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If you’ve played Wingspan, you probably know the general routine. You collect birds, feed them, lay eggs and slowly build a collection where one bird’s ability can help another. Wingspan Pocket takes several of those ideas and rebuilds them around a much smaller game. There are no habitat boards, food dice or birdfeeder here. Instead, you start with a nest, a handful of cards and enough space to build a flock of six birds.
That sounds like Wingspan with most of its belongings left at home, but the changes go further than simply reducing the number of components. Your flock is limited to six birds, every turn can send you through the same row of bird powers, and food and birds even share the same cards. It’s still very recognisably Wingspan, but those changes made us approach our flock rather differently than we do in the original.
👥 1-5 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 25-35 minutes
📝 Designer: Elizabeth Hargrave
🎨 Artwork: Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo & Natalia Rojas
🏢 Publisher: Stonemaier Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Each player starts with a nest card, one egg and a reserve containing four food cards and two bird cards. Your flock begins with the nest and grows to the right as you play birds. In the centre of the table is the shared supply, consisting of four food decks with four face-up birds beside them.
On your turn, you choose one of three actions shown on your nest: play a bird, draw two cards, or lay up to three eggs. Once you’ve completed that action, you go through the birds in your flock from left to right and may activate their brown powers. These abilities are optional, so you’re free to skip one if using it doesn’t suit you. When you’ve reached the final bird, your turn ends and play moves clockwise.
Playing a bird means taking one from your reserve, paying the food and egg cost shown on its card and placing it at the right end of your flock. Food is paid by discarding food cards from your reserve, while eggs can come from your nest or any bird in your flock. If you don’t have exactly the right food, you may also spend any two food cards as one food when playing a bird. It’s an expensive exchange, but sometimes the bird you want just isn’t interested in what you’ve got.
Drawing gives you two cards from the shared supply. You can take two face-up birds, two food cards from the decks, or one of each. Birds and food are actually opposite sides of the same cards, and a card has to stay on the side on which you gained it. Food is therefore food and a bird is a bird once it reaches your reserve. Taken bird cards are replaced at the end of your turn, while you can draw food from the same deck more than once if you want to.
The third action lets you lay up to three eggs, but each egg has to go onto a different eligible card. Birds have individual egg limits and your nest can hold a maximum of three. Once you’ve placed an egg, you can’t move it somewhere else, although you can later spend it when paying the cost of another bird. Eggs that remain at the end are worth one point each. In the advanced game, two goal cards also score points for eggs on particular types of birds, and the same egg can potentially count towards both goals.
Most combinations between birds come from their powers. Brown powers can be activated each turn as you move through your flock, including the power of a bird you’ve just played. Green powers work differently and remain active throughout your turn. They can reduce food costs, make certain foods easier to use or affect other bird powers. Play continues until somebody has six birds in their flock. Everyone then finishes with the same number of turns before scoring the printed values on birds, one point for every egg and tucked card, plus advanced goals when they’re being used. Highest score wins.
Artwork & Components
Wingspan Pocket keeps the field-guide look of the original, with large bird illustrations alongside scientific names, wingspans and small facts about each species. Food costs, points and egg limits are worked in around the artwork without taking too much attention away from the birds themselves. I still like those little bird facts. They aren’t important to the game, but I inevitably end up reading them while somebody else is deciding what to do. At least I’m learning something while waiting.
The illustrations come from Natalia Rojas and Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, and they’re what our eyes naturally went to first. Most of the game information sits around the illustration or in the coloured power area at the bottom, leaving plenty of room for the bird itself. Food uses simple symbols, while brown and green backgrounds make the two types of bird powers easy to tell apart. Your nest also doubles as a player aid, with the three actions printed directly on the card.
The little eggs are also back, this time with gold speckles, and they stand out nicely once several have accumulated across a flock. Alongside them are coloured feather-shaped player tokens, which you move along your flock while activating birds. There isn’t much else competing for attention on the table, so most of what you’re looking at is birds, food cards and an increasing number of eggs.
Most of the size reduction comes from removing things rather than making everything tiny. There are no large player boards, and food doesn’t need separate tokens because the reverse sides of the bird cards handle that job. The box is therefore considerably easier to bring somewhere than Wingspan. Just don’t take the word Pocket too literally. The box may be compact, but once everyone starts building a six-bird flock, you’ll still need more than a tiny café table.
Our Experience
Our first game started more simply than I expected. We looked at the three available actions and wondered whether there was really going to be enough here to keep us interested. For the first couple of turns, there wasn’t much reason to think otherwise. We collected some food, played a bird and generally felt quite pleased with ourselves for understanding everything. Then more birds entered our flocks and we realised we’d been paying attention to the wrong thing. The action we chose was only part of the turn. What mattered just as much was everything our row of birds could do afterwards.
Sequencing was the first lesson we learnt the hard way. During that initial game, we mostly looked at whether two bird abilities worked together. At some point we realised we’d managed to put a useful pair in exactly the wrong order. One bird wanted to use something that the bird immediately after it would produce. They were technically a combination, just not a particularly successful one. Since birds stay where they’re played, we then had to stare at our mistake for the rest of the game. After that, we stopped looking at a new bird only for what was printed on its card. We started asking where it would sit in the row, what would happen before it activated and what could happen after it.
We were also too stubborn about combinations at first. Once we’d spotted something we wanted to build, we’d wait for the right bird or food to appear and try to make the plan work. Sometimes it did. Sometimes somebody else took exactly the card we needed. And sometimes the supply simply refused to cooperate while another player was happily getting on with things. After a few games, we became much quicker to take a useful bird or workable food from the supply instead of waiting for the card that would complete the combination we’d imagined. Green powers played a part in that change as well. A food reduction or more flexible use of a particular resource wasn’t always exciting when we first saw it, but we gradually valued those birds more because they made awkward hands easier to work with.
Another change was how much attention we paid to everyone else. Early on, we were mostly staring at our own birds. Later, we regularly checked the shared supply, what other players might want from it and, especially, how many birds they had already played. There isn’t much direct aggression here, and most of the time everyone is working on their own flock. Still, somebody reaching five birds changes what you’re willing to attempt. We had several moments where one of us started planning another couple of turns, looked across the table, counted five birds and immediately reconsidered. Some bird powers can involve everybody as well, but for us most of the interaction came from sharing the available cards and never being completely certain how much time another player would leave us.
That changed the way our games finished too. Early turns were usually about getting useful birds into place and seeing what we could connect. Later, we became less interested in preparing for some future turn and more interested in what we could actually score now. Eggs and tucked cards suddenly looked more attractive, while a bird we’d have been delighted to see ten minutes earlier could arrive too late to be worth building around. We didn’t make that switch early enough in our first games. Once we did, the final few turns became much less about completing the flock we’d imagined and more about getting something useful from the slightly strange collection of birds we’d actually ended up with.
Our Thoughts
After a few games, we stopped thinking of Wingspan Pocket as simply a smaller version of Wingspan. It removes the habitat boards, dice, birdfeeder and separate food resources, along with quite a bit of the administration surrounding them. What remains is the part we personally care about most: collecting birds, paying for them and trying to make their abilities work together. The double-sided bird and food cards are particularly useful here. They reduce the component count, but they also mean birds and resources are coming from the same shared card system rather than feeling like completely separate parts of the game.
Your flock also needs to start doing something useful much sooner than it does in Wingspan. In many engine-building games, we spend a while constructing an engine and then get several turns to enjoy the result. Here those two things happen at the same time. A bird you play can already activate during that turn, and with only six bird spaces you don’t have much room for something that might become useful eventually. We started caring almost as much about when a bird would become useful as what its ability actually did. Spending two or three spaces on abilities that won’t pay off until later can leave very little time to benefit from them.
The six-bird limit works for what Pocket is trying to do, although there were times when we wished it gave us a little more room. Sometimes the game finishes just as your flock reaches the point where you’d really like to use it for another couple of turns. If your favourite part of Wingspan is watching a large collection grow and repeatedly running an increasingly productive engine, Pocket doesn’t provide the same satisfaction. Six birds can feel restrictive, and there’s less room to recover from an early bird that turns out not to be particularly useful. I wouldn’t simply increase the limit, because that would change the game considerably, but there have definitely been times when I wished I could keep going.
The short game also means the cards that appear can matter quite a bit. Sometimes the supply simply doesn’t contain the bird or food that suits what you’ve already built, and waiting for it can be more expensive than changing direction. Food conversion and green powers give you ways around an awkward supply, but they don’t remove that uncertainty. For us, that’s mostly fine. We’d rather change which bird we’re aiming for than spend several turns waiting for the supply to produce exactly what we need, but players who prefer to decide on a strategy early and develop it with relatively predictable options may have a harder time here. Once everyone understands the basics, we’d also include the advanced goals. They give us another reason to care about where eggs are going without adding much extra work.
That leaves the obvious question of who Wingspan Pocket is actually for, especially if Wingspan is already sitting on your shelf. I don’t think owning one makes the other unnecessary. If we have the time and want to build larger flocks, develop longer combinations and watch them run several times, we’ll still choose Wingspan. Pocket is the one we’d bring out when we want those familiar bird cards and engine-building ideas without committing to the larger game. Newer players don’t have to deal with three habitats, the birdfeeder and the different action rows from Wingspan, although they’ll still need some time to get familiar with the different bird powers.
Wingspan Pocket doesn’t give us everything we enjoy about Wingspan, and the shorter format occasionally cuts things off sooner than we’d like. But it also isn’t trying to recreate the entire game on smaller cards. We enjoyed figuring out how much we could get from just six birds, changing plans when the supply didn’t cooperate and seeing how different our little flocks could become within those limits. I still prefer full Wingspan when we have the time for it, but Pocket has given us a reason to choose the smaller game rather than merely settle for it. Considering our first few turns had us wondering whether there was enough game here at all, that’s a pretty good place for those six birds to have ended up.
We received a copy of Wingspan Pocket from Stonemaier Games.
