Like its predecessors, Finspan is an engine-building game in which you play cards with hopefully complementary abilities, building up the resources to play even more cards... hoping in the end to score more points than the other players. As you would expect, the gameplay is generally quite similar despite some cosmetic differences.
You once again play your cards in three lines -- though Finspan cosmetically twists this 90 degrees by having you play in columns (representing ocean depth) rather than rows. You once again can use your turn to survey all your cards in one line (this time, "diving" past them) to collect any repeating benefits they award. And you have a limited number of turns to work with in the game -- this time, 24 split evenly across four rounds.
Finspan makes a few adjustments that are not simply cosmetic. While all three games have eggs you spend to play new creatures, these actually hatch into tokens which then can be moved around your ocean. Movement itself is a "resource" of a sort, because if you can join three young together in one spot, they form a school that doubles the number of points they're worth at the end of the game.
Unlike Wingspan and Wyrmspan, Finspan eliminates the concept of "food types" that are used to play new cards. It's a curious choice that on the one hand makes the game simpler by eliminating multiple resources the players must accumulate and plan around. On the other hand, it removes some flavor that might make the game a bit more accessible to inexperienced gamers, removing concrete concepts like berries, grubs, and grains (for birds; meat, milk, and others for dragons) and abstracting them -- to play new fish, you just discard other cards, or eggs, or young.
Finspan also makes the "combo-building" nature of these games more explicit by dividing each of the three columns into three zones: shallow, mid, and deep. When your diver descends in a column, you get a specific bonus in each zone simply for having any fish there (regardless of whether it has a power of its own you can trigger). It gives players something to shoot for independent of what the cards say they do: spread out across the different depths of your ocean to maximize your rewards.
Because of the streamlining of food and highlighting of combo-building, many experienced gamers have rallied around the idea that Finspan is the "simplest" of the Span family of games. I'd say the difference is subtle, if real at all; Mandy Patinkin would probably still have a hard time learning Finspan. And I really don't find the game in any way "less satisfying" to play. (Not that I always prefer more challenging games anyway.)
In fact, I certainly prefer Finspan to Wyrmspan, in part because of how it highlights that theme can really matter in a game. In my review of the dragon version, I commented that collecting fictional dragons wasn't nearly as compelling to me as reading factoids about actual birds (especially because in Wyrmspan, while they wrote a mountain of fictional information about the fictional dragons, they didn't bother to actually print any of it on the cards). Finspan brings us back to the real world, and once again each card features an intriguing little factoid about a fish you may or may not have ever heard of. It cements for me that in the Span games, the real-world themes are a significant part of the appeal to me.
Where I've called Wingpsan maybe an A- or B+, and Wyrmspan maybe a B or B+, I feel that Finspan ought to slot solidly in the middle. Call it a B+, no "maybe" about it. It's quite possible that no gamer's collection needs to include all three. But it's just as possible that a fan of any one of them might want to check out the others.
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