Stonemaier Games has announced a new spinoff game in the Wingspan line: this time it's a shrunk down cards-only version that fits in a much smaller package. Wingspan Pocket was revealed this past week and keeps the thematic and mechanical components of the larger game while cutting down on box size and playtime.
There are a couple videos I could choose from to show off the game including some How to Play videos commissioned by the publisher, but the initial reveal trailer didn't show very much at all, so I'm going with this 3 Quick Turns preview from the Stonemaier YouTube channel:
It's clear from the components alone that this new miniaturized offering is retaining a lot of the shape of the original game: the bird cards themselves, which form a bulk of the Wingspan experience, look so similar as to be almost unchanged, with the beautiful full color illustrations and variety of real-life species the series has built its name on. (They even kept the tiny sculpted egg tokens that everyone loves.)
The gameplay has been stripped down a bit to make the card game quicker and easier to play: all your birds get played into one single line, rather than multiple different habitats, and you activate the whole line of abilities every turn. Food tokens have been replaced using the backs of the bird cards — turn them around and they become resources to feed other birds.
Finspan was the previous spinoff game in the catalogue, trading the birds and grasslands for the coral reefs, dark depths and myriad fish of the world's oceans. Before that came Wyrmspan, a fantasy take on the formula that uses fictional dragon species on its cards. And the original release Wingspan became popular enough to warrant a digital adaptation as well as a multitude of expansions, most of them centered around new avian species from a specific region of the world. Several of those have made their way to Steam, and the most recent released in physical form was the Americas expansion.
Wingspan Pocket will first be available to order a few days from now on July 15th from the Stonemaier Games website. The game will debut publicly at GenCon this August. As always, the digital version of the original Wingspan is available on Steam and mobile.
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