March 31, 2025
Pair A Dice Games Corner
Wyrmspan
When Wingspan hit the shelves in 2019, it quickly became one of the most popular games in the world. In 2024, when Stonemaier Games announced Wyrmspan, everyone thought it would be the same game but with dragons. Everyone was wrong.
On the surface, Wyrmspan and Wingspan have a lot of similarities. Add your dragons to your board to make your actions better and score points. Lay eggs to score points at the end of the game, and tuck cards to score points. But that's where the similarities end.
We start with how actions are taken. Every action in the game has a varying cost of one coin plus either resources or eggs. You are given six of these coins every round and can carry them over between rounds. This allows for more explosive rounds in the late game and some rewards to be coins.
Player boards represent caves that will home your dragons, but aren't fully excavated. You must take a new action, excavate, to play out the new cave cards to open up the slots for your dragons. Cave cards give rewards for playing them, resources or cards, or reputation. Reputation moves you along the new guild board.
The guild board adds more ways to gain resources, eggs, cards, coins, or by adding a cube to the guild board. This board adds limited spots that players can vie for to gain limited powers or victory points. These new ways to gain resources give more freedom to your actions, allowing you to play into the engine-building fantasy.
All of this comes together to a game that I dare to say is better than Wingspan. I have already bought into Wingspan, with all of its expansions and the storage box, but I may never play it again with Wyrmspan in the mix. If you were against Wyrmspan, thinking it is just a reskin of Wingspan, it isn't. If Wingspan wasn't your game before, try Wyrmspan.
