S1E3 - Wingspan (Birds)

Let's talk birds! In this episode we cover Wingspan, an amazing game by Elizabeth Hargrave and published by Stonemaier games. Also, Jason just got back from a conference and has tons of fun science facts to share.

One note: we had an audio glitch that resulted in lower audio quality than normal, which we didn't realize until after the recording. Quality will be back to normal next episode.

Timestamps

00:33 - Conference news about hemp, COVID evolution, and bird pangenomes
07:58 - Wingspan overview
12:50 - Making a bird sanctuary
21:04 - The power of corvids
23:40 - Assembling an ecosystem
26:47 - Actions, goals, and other ways to win
29:50 - Cornell Lab of Ornithology is awesome!
31:35 - Grades & wrap-up

Find our socials at https://gamingwithscience.net 

Game Results

• Game 1: Brian 65, Jason 81
• Game 2: Brian 71, Jason 85

Links

• Official Wingspan website
• Cannabis genebank - Zachary Stansell
• Bird pangenome - Scott Edwards
• COVID19 evolution - Lucy Van Dorp
• Cornell Lab of Ornithology
• Macualay sound library

Full Transcript

Jason  0:06  
Hello, and welcome to the Gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of the favorite games.

Brian  0:11  
In today's episode, we're going to discuss wingspan from Stonemaier games.

Hey, this is Brian.

Jason  0:23  
This is Jason.

Brian  0:25  
Welcome back to our third episode, we're going to talk about wingspan today. But before we get into that, Jason, do you have any science topics for us to talk about?

Jason  0:33  
So yeah, I am brimming with topics today because I just got back from a major conference. For those of you who don't know how science works, conferences are how academics exchange information and network and such. Yes, technically, we publish papers. And those are important. But everyone knows that most of the real work happens by in person meetings, being at a conference presenting things either in front of an audience or at a poster session or something. And there can be a mixed bag because scientists are not always the best communicators. But so sometimes, they're really good. And sometimes they're not. But the one I was just at is plant and animal genome, which is every year this time of year, and it is the biggest one in my area, which is agricultural genomics. So studying the genes and genomes of plants and animals. And there's just a ton of stuff. And so there was all sorts of cool things going on. There's someone in upstate New York, who works for USDA, who is assembling a collection of hemp to use as a germplasm resource. So basically, where people who are breeding hemp can ask for seeds, and they can use it to, to breed new varieties. You have to be affiliated with an actual company or research lab. So no, if you're just a private individual, sorry, you can't do that. They can't send it to just anyone who wants to grow some. I'm also pretty sure they're focusing on fiber varieties, not THC and the ones that give you actual highs

Brian  1:57  
Not yet anyway

Jason  1:58  
Not yet anyway. But yeah, as it continues to get legalized and assuming that trend continues, then yes, the USDA will eventually want to accumulate a large supply, because that's sort of the basis of what people used to breed. There was I can relate to today's topic, there was someone who has done a lot of what are called pan genomes of birds. This is where you don't just get one genome sequence, you get the genome sequences of a lot of individuals. And then you're able to compare a lot of differences among them, especially things that are there in one person's genome, or in this case, one birds genome and absent in another and how these can affect behavior and traits and stuff. The one I really liked, there was this woman from the UK, who really came onto the scene during COVID, because she studies viral evolution. So she's making use of all these 1000s upon 1000s of COVID sequences that were deposited during the pandemic, to study viral evolution in real time, where she can actually track down using mathematical models, how the virus was changing over time, how long it had been circulating, and based on her results confirms that, yes, it probably made the jump to humans sometime in September, October of 2019. And she really drove home just how much globalization is changing the way these viruses move around, because she studied the data from Britain, in terms of what the viruses were. And as far as her well, her and her lab, because she has a bunch of people working with her, as far as they can tell. By March 2020, so when everything really went to pot, there have been over 1000 independent introductions of the SARS- COV-19 virus to Britain by that point. It's not like there's a single patient zero who brought it in. I mean, this thing was just jumping plane after plane after plane and coming in and then just spreading like wildfire.

Brian  3:46  
Wow, that's interesting to hear about viruses. I know like in the agricultural context, you know, I study bacteria that infect plants, when they find an epidemic strain, and they check its history, it always seems to turn out Oh, that's actually been around for decades before it became a problem. So it's fascinating to see that that's not what happened here. As soon as it jumped to humans, it was a problem.

Jason  4:05  
That seems to be the thing with animals. These are called zoonotic diseases, which I think is just a fancy Latin term for "it came from an animal" that basically when they jump hosts, when they go from a pig to a human or a bird to human, or vice versa--she's actually studying the opposite direction too where we give diseases to our animals, which apparently actually happens a lot more. But anyway, when it makes that jump, suddenly the new virus or the virus, assuming it can actually make progress in its new host, which most of the time it can't, but the rare lucky one that can, there's no immunities against it, and so it just takes off. And she was saying how, like she's studying all this viral diseases and everything. But at the end of the day, there's actually not that much variation in the virus compared to most other viruses because it is still so new and so young. It's only been in humans for...at the time of recording, what, three and a half years, something like that.

Brian  5:00  
Something like that.

Jason  5:01  
So, anyway, it's still a very young virus in us. And then I mean, this is my own personal observation, but it seems like it's just here to stay. It's now just like the seasonal flu, it'll just be circulating around like all other coronaviruses we have.

Brian  5:14  
Yeah, we'll just have to get those shots every, every fall, probably forever now.

Jason  5:19  
Yep.

Brian  5:21  
Can I ask a question about the bird pangenome study?

Jason  5:23  
Sure. I can't guarantee I can answer it. But yes, you can ask.

Brian  5:28  
So you said that it is looking at sort of presence absence of genes in birds? Was this just like across all birds, or a population of one type of bird.

Jason  5:36  
So the one he specifically did was scrub jays, which are a type of blue jay, he was looking at three populations, there's a big one that's in kind of the southwestern United States, there's a small little population on some island off of California. And then there's another population on the south of Florida. And it I mean, who knows, I actually didn't have time to check, maybe at least one of these is actually in wingspan, but they...he was following the patterns of them and seeing that, yes, the big one has a whole lot more genetic variation than the little ones, as you'd expect. Small populations, they just tend to have less variation. And problematic, problematic genes tend to rise to higher frequencies, because natural selection is not very efficient Wwen you have a small number of individuals. It's much more efficient when there's a lot of them,

Brian  6:23  
Yeah, just random chance you end up carrying through bad genes, because you've got to work with the genes you got.

Jason  6:28  
Yeah, and the thing is like this, he's working on birds. But I know the human geneticists are doing the exact same thing. Actually, they're probably a lot more advanced than the plant and animal people are just because, like big surprise, human genetics gets a lot more money than those of us working on animals and plants. And so they tend to have a lot more tools. And just be, I usually say maybe five, five to 10 years ahead of the plant and animal community just because there's so many more resources there.

Brian  6:54  
It makes sense. But then how do you define your separate populations of humans?

Jason  6:59  
That's the thing, you don't really, especially not today with so much globalization. You could 20,000 years ago, not so much today. Why no humans are actually kind of the outlier this was brought home a few times is that we have a lot less genetic variation than most other species out there. Especially ones with our population size. And it's thought that we went through a bottleneck, I don't know, a few 100,000 years ago, where we got down to like, less than 1000 breeding individuals. So we almost went extinct before anything happened. But apparently, we got lucky.

Brian  7:33  
That sounds like a really cool basis for some kind of a novel or story of telling the story of when humans almost got wiped out.

Jason  7:42  
I don't know that we know enough information about it, though. Like I've only ever heard about it from genetic studies. I don't know anything archaeological, or anything like that. So I don't know if anyone knows exactly when it was or why it was or anything.

Brian  7:54  
Even more open for speculation then right?

Jason  7:57  
There you go.

Brian  7:58  
All, right. That was fun. Um, should we talked about this board game?

Jason  8:01  
Yes, let's talk about wingspan, which is a lovely board game. 

Brian  8:04  
Yeah. What a game. For science content purposes, for just fun, for overall quality for the enthusiasm of the community that is built around Wingspan, there is this enormous, enthusiastic, active community making resources for Wingspan, discussing strategies for Wingspan, optimizations, everything there, there is an app for Wingspan that replicates the full gameplay. This is quite the game. So Wingspan was designed by Elisabeth Hargrave. It's published by Stonemaier Games. It is for one to five players, which is the first game that we played that actually has a single player mode, I wish I'd had a chance to play that; I did not. The single player mode was designed by Automa Factory, which as I understand it, they design apps to allow board games to be played single player. Let's see...it is for ages 10 and up, which seems right and 40 to 70 minutes, which also seems right depending on how quick your opponent is and sort of taking...well we we've primarily played two player I imagine when you get up to the higher player counts, it's going to take longer.

Jason  9:04  
Yeah, probably there's only so fast that people can do. Although good players--and this is a tip for everyone out there--good players plan your move while other people are playing so that it doesn't come to you, and then suddenly you spend two minutes trying to figure out what you're going to do.

Brian  9:18  
I mean, that's that's just a general tip for any kind of turn based game, though, isn't it?

Jason  9:21  
Yes it is. And yet, it's surprising how many people I've played with don't get that. Especially in wingspan where you don't affect each other, the only thing you can do to someone else's steal a card from the draw pile.

Brian  9:32  
Yeah, that is a good point. And when we talk about the game plays like there are relatively limited interactions between the players, mostly you're sort of playing against the game trying to get as many points as possible. There's a few things where you do have to pay attention because if you do something, your opponent may do something else, right. You have to kind of interact from that perspective. Let's try to address the challenge of a audio medium for a visual, visual board game. What does this game look like? So in terms of display, it's relatively simple. Every player will have a play mat that is in front of them. I think most of this is done as watercolors. Each mat is divided into three sections representing forests, grasslands, and wetlands. And on that map, there will be places for five cards in each of those sections. You have two decks of cards, you have this thick deck of 170 bird cards, each unique, and a smaller deck of goal cards. You have the little cardboard tokens that represent five different types of foods, so seeds, berries, rodents, invertebrates, which are supposed to represent all types of invertebrates, not just bugs, but like based on designer notes also like aquatic invertebrates, clams or stuff like that. Let's see what am I forgetting? Ah, yes, fish, of course. Thank you. You have these wonderful chunky wooden dice, where each face represents some of those food tokens and this gorgeous foldable dice tower that looks like a bird feeder that you put in your backyard, which is totally unnecessary, but really fun to roll your food dice into. Little wooden egg miniatures, or little resin egg miniatures of different colors, which is great to have the different colors, they don't do anything. But it's really fun to be able to pick your favorite color, some action cubes, and then like a goal mat that I don't know if that's a good picture. But mostly this is mats and cards and a little dice tower. Right is how you play this game.

Jason  11:19  
Yeah, and the game. I mean, you alluded to this, the game is just beautifully designed the watercolors and the bird designs. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely done by people who care a lot about birds. I almost wonder if the popularity in that community you mentioned taps into that because I know birders are a very avid community. I'm not a birder. So I, I haven't done it. I don't really get it. But I know some people who are, and it just inspires a lot of enthusiasm and people. So I wonder if they're, the game is managing to tap into that somehow.

Brian  11:48  
I think it I think absolutely 100%, it does. Yes, the components, the quality of the components, they just they had a wonderful feel, the cards, the cardstock is thick, and it's got a wonderful sheen to it. Everything looks like it was designed with a lot of care and attention to detail. The decks come in a plastic molded holder with a tray that can hold all the cards. None of this is necessary. Like you could play the game with just cheap paper. But it's so much nicer that you don't have to, it just feels good to hold the well design materials hold the cards in your hand.

Jason  12:21  
No, I agree quality of game components is important. Board games are tactile. I mean, if you're playing the app, not so much. But if you're playing around the table with people, it's a tactile experience. And so the little visuals and the sensory things that make it so much better, really up the quality of the game.

Brian  12:36  
Yeah for sure. I do wish that the game was I think when you get used to it, it does take a little bit of time to set up. Like if I could just throw out the game and have it ready to go in a few minutes, I feel like I would play this every evening. We also have a cat so we can't leave the game out. So we have to actually then pack everything up and put it away. But anyway, let's talk about some of the science concepts here because this has layers to it. From a pure scientific concept perspective. I think I mean, this is bird facts that game. 

Jason  13:03  
Yes, I mean, look, let's start with what you got the metaphor of the game. So the game claims you're building a bird sanctuary and you're trying to build the most elegant bird sanctuary or the most beautiful one based on what you get. Mechanically, it's a worker placement slash engine building game, you choose which action you're going to do each turn, that says what you're allowed to do, and you're trying to build up the right combination of birds in the right places to get as many victory points as possible. So like, I don't know how much that those mechanics mesh with that metaphor, but the metaphor is a great package for having a whole bunch of bird stuff you're trying to do.

Brian  13:37  
I think okay, so so this was what I've been thinking about is if we think about the metaphor as exclusively the game play, I agree with you that maybe the way that the game is played doesn't necessarily tie directly and meaningful to the to the actual science, but this this entire game, how everything is set up is based on science. Let's start with the, just the core concepts. You've got ornithology, right, which is the study of birds, which is a sub discipline of Zoology. I said, Okay, great. So what what do you study specifically about birds? What makes ornithology unique? And from looking around one of the things and I think you already brought this up, one of the things about ornithology that is interesting is that it is a field where enthusiastic amateurs still make regular contributions to the field. So people who don't have a formal education from a university or a degree are still making important contributions to the study of birds, to ornithology. And that's actually reflected by Elizabeth Hargrave herself, the designer of the game, who does not have a science degree, although as far as I understand from looking at her biography, if we can trust Wikipedia as a as a valued source, I don't know why anybody would be spamming Wikipedia for a game designer. She did volunteer, she worked in a survey of stingrays like volunteered to do that, like an ecological survey, but she's a birder, that amateur enthusiasm for the study of birds is a huge part of this game. The other thing that we have here where it's sort of like it's inlaid into the game is ecology, right? And what is ecology? It's the study of living organisms, how they interact with each other and their environment. These are the kinds of layers that I see. The first is the player mat itself. So we've got these three different sort of habitats, the forest, the grasslands, the wetlands, the birds that you play have to have a corresponding food cost based on it is modeled based on what these birds actually eat. So you're essentially representing in a very limited sense, their ecological niche, what are their habitat and food requirements to be able to play them out onto the mat? So that, that's one layer there. And when we come to the cards themselves, one thing is every card has flavor text that basically represents actual bird facts. That doesn't really influence the game. But it is awfully neat, because sometimes they do tie together in interesting ways.

Jason  15:53  
Yeah, no, I, I that's one thing that I really liked about the game is how there are things you think wouldn't matter. They end up mattering, like every bird has its wingspan put on it. Like how big is this bird? Which seems like a just a random fact, except that are some birds, which are the hunting birds that when things trigger them to do, you will look at bird cards from the deck. And if it's smaller than a certain size, they basically capture it and eat it and you get to stash that for victory point.

Brian  16:20  
Yeah, or some of the goal cards for instance, will be based on collecting a certain number of birds under a certain size. Yeah, let's talk about the cards and everything that goes into the cards themselves. So oh, I didn't even mention this is...okay, we've only done three games. At this point. This is our third game. This is the only game I've ever played that cites its sources. Like in the design of this game, it says this, basically used the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Audubon Society to derive all of the facts about the birds that were used to design the cards. So what's on the card is a beautiful illustration of the bird itself, a point value represented to it. Now, there's actually no notes in the game about how those point values were derived. I think that these are based on the rarity of that bird. That would make sense based on the sort of overall design and metaphor of the game of attracting birds to your place. But other things that are on this card. One is, what is its habitat? Now the base game is explicitly birds that are native to North America. There's 170, unique birds out of like over 900 birds, so 170 seems like a lot. But it's still only only a small fraction of those. Other things are, like you mentioned the size of the bird, which does have real consequences. Other things that are just on every card will be what type of nest does it lay, with four different categories. A bowl nest is sort of classic bird nest, cavity nests...so birds that will lay nest inside of hollow trees or other similar situations. Platform nests, so you know, an eagle building that big sort of platform of sticks on top of something, and then ground nesting birds that just lay their eggs right on the ground. And then there's a wild card, which basically, well, this doesn't cleanly fit in anything else. So just counts as all of them. The number of eggs that you could put on the card is proportional to the real life number of eggs that that bird would lay. Not a one to one, but just like they must have been sectioned out into groups of just, you know, one egg to lots and lots of eggs, I think they go from zero to six. Let's see what else is on the cards. 

Well, my favorites are the birds that they don't have a nest because they lay their eggs in other birds nests. And then mechanics reflect that.

Exactly. And this is the other place that we get this. So we have all of these details about the birds that affect the mechanics, their habitat, their food requirements are all there. But then the birds will also like you said, sometimes they'll have abilities that are based on collecting food, or yes, you're right, the nest parasites that do not have their own nests, will have powers to lay eggs on other birds nests. So not every single of the unique 170 bird cards has powers that are uniquely associated with that bird, but easily half of them do. For instance, if the species is endangered, it will have all of the ones that are endangered have the same ability to draw two new goal cards. So it's like is that uniquely associated with them as being endangered? No. But does it basically key you in to this information that these birds are all endangered if they have this ability? The...every card has the common name and Latin name. You can't play this game and not learn something. I don't think it's possible. Whether you realize it or not. You have learned something about birds when you played this game.

Jason  19:36  
Yeah, and I think another great thing about it is that that's half the equation, is that the science is really top notch. The other half is that the gameplay is top notch. The mechanics work really well. So we didn't actually talk about how you win yet but the fact is, you're, you're trying to gather victory points, and there's many different ways you can do that. The birds themselves are worth points so you can just get a bunch of high value birds. Eggs you lay on the cards are worth points. There are ways to stash cards from the deck underneath them, those are worth points

Brian  20:05  
That stashing is based on two different things. Either the hunting birds will take that card that they capture and tuck it under. Or it's also representing birds that travel in very large flocks. So this is how like the metaphor of the ecology is kind of like with the stashing cards under cards. 

Jason  20:20  
Okay, I didn't know the flock part, that's good to know, that explains some of the other ones. Yeah, then you got your there's end-of-round goals that get you points, there are your own personal goals that are hidden from other players that get you points. So there's a lot of different ways to get points in this. And so there's a lot of different ways to play the game. The ideal, at least in my head is to try to build up some sort of engine so that when you do your actions, you're able to just generate points after points after points. I've only achieved this once. I got a card draw engine where, by the end of the game, every turn, I was drawing five cards, and tucking five cards underneath my birds and drawing five and tucking five. I'll be honest, like it was nice to do it, but actually got a little boring, because my last six actions were all the exact same thing.

Brian  21:04  
When we played, you had the crows, the crows allow you to develop a pretty powerful engine, too.

Jason  21:09  
Yes, that was a that's a general tactic, where if you can get the birds... So, each of the three habitats give you a different resource when you use them. So the forest gets you food, the grassland gets you eggs, and then the water gets you cards, and you need all of these, but you can only pick one each turn. And so by placing birds in each of those rows that get you resources from one of the other rows, you're able to get two things for one. And so I very early on in one of our games, managed to get in my grassland birds that could trade eggs for food, and birds that could trade eggs for cards. And so I pretty much just did that for an entire round to just build up tons and tons and tons of food and card resources, and then ran off of that the rest of the game and managed to get a pretty good score,

Brian  21:54  
You pretty much didn't have to do the collect food action at all, it was unnecessary. Like you were getting all of your food from the ability of trading eggs for food.

Jason  22:03  
Yeah, I could have but I didn't. Because I was using the middle row, I didn't really invest much in my forest. And so it's a pretty low payout. So this is one thing as you put more birds in your rows, they're more expensive to put there. But you get more from them each time. And so the game rewards you for filling out your ecology.

Brian  22:23  
And my wife and I actually played this game a lot when we were researching and she got really into it. And there is an app that you can play on your phone where you can play against an AI and normal two player game, play against someone else online or just pass the phone back and forth and play wingspan. I read that they have taken the crows out of the game. With the expansion at this point the crows were considered, they basically are banned cards like an overly powered card in Magic.

Jason  22:47  
I totally agree. The corvids are usually the most powerful. So the common crow and the raven...let's see, one of them, I think you can trade an egg for two pieces of food and one an egg for one piece. I think maybe the the one egg for one food might be fair, but the one egg for two pieces of food is definitely very powerful anytime. So hint if you're playing with that corvid, if it shows up, get it because it is arguably the most powerful card in the game.

Brian  23:14  
And again, how does the game represent that? They're the ultimate generalists. They can go into any habitat, they can choose any food, to play them. They have amazing abilities. They're smart, and like very Yeah, yep, makes sense to me. They're powerful. They're powerful birds. So let's come back to the metaphor of the actual gameplay. So this game integrates real biology, real ecology through most of it. Now, when you are assembling your bird engine, or, you know, recruiting birds into your bird sanctuary, you're, you're not really trying to assemble a functional ecosystem, per se, it's not like you would have a top predator and things that have a balanced use of different types of food resources or anything like that. So from that perspective, you're not building an ecosystem in the game. But you're building an engine, you're building something where the abilities of one creature interact meaningfully with another. So in a strange way, you're you almost are representing an ecosystem in a strange way of building a functional set of interactions between individuals that, I don't know, make them successful. I don't Is that too much of a stretch?

Jason  24:26  
It may be a little bit of a stretch, but I can get it. You're trying to get synergies going on. So things support each other. I mean, the thing we don't have is you don't have when suddenly you introduce a new bird, suddenly the existing ecosystem collapses because you managed to predate something to extinction or something like that. So these birds all play nice with each other. Whereas reality is messier. Let's put it that way. Yeah, people have this idea that like nature's all in harmony and everything, and anyone who actually studies ecology knows it's not like that. It's only in harmony because everything is pulling as hard as it can in every different direction and it all cancels out. So there's no, this mystical harmony of nature where everything respects and helps everything else. No, no. Like, everything is  out to get as many resources as it can. They're just stymied by everything else also trying to get as many resources as they can. And yes, that's not nearly as like, feel good. But it explains things a lot better.

Brian  25:21  
Yeah, no, cooperation in nature is tricky. Yeah. So this is not, okay, I was thinking about this. And I don't think that this is really fully replicating what you're what you're talking about, at the end, you introduce a new species, that everything goes crazy. In the expansion, because there are many expansions for this game, we only played the base game. But there are expansions that are the birds of Oceania that add Europe, that add Asia, the Oceania adds some new rules. And that's actually when they had to take the crow cards out because they became too powerful when coupled with some of these new rules. So from that perspective, when you introduce birds from different ecosystems together, the ecosystem breaks. So does that count?

Jason  26:04  
Yes, I think that counts.

Brian  26:07  
Sort of the unintended consequences of mixing species from different areas together. That's kind of the major science, I see four different layers. There's sort of record representation of ecological niches. There's all of the details on the bird cards themselves. There's the bird facts. And then there's just sort of a more nebulous, sort of, you're building an engine, which is a little bit like an ecosystem, right? Of course, an ecosystem doesn't just have birds in it.

Jason  26:30  
Yes, but you're eating all the other stuff. So it's tricky. It's technically they're just all gets eaten. 

Brian  26:34  
Yeah, that's very fair. Do we want to spend some time like talking about what the game feels like to play? I mean, I think we already addressed it a little bit, is there anything else you'd want to bring up about that?

Jason  26:47  
I think we've covered it. It's a worker placement engine building game, you have so many moves. And so the game actually has a very specific set time length, because you have X number of moves to carry now and I forget what it is like eight plus each, each round, you actually get one fewer moves. So it's probably somewhere between 20 and 30. You could calculate it out exactly,

Brian  27:06  
I believe you're right, the frustrating start with eight, sort of action cubes you use to declare what you're going to do. But at the end of each round, one of those cubes goes onto your scorecard. So as a consequence of that, you're always having one less action to take each round until I think when you're done, you only get I guess, five things or something.

Jason  27:22  
Yeah. Although presumably, by then they are five very powerful actions, right?

Brian  27:26  
If you've, if you've done a good job. I would always get into the situation where I'd get really focused on specific either public or private goals. And then I would have what looked like a lot of cards that were filled out, but then the face value of my birds was very low. And since the face value of your birds under a in a normal game actually makes up a huge majority of the points you'll earn. Oh, I actually didn't do that well. Even though I met all of my goals. Do you have a favorite goal card?

Jason  27:53  
I remember reading over them, some of them seemed kind of clever. I think there was one that was like "forward thinking" and you have the most, you have more than 10 cards in hand or something like that.

Brian  28:02  
That might be "visionary leader" where basically, you score points based on how many bird cards you have in your hand that you haven't played at the end of the game.

Jason  28:10  
There's just all sorts of different ways they've chosen to give you points. Birds that are smaller than an amount or bigger than an amount or that have cavity nests, or this or that. And I like it that they have two tiers on them. There's the easy tier and the hard tier, and the easy tier is usually pretty easy to get. And then the hard tier takes significant effort and investment, you're not going to just accidentally hit the hard tier of your goal. And it's worth usually about double the points.

Brian  28:34  
Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's a good point. Another thing I like about the goal cards is when you pull the goal card at the bottom of the card, it tells you what percentage of the birds in the game will be able to satisfy that goal. So if for nothing else, if you have two cards in front of you, you could say, well, this one only has 15% of all the bird cards can satisfy this. This one has 25% They're relatively well balanced. But But yeah. If say, I don't know, it's just a fun game. Like it's, it's competitive, but not in a way that where you feel bad when you lose, because you're kind of competing with yourself. 

Jason  29:05  
Yeah, it's one of those we're you're racing towards a common goal. And it's whoever races first, you're not really sabotaging each other along the way. I mean, it is possible to hate draft, to choose a bird card, you know, someone else is going to want, but that, that doesn't happen all that much. Because, one, there's just not that many options out there. And two, you that if you're doing it just for that purpose, then you usually have something better you can be doing with your move.

Brian  29:30  
Yeah, you'd be sacrificing your own ability to do something to stymie somebody else. So that's not really I know your playstyle is often wanting to mess with the other people at the table.

Jason  29:39  
Yes, I love messing with other people at the table. So that's why I love Robo Rally so much is because I got to mess with people. So I can't do that with the birds, other than trying to grab the corvids as soon as they come out. Before we close. I do want to give a plug to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. You mentioned that that was one of the sources cited. So the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is really cool. I actually lived next to it for about three and a half years when I was postdocing. Literally, there was a a gate in the chain link fence next to our parking lot that I could go through. And we could just walk through the trails and go by the wetlands and everything. But the thing is, it's really cool for anyone anywhere because they maintain a vast library of animal sounds. You can actually look up different bird calls, and I think mammals and amphibians, I'm not super familiar with it, but I just did a Google search. It's called the Macaulay, M-A-C-A-U-L-A-Y library. Anyway, they have a library of animal sounds and animal media that you can, you can work with, that you can listen to and just I assume it's used for naturalist purposes. There's probably some way of trying to identify stuff based off of it. I don't know. But it's just it's a cool resource that puts out a lot of public stuff. And I know when we were there every year, I think it was golden eagles. Some birds of prey would nest in the middle of their big pond, and they would have their little chick cam so they'd have a live webcam just mounted up in the tree so you can see the little baby chicks as they were hatching and fledging and everything.

Brian  31:07  
horrible little baby chicks.

Jason  31:09  
Okay, yes, baby birds are not particularly cute. Chicks. Like actual chicken chicks? I don't know. Maybe they've been selected for cuteness. Most of the ones I've seen are just super ugly.

Brian  31:21  
Until their feathers come in. Then they go, exactly.

Jason  31:24  
They get better then. But when they're just little naked, tiny dinosaurs, they're just super ugly. I'm sorry, baby birds do not look cute. Baby mammals do, baby birds, sorry, you got the short end of the evolutionary stick.

Brian  31:35  
Let's see. So let's do our, let's do our grades, let's do our scorecard. So let's start with the with the science. Now. We talked about this briefly. If this is not an A on science, I don't know what an A for science looks like.

Jason  31:50  
I agree. It's like this is A, A+ territory. Definitely. I mean, it, it sets the bar for what a science themed board game really should be.

Brian  31:59  
Great gameplay solid science content with like specific designer notes on, on how the real life science was integrated into the design of the game. I don't think you could ask for more. Okay, what about the, what about the fun? Where are you on the fun?

Jason  32:14  
I'm also going to go A. I mean, there's a reason this has such a huge following, is that it has very deep gameplay. There's a lot of different ways to play the game, a lot of different ways to explore it. There's enough randomness in terms of the bird cards that it's not like you can just get us, you always play the exact same way because, those super corvids we talked about, they may never show up in your game.

Brian  32:35  
I feel like, I hope I'm not just inflating this, but this is an A. This is, there's so much replay value. So much fun to play. I just, I wish the game was just a little quicker to set up so that you could just pop it down and play after dinner every night.

Jason  32:48  
There's an app for that.

Brian  32:49  
Yeah, there actually literally is an app for that. No, great game, really fun. And also while we're talking about plugs, I also wanted to thank our buddy Kyle for lending me the game for almost two months while I was researching it.

Jason  33:01  
Alright, well that seems like a good place to wrap it up. So we're going to close down. Hope you all enjoyed this. I hope if you are not a wingspan fan already then I hope you're willing to at least give it a try. And if you were, hopefully you learned some things. So with that we're going to sign off and happy gaming.

Brian  33:16  
Yep, thanks so much. Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya!

 This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.