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In Wingspan, you spend most of the game building little combinations of birds, food, eggs, and card effects while trying to turn your nature reserve into a proper point machine by the final round. One bird gives you food, another lets you draw cards, another suddenly makes your whole wetland row much better than it was two turns ago. When Wingspan works well, it has this satisfying feeling where your turns slowly start connecting together.
Of course, sometimes it also means staring at the bird tray for five minutes because the game refuses to show you a single bird that eats fish.
The Americas Expansion shifts the focus toward birds from Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. That mostly means two things: more tropical birds and a lot of hummingbirds.
The expansion adds new bird cards, a separate hummingbird deck, new bonus cards, goal tiles, nectar tokens, and a shared hummingbird garden board that sits in the middle of the table during the game. The main attraction here is the hummingbird system. Instead of simply adding more cards into the deck, Americas changes how turns work. Hummingbirds move between your player mat and the shared garden, giving extra rewards and actions during the game.
It sounds like a fairly small addition at first, but after a few turns you really notice how much it changes Wingspan. Players pay more attention to each other, and most turns end with one extra thing to think about before you’re actually done. It immediately came across as an expansion that wanted to push Wingspan a little further instead of simply giving players more birds to shuffle into the deck.
It also asks more from players. There’s more to track, more combinations to think about, and more moments where somebody at the table says “wait… did I already move that hummingbird?” This doesn’t feel like a small add-on that disappears into the background. After one round, everybody at the table notices the hummingbirds.
👥 1-5 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 75-90 minutes
📝 Designers: Elizabeth Hargrave
🎨 Artwork: Martha Clare, Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo & Natalia Rojas
🏢 Publisher: 999 Games (Dutch version, review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
The structure of Wingspan stays mostly the same. Players still spend four rounds taking one of four actions each turn: playing birds, gaining food, laying eggs, or drawing bird cards. As birds are added to habitats, those actions become stronger and start triggering extra bird powers.
Americas keeps all of that intact, but now the forest, grassland, and wetland rows also include hummingbird actions. After you finish one of those habitat actions, you resolve an extra hummingbird step connected to that row. Playing a bird is the only action that doesn’t trigger hummingbirds.
At the start of the game, every player gets a hummingbird overlay, a hummingbird track, five hummingbird markers, and a random starting hummingbird already sitting in the grassland space. In the middle of the table there’s also a shared hummingbird garden filled with face-up hummingbirds from a separate mini deck.
When a hummingbird space on your mat is empty, you attract a hummingbird there. You either take one from the garden or draw blindly from the deck, then immediately gain the reward shown on the card. Some hummingbirds give movement on the hummingbird track, others give food, eggs, cards, or nectar.
If the space already has a hummingbird, things work differently. Instead of attracting a new one, you return that hummingbird back to the communal garden. Usually that means covering another hummingbird already there. After that, you move one of your markers up on the hummingbird track based on either the hummingbird you returned or the one you covered.
That shared garden is probably the most interesting addition in the expansion. Base Wingspan can sometimes feel like everybody is building their own little bird machine separately, but the garden constantly pulls players back toward the middle of the table. Covering one hummingbird changes what other players can access next, and over time the garden starts feeling less like a simple display of cards and more like a shared market everyone keeps watching.
The hummingbird track also changes how you think about the birds themselves. Attracting hummingbirds gives quick rewards straight away, but returning them is what moves your markers up the track toward points and extra actions. So you’re constantly deciding whether you want the immediate bonus now or whether it’s worth building toward something bigger later. Ignore the track completely and it can hurt by the end of the game, but spending too much time chasing hummingbirds can also leave the rest of your reserve underdeveloped.
The expansion also introduces new end-of-round goals tied to hummingbirds, egg limits, and different bird point values in your preserve.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
Inside the box you get 111 new bird cards, 40 hummingbird mini cards, new goal tiles, bonus cards, hummingbird tracks, overlays, nectar tokens, extra eggs, and the shared hummingbird garden board. The hummingbird overlays fit onto the side of the normal player mats surprisingly well. I expected them to feel a little awkward somehow, but visually they blend in naturally with the original design.
The hummingbird garden board is probably the visual centerpiece. Covered in flowers and tropical plants, it gives the expansion its own look immediately. People walking past the table kept stopping to look at it during our games, which happened more than once.
The bird artwork continues the watercolor style Wingspan is known for, but this expansion leans much harder into stronger colors. Flamingos, tanagers, parrots, hummingbirds, toucans… there’s a lot more contrast compared to the softer woodland feeling of the base game. The hummingbird cards themselves are especially nice. Even though they’re smaller than regular bird cards, they still stand out because of the hovering poses and shimmering feather colors.
Component quality is pretty much what you’d expect from Wingspan at this point. The cards have the same linen finish, the overlays fit securely, and the wooden hummingbird markers are easy to read during play. The expansion does take up more table space though. We had one game where the snacks slowly disappeared because the birds had claimed half the table. Fair enough. It’s their preserve now.
Once everything is on the table, this expansion is hard to ignore. It feels tropical, colourful, and noticeably different from the atmosphere of the original game without losing the identity of the series.
Our Experience
Americas immediately changed how people behaved around the table. In normal Wingspan, players often spend most of the game focused almost entirely on their own engine. Here, people kept checking the shared garden to see what was available, what had just been covered, and whether someone else might take a hummingbird first.
That small shared system made games feel much more connected without turning Wingspan into a confrontational game. You still spend most of your time building your own preserve, but players naturally started reacting more to each other’s decisions. There were a lot more comments during our games too, mostly because somebody had just covered the exact hummingbird another player wanted. At one point somebody actually celebrated drawing a hummingbird like they had just pulled the final sticker they needed for a football album.
The expansion also smooths out some of Wingspan’s usual frustration without completely removing the need for planning. Even when somebody had a slow opening or an underdeveloped habitat row, hummingbirds usually provided enough extra value to keep turns useful. Food, cards, eggs, nectar, track movement… there was almost always something productive happening, which made rough starts feel much less punishing than in the base game.
The expansion definitely asks for more attention from everyone at the table, though. Players regularly forgot hummingbird actions during the first game or two, especially when extra hummingbird actions started chaining together. Once everybody understood the flow it became much smoother, but the first play felt noticeably fuller than normal Wingspan.
At higher player counts, the extra decisions can stretch the game a bit. Players who already tend to think carefully about every Wingspan turn suddenly have even more things to evaluate. The shorter-game variant in the rulebook feels like a very sensible inclusion for groups like that.
After a few plays, we stopped thinking of hummingbirds as an “extra module” and started treating them like a normal part of Wingspan. The movement between habitats and the shared garden fits the theme surprisingly well once you get used to it.
Our Thoughts
Wingspan: Americas Expansion feels like one of the boldest expansions in the series because it takes an actual design risk. It doesn’t simply add more birds and a few extra powers. The hummingbird system changes the structure of the game enough that it genuinely feels different once it’s added in.
What we liked most is how much momentum the expansion creates. In base Wingspan, weaker habitat rows can sometimes feel inefficient for several rounds while you slowly build your engine. Americas softens that quite a bit. Even modest turns usually come with an extra reward or useful action because of the hummingbirds, which keeps the game moving and makes early development feel more forgiving.
That does come with a downside. Part of what some players love about original Wingspan is the tighter resource puzzle. Food can feel scarce, eggs matter a lot, and weak turns can really hurt. Americas loosens some of that pressure. That mostly felt refreshing to us, but players who enjoy the stricter efficiency puzzle of the base game may find this expansion a little too generous at times.
There’s also some real power creep here. Hummingbirds cost no food, fit into any habitat, and constantly provide useful rewards. They don’t have bird powers or egg capacity, which helps balance them somewhat, but the overall pace of the game becomes much faster once players understand how to use the hummingbird timing properly.
That skill gap is worth mentioning too. The expansion is easy enough to learn, but much harder to optimize well. Experienced Wingspan players will absolutely get more value out of manipulating the garden, planning track movement, and chaining hummingbird actions together than newer players will.
The hummingbirds themselves also make the game feel a little more abstract than normal Wingspan. Regular birds feel grounded in habitats, food costs, eggs, nests, and bird powers. Hummingbirds function more like moving support pieces attached to a scoring system. Mechanically, it works very well, but thematically it does shift the game slightly away from the more naturalistic feeling of the original design.
I can already imagine some Wingspan players loving this expansion and others immediately wanting to go back to the calmer base game. This really doesn’t feel like filler content, though. It feels like an expansion made for people who already know Wingspan well and want a reason to rediscover the system from a slightly different angle.
If your group already knows Wingspan well and wants a version where people pay more attention to each other, this expansion really works. It isn’t necessarily smoother or simpler than the base game, but for the right group, it adds a lot of life to a system many people already know extremely well.
By the end of our plays, this was probably the Wingspan expansion we kept talking about the most afterward, and that alone says quite a lot.
📝 We received a copy of the game from 999 Games.
