Review: Wyrmspan:: Wyrmspan – a solo review – by Stidjen Plays Solo

by Stijnhoofd

Roar, the dragons roam the skies! Imposing though they seem, they are wanderers looking to settle in a nice, cozy cave. This is where you, brave dracologist, come in! From egg to hatchling to full-fledged ruler of the skies, it's up to you to make your caves the most welcoming and make the best contribution to the noble dragon race!

Name: Wyrmspan (2024)
Designer: Connie Vogelmann
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Play type: hand management, action selection, track movement, tableau building

What the game is about

Can you uncover the secrets buried beneath the mountains as you entice dragons to come and live with you and exploit their draconic powers? In Wyrmspan, you’ll excavate caves, summon dragons, and navigate among your dragons as you strive to be the best dracologist in the entire Dragon Guild.

How the game works

In Wyrmspan, you act as a dracologist trying to create an environment where different dragons want to live and hatch their eggs. It borrows heavily from its predecessor, Wingspan (to the point that I first thought Wyrmspan was an April Fools joke), but there are differences.

You start with a player board where you can play dragons. However, a dragon first needs a cave in which to live. Your player board consists of three different dragon habitats where you’ll play dragons from left to right. The first cave comes pre-excavated, but you’ll need to excavate the subsequent ones yourself. Each round you start with six action markers (or seven or eight if you’ve kept unspent ones from the previous round) that you spend to take actions on your player board.

* Excavate a cave in one of your three caves, playing a cave card from your hand.
* Entice a dragon by paying its cost and play it into an excavated cave.
* Explore a cave by moving your explorer meeple from left to right, activating bonuses on your player board and possibly dragon cards until you hit a stop sign.

There is a public display of both dragon and cave cards, but there are other spots where there is more player interaction. For one, we have the Guild board, where a random Guild tile is placed. You earn favours from the Dragon’s Guild as you move along this track. Once your marker reaches the top or bottom spot, you can place one of your cubes on the Guild board to either secure end-game scoring or gain a one-time benefit.
The game plays over four rounds, at the end of which there is a scoring opportunity for a randomly drawn tile (for example, who has the most dragons in the Crimson Cavern – the red cave on your board).

The solo mode is a low-upkeep Automa that bases its actions on movement around the Guild board track. You set up a deck of 8 cards, depending on difficulty and mode of play: the low-interaction general mode of play, or the medium-interaction Ravel mode. You flip a card that tells you how many spaces they move, ignoring all effects until they cross the top or bottom spot, which is when they either take cards or place a cube on the board.

At the end of the fourth round, the final score is tallied, and the winner is the one with the most points. The Automa scores for the cards it has collected (not their respective values; they have a multiplier based on difficulty) and cubes on the Guild board.

Theme & components

‘Wingspan but with dragons’ is Wyrmspan‘s most heard one-sentence summary, one that is both kinda true and horribly beside the point. It’s not a matter of picking a game on whether you like birds better than dragons or vice versa; if you like birds and pick Wingspan solely based on that, I’d say you’re missing out. Wyrmspan does a lot that Wingspan does, and in the end, they’re both card-based tableau-building resource games. They are both as thematic or unthematic as each other, although I feel Wyrmspan gives me a bit more thematic agency over what I’m doing here.

One thematic aspect of the game I need to address is the book of dragon lore, giving each dragon a thematic backdrop. Completely unnecessary, but I appreciate why Jamey Stegmaier chose to do this – it still gives you flavour text, like Wingspan‘s birds have, but without it cluttering the card. Do we need background info on non-existent creatures? No. But if that’s your justification, we can dismiss many games and their themes.

How does it play?

Let’s first discuss the elephant (bird?) in the room. We cannot discuss Wyrmspan in a vacuum; it stands on the shoulders of its predecessor. While Stonemaier Games’ marketing is sound, Wyrmspan would not have gotten the buzz it got if Wingspan didn’t exist. That doesn’t mean I will review Wyrmspan in comparison to Wingspan – but we need to at least acknowledge the fact that it got some looks purely for its name.

To be blunt, I think Wyrmspan is Wingspan 2.0 – it has more things going on. That does not necessarily mean that either one is a better or worse game than the other. The only thing you can assert from this statement is that Wyrmspan might be harder to teach to non-hobby gamers, although the solo mode of Wyrmspan is easier to operate than Wingspan‘s (more on that later).

So, let’s start the review with that premise in mind. If I look at my personal preferences, I think I like Wyrmspan better than Wingspan. The most obvious reason for that is that I feel building your tableau is much more consequential than it was in Wingspan. You need dragons, but also caves. The way you build up each cave is like building your own chain of actions for when you explore the cave – some dragons have an ability that triggers when your explorer reaches them. That, on top of what a cave naturally focuses on (resources, dragon cards, or cave cards) makes building your tableau much more consequential. I know that Wingspan has this, too; at least in Wyrmspan, I feel much more in control.

The Guild board is the biggest addition to the game formula that was absent in Wingspan. It is something you can fully focus on, grabbing bonuses and placing cubes as you go, or you take the occasional bonus should you happen to trigger them. There are I believe four different Guilds you can play with, but their effects aren’t terribly consequential. The track and its bonuses remain the same; it’s only what you can do with your cubes as you pass the top or bottom spot that changes.

The Guild board is also a good way to easily watch what the Automa is doing, since the Guild board is their only physical presence. I think this was a conscious decision on Automa Factory’s part; make the Automa both easier to operate, easier to watch, and easier to ‘predict’.

So let’s talk solo. Stonemaier Games continues with low-maintenance solo modes. They’ve come a long way from the flowchart monstrosity that was Scythe, and even Wingspan was much more upkeep than modern offerings – I’m talking Apiary, Expeditions, and also Wyrmspan. I like my solo modes to contend with me on goals, to go after the things I’m after, and to score points so that my own score feels meaningful and not just a beat-your-own-score exercise. It is just a matter of moving their marker on the Guild board, adding or removing a coin on the end-of-round scoring tile, and perhaps adding a cube to the Guild board or gaining cards from the offering. This is a significant advantage Wyrmspan has over Wingspan – after a while without playing the game, Wyrmspan is much easier to get back into than Wingspan is. It even has an alternative solo mode called Ravel Mode, which is more interactive. The Automa looks at how far along your caves are to determine how far it moves on the Guild board.

Wyrmspan is an action selection game at heart, but one that allows you to tailor those actions as you build out your tableau. That’s mainly true for your explore action, where your explorer meeple ventures further into a cave until they can’t proceed anymore, triggering all actions on dragon cards they come across. This is also present in Wingspan, but in Wyrmspan, it feels more impactful to me. The actions you can take and the bonuses you can trigger are more attuned to each other – or at least they offer more potential. I found it gave more consideration and possible reward to the already solid tableau-building of Wingspan, but more immediate and impactful. Not to mention the fact that you can’t play dragons everywhere; they need a cave to live in – an entirely different deck of cards with their own bonuses as well (when you play them).

I’d like to elaborate more on the explore action, because what I perhaps like best are the hatchling cards. These are small dragons that can ‘eat’ a resource every time your explorer passes them. Often, this is meat or milk – in other words, you are feeding them! The resources are stored on the card, and whenever you do, you get a small benefit in return. Each hatchling also has an ‘if this was the third time’ ability that gives you a better bonus. I love this so much! Hatchlings act like mini-quests for you to complete.

Another thing I appreciate is that you don’t have a fixed number of actions each round. While you gain a fixed number of tokens to spend each round, you can store up to 2 tokens for the next round. Furthermore, some dragons cost an additional action to play, and there are plenty of ways to gain extra tokens during your plays. This is another lever for you to pull, another switch on your board of options, that improves the feeling of control you exert during your games.

However, there is one obvious downside to this game system, and that is the amount of cards. Or rather than calling it a downside, I should rather call it a disclaimer instead: ‘Be aware that Wyrmspan has a large number of cards, and while there are ways to mitigate this, there is, therefore, a nonzero amount of randomness in the game through its influx of cards.’ There you go. Honestly, I have never found this a downside in Wingspan either; and with Wyrmspan giving me an additional sense of agency, I feel it even less here.

If I were to think hard and come up with a downside, it is that I feel that you can dig yourself into a hole in Wyrmspan (wyrmhole? Sorry). Because your caves require more attention than the habitats in Wingspan, you need to keep an eye on your resources and where you can get them. Because if you don’t, you might be forced to take a few sub-par actions and that could easily make your game spiral out into disaster. But again, to stress – this has happened maybe once in my (as of this writing) 10 plays.

What you might like

For me, this is an improvement over Wingspan – it improves upon the formula at no cost (except for introducing this game to new players, then I’d pick Wingspan still)
A tableau builder where you are in control of not only how your tableau evolves but also how you can exploit each cave – especially when you have hatchlings to feed – and create satisfying combo chains
The Guild board is another place for contention and interaction, plus it doubles as some sort of ‘Automa action indicator’ to give them some predictability
In line with other recent Stonemaier offerings, Wyrmspan‘s solo mode does what it needs to do to hinder you, but with minimal upkeep
Action management – you get a fixed number of action tokens each round, but there are ways to spend more than one at a time, and also ways to gain tokens during the game

What you might not like

This is a game with two large stacks of cards, so buyer beware – if you’re sensitive to the luck of the draw, this game might be troublesome for you
There is the possibility of digging yourself into a hole where you are forced to take sub-par actions and run the risk of ruining your game – but it’s a small chance

Conclusion

Wyrmspan is a fabulous game and a worthy successor to a game that, quite frankly, changed the board game industry. While the waves Wyrmspan makes are less profound, I think its design is better crafted for us hobby gamers. It has a low-upkeep solo mode and an engaging gameplay experience with long-term plans, tactical decisions, and lots of bonuses to collect. Move over, Wingspan; please hand over your crown to this here dragon.

Rating:

This review was first published on Stidjen Plays Solo. You can read the full review here.

Thank you for reading! My name is Stijn, and I write about solo games under the name Stidjen Plays Solo. For more reviews you can check out my blog, Facebook page, and a lot of board game pictures on my Instagram-account.

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Author Of article : Stijnhoofd

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