Wingspan is
overrated.

Let us begin with the part where everyone agrees. Wingspan has the prettiest bird art ever printed on a board game card. The engine, when it clicks, hums. The component quality is luxurious for the price. Your aunt who has never played a hobby game can sit down, take six turns, and feel like she did something clever. These are real wins. We are not insane.

Here is the problem. The game is a medium-weight engine builder dressed in the costume of a great game. And because it is the most-bought hobby game of the last five years, the entire community has agreed, by sheer momentum, to grade it on a curve.

Three real complaints.

One: the player interaction is a polite cough. You play four games of Wingspan. In each one you barely look at another player's board. You are not blocking. You are not trading. You are competing for a shared bird pool that, in practice, almost always has a bird you can use anyway. This is parallel solitaire with prettier art than most.

Two: round-end bonuses are a glorified coin flip. The end-of-round goals add randomness in the exact place a medium-euro should be tightest. Some games you score them by accident. Some games they punish a strategy that was working. Either way you are not really playing for them, you are reacting to them. The bird cards are doing the real work, and there are too many of them to plan around.

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Wingspan is the best executed seven-out-of-ten game in modern board game history. Calling it a nine ages badly.

Three: it does not punish you enough. You will rarely have a bad game. You will rarely have a great one either. The variance is smoothed out by design. That is great for teaching it to your sister-in-law. It is not great for the fifteenth play through, where you start to notice that the same five birds keep doing the same five things and the decisions feel familiar.

Why it sells anyway.

Because Wingspan is the right product. It teaches in under fifteen minutes. It plays in an hour. It looks beautiful on a shelf. It has female designers and ornithologists in the credits. It is the game most likely to convert a non-gamer into a sometimes-gamer. That is an enormous achievement.

But "essential first hobby game" and "best modern board game" are different awards. We keep confusing them. The latter belongs to something with more teeth.

Buy it anyway.

Yes. Buy it. Own it. Teach it to people who think Settlers of Catan is "too complicated." Just do not pretend it is the apex of the hobby. The apex of the hobby will draw blood, occasionally. Wingspan tucks you in.