Wingspan rules refresher

Read the refresher

You are trying to score the most points by filling your preserves with birds and building engines of chained bird powers. You do that over four rounds, spending action cubes on four possible actions and stretching your food, eggs, and cards as far as they will go.

At setup, the bird deck sits next to the bird tray with three cards face up. All five dice go into the birdfeeder. Choose a side of the goal board: green, where players compete for first, second, and third place on each goal, or blue, where you simply score one point per targeted item. Shuffle the goal tiles without looking, and place one on each of the four blank spaces, random side up. Each player takes a mat, eight action cubes, five random bird cards, two bonus cards, and five food tokens, one of each type. You then keep up to five bird cards, and for each bird card you keep, you must discard one food token. Keep one bonus card and discard the other. Randomly choose a first player.

Play proceeds clockwise. On your turn you take exactly one of four actions: play a bird from your hand, gain food and activate forest bird powers, lay eggs and activate grassland bird powers, or draw bird cards and activate wetland bird powers. The three habitat actions all work the same way. Place a cube in the leftmost exposed slot of that row, take the benefit shown there, then move that cube from right to left along the row, activating any brown when activated powers on birds you pass, and finish with the cube resting at the far left. All powers are optional. The round ends when everyone has placed all their available cubes. You have eight turns in round one, seven in round two, six in round three, and five in round four, because one cube each round is spent marking your score on the goal board.

Playing a bird is the odd one out. Place a cube at the top of the column where the bird will go, and pay that column's egg cost by discarding eggs from any birds on your mat. The first column is free, columns two and three cost one egg, and columns four and five cost two eggs. Then pay the bird's food cost from the tokens beside your mat, never from food cached on birds. When playing birds only, you may spend any two food tokens as if they were one token of any type. Place the bird in the leftmost exposed slot of its habitat, up to five birds per habitat, and trigger only its white when played power, if it has one. Playing a bird does not activate the rest of the row.

For gain food, take dice from the birdfeeder, one food token per die, matching the icon. The die face showing two different foods gives you one token of either type, not two. If the slot you used shows a card to food conversion, you may discard one bird card from your hand to take an additional die, chosen from what remains in the feeder. If the feeder is ever empty, throw all five dice back in. And if all dice in the tray show the same face, and you are about to gain food for any reason, you may first re-roll all five.

For lay eggs, take eggs from the supply and place them on birds on your mat in any combination, but never more on a bird than its egg limit. Any capacity you cannot use is lost. If your slot shows a food to egg conversion, you may pay one food token to lay one additional egg.

For draw bird cards, take cards from the three face-up in the tray or the top of the deck, in any mix. There is no hand limit. If your slot shows an egg to card conversion, you may discard one egg from a bird on your mat to draw one more card. Refill the tray only at the end of your turn.

Remember the three power colors. Brown is when activated, triggered right to left as you use that habitat. Pink is once between turns, triggered on an opponent's turn, and only once between each of your own turns. White is when played, and only then. Food cached on a bird cannot be spent.

At the end of each round, remove all action cubes from your mat, score the end of round goal, discard the face-up bird cards and replenish them, and pass the first player token clockwise. Every player places a cube on the goal board even if they score zero. On the green side you rank by quantity, and you need at least one of the targeted item to place above zero. If players tie, both cubes go on the tied place, the next place is not awarded, and at game end you add that place and the following place or places together, divide by the number of players tied, and round down. On the blue side you score one point per item, up to five.

The game ends after round four. Add the points printed on your face-up birds, your bonus cards, your end of round goals, and one point each for every egg on a bird, every food token cached on a bird, and every card tucked under a bird. Most points wins. If there is a tie, the player with the most unused food tokens wins, and if still tied, they share the victory.

A turn, played out

It is round 2, and you have 4 cubes left. Your wetland row already holds 2 birds, so a new wetland bird lands in column 3. You place a cube at the top of that column. Column 3 costs 1 egg, so you take 1 of the 2 eggs off a forest bird, leaving it with 1. The new bird costs 1 token of one food type and 1 of a second. Beside your mat you hold 1 of the first type, none of the second, and 2 tokens of a third type. Your grassland bird has 1 food cached on it, but cached food cannot be spent. Because you are playing a bird, you spend those 2 matching tokens as the missing type. The bird slides into the third wetland slot. It has a white when played power, so that fires now, once. The brown powers on the 2 older wetland birds stay quiet, because playing a bird never runs the row. Next turn, you draw bird cards. Your cube lands in the fourth wetland slot, to the right of all 3 birds, then walks right to left past both brown powers.