to earn rewards and compete to score points at the end of the game. It does away with Wingspan's dice, giving players more control over the food they gather, and thus more ability to engineer card combos. Add in a handful of other minor changes -- some merely cosmetic, others subtly nudging the nature of the gameplay -- and you have something clearly meant to be a slightly more advanced take on Wingspan.
I've got no problem with board game spin-offs. Maybe that's motivated thinking, given the board game company I work for. Still, the most subtle changes in a game can cause real ripple effects throughout its ecosystem. So when a designer or publisher actually changes things up with a spin-off, rather than just re-themes them, I'm open to treating it as a new experience. (To those who claim this sort of thing is just a "cash grab," my answer is simple: you can just not let your cash be grabbed.)
To me, Wyrmspan retains enough of the core of Wingspan that I don't find it massively better or worse than the original game. The fun still comes from the hundreds of cards (bird or dragon) that combine in new ways every time you play. Building an engine, then exploiting it, is still the core loop -- and I find that fun in either form.
But Wyrmspan has highlighted at least two things about my own gaming tastes. The first, I already knew: with each passing year, my tastes are drifting toward less complex experiences. I was never the kind of gamer eager to dive into a 4-hour game preceded by a 1-hour rules teach. I've always been the sort of gamer that would rather experience two different 2-hour games in that time. Except... it seems more and more like I'd actually rather fit three 90-or-so minute games in that time. (Or four 1-hours!)
The original Wingspan, it's important to note, doesn't actually feel like a "crossover" game. The super-accessible bird theme helped it rocket to the top of the hobby, helping it land in Target stores and on plenty of tables that otherwise host only the occasional Monopoly game. But it's easy to forget all that when experienced gamers pick up Wingspan so quickly: it's already a gamers' game. Try teaching it to non-gamers, and this is what you'll get.
All that is to say that, for me at least, I didn't necessary need a "more complex Wingspan" -- even an only incrementally more complex one. I don't mind Wyrmspan, because it is only incrementally harder to wrap your head around if you've experienced Wingspan. But Wingspan was scratching a particular itch just fine. The reason it had become less frequently played in my group has nothing to do with its complexity (or a perceived lack thereof).
The second thing Wyrmspan taught me is something I've recently begun to notice about my gaming habits, and something that's definitely changed over the years: theme matters. It used to be that when a game was being explained to me, I'd gloss right by the flavor of it. We're spreading civilization in ancient Greece? Trading artifacts at high-class auctions? Building castles in the European countryside? Whatever, what are we -- the players -- actually doing when we play this game? But increasingly, I've come across games where I feel that the theme does vastly improve the experience for me.
Without checking the rulebook for Wingspan, I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to represent. Simple birdwatching? Some sort of conservation effort? I'm not sure, but I do know that I find playing birds (and reading little factoids about them on each card) to be inherently more interesting than playing made-up dragons with goofy, made-up names. If all the gameplay about Wingspan and Wyrmspan were exactly the same, I'd still prefer the birds of Wingspan to the dragons of Wyrmspan.
But ultimately, I think the two games feel something like 80-90% similar when you play them. They're different enough to each "justify their existence," and different enough that I think most gamers would have a preference between them. But they're both enjoyable. Suggest either on game night, and I'm likely to say yes. If Wingspan has settled around a B+ or A- in my view, Wyrmspan slots in at a B or B+.
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