Wyrmspan - Wingspan with Worms

I had the chance to play Wyrmspan because of an end of year sale put on by Barnes and Nobles. I reached out to some friends that expressed interest in the game when I saw it at a discount in store, and they decided that they wanted it.

What is Wyrmspan?

Wyrmspan is the more complex brother to the popular bird engine building game - Wingspan. In Wyrmspan each player is excavates caves, entices dragons into excavated caves, or explores caves populated with dragons. Players build point scoring engines, interact with dragons guilds, and cache resources in order to be the player with the most amount of victory points at the end of the game.

Preparing to play

It has been a while since I played Wingspan, and the last time I played it was the only time I played it. In preparation to play Wingspan, I read the rule book cover to cover and watched a handful of videos on YouTube to fully grasp the game mechanics. I wanted my first experience playing Wingspan to be spoiler free, so I did not do any research about the abilities printed on the dragon cards or anything that was outside the bounds of the rule book and videos.

In-game thoughts, strategy, and experience

While playing Wyrmspan, the play group that I played with were Wingspan veterans that owned the base game and all currently released expansions. I was the only person at the table that did not have a ton of experience with the rest of the Stonemaier-span games. As a new player, I was overcome with analysis paralysis. At the start of the game, I could not tell which of my opening cave and dragon cards were good or bad. I made my best judgement and continued play. Throughout gameplay, I figured out that some dragon abilities were much stronger than others. The dragons that I felt like were a lower tier than the rest were the ones where its ability only activated when the dragon was enticed, or once a turn during the end.

Going into the game I did not have an elaborate strategy other than to have fun. I started the game by discarding 2 cave cards and keeping all four of my dragons, and I ended the game with 93 points that put me in second place behind the player that scored 117, and in front of third place that scored 81. While I was playing I heavily utilized the explore action over and over again to gain resources in order to cache them for more resources (and more end game points). Another player was building an engine to pay lower costs to play more expensive dragons, and the other player was focused on dragons that scored them the most points.

Things that caused confusion

One thing that our playgroup had difficulty with was wondering if the resource/ food tokens were unlimited. Initially, we thought the 9s of rule did not apply until end of round (as opposed to end of turn), so I was piling on 14-15 meat and milk tokens while the supply was running dry. We were also starting to cache more and more resources onto our enticed dragons, so this led to a scarcity in available tokens.

Things I would do differently next play through

I would like to utilize caves more extensively. I was pretty lean with using the third row on the player board, but the others at the table were very heavily utilizing it. I wasn't sure if I was missing something, or if this was just something that was carried over from Wingspan.

For a big chunk of the game it felt like I was rolling with the punches, some of the dragons that were on my board were end game scoring beasts and I played that to my advantage. But until those fellas materialized, I was going with the flow. Next play through, I'm definitely going to read through all the dragon cards and cave cards, and do some homework about strategy and method.

Would I Play Wyrmspan Again?

Sure. There is a lot of replay value in Wyrmspan, and now that I know what some cards of the deck do, I probably will make more and more educated decisions the more that I play. 9/10