The best birding board game on PC is getting a sequel about dragons, which are like cooler birds

4 hours ago 1
An illustration of a dragon spreading its wings. (Image credit: Monster Couch)

I love Wingspan, a birding-themed board game with a humdinger of a digital adaptation, but the hardest part about pitching it to board game skeptics is that they're rarely tantalized by the theme. "Why would I play a game about identifying God's most illustrious creations," they whinge. "I want to play games about exciting things, like purchasing hotels and English vocabulary." Well, I finally have the silver bullet I needed to shut those saps up: dragons.

On Thursday, a trailer dropped for the PC version of a sequel of sorts to Wingspan: Wyrmspan, which appears to play similarly but trades in all the tufted titmouses for wyrms and wyverns. As "an amateur dracologist," each player throws down cards with different point-generating effects while trying to build the biggest tower of synergies before the game is over. Like Wingspan, you can play in a group of up to five or go it solo.

I haven't played the physical version of Wyrmspan, but it has an impressive 8.0 rating on boardgamegeek, where it's also scored at a "medium light" complexity. Just to be clear, this isn't an expansion or an "expandalone" situation, so don't expect to plug in any Wingspan DLC you might have picked up—this is a new game with new mechanics.

I'm hoping its visuals are as lavish as the digital version of Wingspan, which, as PC Gamer's Jonathan Bolding noted in his review, boasts a "stunning attention to detail, and a layout that serves the experience of playing on a PC over mimicking the tabletop game." While it can be sufficient to play a facsimile of your favorite board game on Tabletop Simulator, it's always nice when a videogame adaptation stands on its own merits.

Wyrmspan has no release date just yet, but you can wishlist the game on its Steam page.

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Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid. As time has passed, he's amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky '90s esoterica. Whether he's extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it's hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples. When he's not at his keyboard, he's probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat. Any day now...

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