Wingspan
reviews and complaints

This helped me understand the mechanics in the real life board game, a deck-builder with tons of depth. Wonderful job translating to iOS. There is a ton of complexity but the presentation mostly helps bubble up what you’re supposed to be doing next and establishes the rhythm. After a few play-thrus, when you finally get a good bird engine going and figure out which goals to hit, you can pump out resources in really nicely. That said, the NPCs and separate Automata AI’s can be ruthlessly efficient as you ramp up difficulty, making for a good challenge. My only ask would be to add a Text Size option—the thin tall font can be a challenge for older eyes, even on an iPhone Max.

Great game! It’s fun, engaging, strategic, beautiful and keeps your attention throughout. I do have a few suggestions for game improvement, however:
1. Consider having the sound match the habitat, like leaves blowing in the forest, bugs buzzing in the field and babbling brook in the wetlands;
2. Allow players to choose songs or other nature sounds in lieu since although the songs are beautiful, they're repetitive;
3. The AI is really slow… about 5 seconds each AI player. Can that be sped up to more instantaneous?; and
4. Add more birds, like flamingos, snowy owl and how about a tribute to the Ivory Billed Woodpecker? How cool would that be?

Thanks for considering!

Steve

I got this app when it first came out. I’ve been obsessively playing ever since. Unfortunately, the new update had rendered the game unplayable. The first game I set up with a friend crashed every time I tried to take a turn. Eventually we figured out we had the same exact starting hand! Next time I tried to start a game it wouldn’t let me because it said I had 10 open games, I only had 7. Now trying to start another game with my partner. Won’t show up for him. He starts one with me, but it won’t show up for me. Before the latest update the game occasionally glitched for me. Now, it’s unplayable. SO FRUSTRATING! Especially given this app and it’s expansions are NOT cheap. But clearly the software is.

The game is a great adaptation of the board game. Easy to play and always a pleasure.

Two bugs: first after completing a game vs. automa the score tallies up and you have a choice to go back to menu or replay etc. After clicking a choice the app just locks up and I have to force close it and restart.

Second I believe there is an error with the Photographer bonus card which gives points for birds with colors in their names. However, when I played the “Black-chinned Hummingbird” the count of birds triggering that card did not change. I believe it should since it contains the name of a color and there is a similarly named bird, “Black-billed Magpie”, that does trigger the bonus card.

These are the only things I can see keeping it from a full five stars.

First off, some of my fav games on iOS are Istanbul, mystic vale, magic the gathering, smash up, stardew valley, prune, frost, magic the gathering, brawl stars, so I cover the gamut of games. I wanted something that requires some strategy without needing to sink too much time, and wingspan fit the bill.
The art work is gorgeous. The learning curve is a little steeper than most of the games above, but no worse than Istanbul / smash up / mystic vale. And the game is rewarding insomuch as when you start to get it, you’ll catch the flow of whether to cede rounds for the win or run the table for points.
Games take about 5 min or so, sounds great, overall well worth the price.
Also If you’re an animal lover, they’ve also layered in great info on the actual birds.

I’m conflicted, and thus rating three stars because while the game is beautiful, the illustrations on the cards, the habitats, even the menus,
I feel like the tutorial is a bit rushed for the density of gameplay. I believe that the games I’ve lost thus far (4 out of 4 played in addition to the tutorial game)
were lost partly to just rng luck which happens in any good card or board game, but I think on the other side it was because I didn’t have a handle on the rules because the tutorial walked me to the door and then left.
While I don’t expect a hand holding clicker by clicker experience, a more detailed description of the game might suffice for the extra two stars.
I hope the developers will consider these requests but otherwise amazing attractive game!

This game is awesome and beautifully made. Playing against automatic or AI is really sweet. Online is kind of a mess. The matching is based on “karma” which is great in theory. You gain a point for finishing a match and lose 5 if you quit early. Unfortunately you will ALWAYS lose the 5 if your game glitches out, but frequently don’t get credit for a finish. You also get no credit if an opponent quits, even right at the end. So for example, my karma got knocked down into the low 30’s almost right away. Since I have played 50 games and only gained 2 karma. I’ve finished 5-6 against players, and all of the rest someone else quit first. If that happens, karma should be granted to those who are still in. Fix this and it’s 5 stars. Also would really love some kind of ranked play. Still well worth the money!

Have enjoyed this game a lot.

A few minor quibbles I’ve noted:

It would be nice to be able to get more detail about the achievement requirements. On my iPhone a few of them don’t have the whole description sentence visible and the one for playing 5 raptors in one game seems to be using a definition of raptor that seems odd to me as I played Coopers Hawk, Burrowing Owl, Peregrine Falcon, Osprey, and Bald Eagle but did not receive the achievement.

Even more minor quibble is that the bird animations seem to have been done without any reference to the actual birds as several of them move in ways that are entirely incorrect for the bird. For instance one of the woodpeckers rotates about the middle of the body while “pecking” at the tree with the tail coming way off the tree trunk whereas in reality a woodpeckers tail is the brace against the tree and so never would lose contact.

The custom games are fine and fun, just like the board game.

But the online play is almost physically painful.
You get “karma” points for playing a game through (plus one point) and quitting a game early (minus five points). If someone quits that you’re playing with you get nothing. If the game glitches, you lose the five points. Often another player will stop playing but if their turn is before yours it will glitch and you will be blamed and lose the five points. And then you’re only matched with people of a similar karma level, so then you are constantly matched with people who quit the lower your points go. It’s terrible. And sometimes the buttons on the online play won’t work. I’ve been playing for three days, never quit a game, and am down to 31 karma points due to the terrible system.

It would be worth the money if the online play was fixed. Right now it’s just frustrating.

The Good: Beautiful game! User interface is pretty straight forward and I learned to play easily. Love love love the games graphics, sound design, and attention to UX details in its port of the non digital version.

The Bad: AI too easy. I never played the non digital version so I was totally new to the game. Since downloading it, I have played every difficulty level and number of AI opponents. Even at max difficulty and number of opponents, I still win by 25pts+ every time. I’m a beginner and yet I’ve never lost.

The Ugly: Online Multiplayer is UNPLAYABLE! I have attempted to play online numerous times and every time, some error, hang, or uncompletable event occurs to one of the players and they time out. I have yet to be able to complete a game or even make it to the third round before failure. These problems are mentioned all over the games discord suggestions or bugs section.

If these problems get sorted out, I’ll be happy to change my rating to 5 stars.

I love the board game version of this, and I just got the app yesterday. But having played several times on my phone and on my iPad I’ve found that multiple times when I’m tapping to start my turn it thinks I’m tapping that I want to gain food. And it won’t let me go back, so even though that’s not what I had planned to do on that turn I have to get food. Why is there no back button at that point and why is it so touchy that when I start my turn it thinks I’m getting food? Also there should be an easier way to give feedback within the game itself. But writing a review seemed the only way I could do it.

OK now I feel like I need to add to this review. I went back and tried to be so careful when I tap to start the turn but it still kept happening. Also I can’t figure out an easy way to pause the game or get out of the app. I feel like I really wasted my money buying this app because it’s so frustrating I don’t know that I’ll play it again.

How can I contact you directly to request a refund?

I keep trying to play a full game and when people are taking there sweet time I can’t take it. I just end up falling asleep. I’m trying to enjoy this game because by round 3 I know the game speeds up but not when your opponent’s take way too long to do one quick thing. I enjoyed the physical copy of the game so much more. If I could get a refund that would be nice. I won’t be playing on the phone anymore. People are just inconsiderate. I can’t take it when someone takes that long. I understand maybe a minute but come on every turn they need a long time to decide. It takes me less than 30 seconds to take my turn. I would like a refund. I’m going to stick to games like dominion where people actually play the game. It’s sad because I feel like using your whole deck in one turn in dominion was faster than someone deciding to gain food or to draw a card in wingspan. The board game gets 4.5 stars when facing the right people. This mobile game is getting a 1 star from me. I never leave bad reviews.

Fantastic visual and background music. A great game to play on my 12” iPad. I’ve spent countless hours on it. Such a modern classic!

Great app as it is now, personally there are a few things that can use some improvement.

1. I often play with the automa and hard AI. Doing this is to save time, compared to playing with human players. However, the calculating speed of these AI is very slow. It can take 20-30 minutes to finish a game in a 4-5 player game. Can you shorten the calculation speed? They are computers.

2. As popular as this game is right now. I think this game should perfect itself even more utilizing its strength as an app!

First of all, there should be a play log available of each finished game for players to improve their gameplay.

Secondly, there should be a special experimental mode where players can choose and arrange to get the cards they want in order to test out their strategies. Along with the game log feature, I believe this mode will be heartily welcomed by all experienced players. Of course, this experimental mode should only limited to the games with AI.

The biggest and longer standing issue - the 5 minutes per action is absurd for live play. It leads to people fitting this in around other tasks instead of sitting down to focus on the game, and then I have to get up and do other things around the house instead of sitting idly 90% of the game. So instead of a game taking a quick 15 minutes it can take 45.

What should be changed about this? The starting turn selecting cards can be longer (2-3 min). All other turns limited to 1 min (or maybe 1.5 for people who like to track all the boards and anticipate future actions). This might not be ideal given that sometimes you need to calculate more, so maybe it works like chess and you have a sum total time to use for all your turns and if you run out, you lose (altogether, or suffer a point penalty). One other very simple fix, all other actions that aren’t your main turn should be limited to 15-30 sec (instead of every time a hummingbird gives each player a resource from the feeder, having to wait 5 minutes for each selection).

Those changes would make for a more lifelike experience of everyone playing together at the same time. Maybe there could also be a 5min for all turns version for people who want to be sluggish, but I bet most of us want to play in real time and not spend 45 minutes idly waiting.

As for the other critique about the glitches, since the mandatory update the other day, the game experience is a lot worse. Twitchy, crashes a lot, many bugs not fixed. It was a much better experience before.

My gamer friend said he was bummed that the end game was always about “laying eggs”, which is true sometimes, but not always. I’ve been beat by the AI with amazing tuck engines.

If none of that makes sense, it will and it will be fun. This would be lovely to play in person but it has advantages over the physical. First the music, bird sounds, visuals (animations) and the backgrounds. All of this adds to the experience. Physical board games take up shelf real estate, require someone to come over (something that’s been hard of late) and lots of pieces to set up. I love a good physical board game but sometimes digital is amazing.

This may also be the perfect game for the times. Is it just me or has everyone in the city gone crazy? Angry, driving reckless and distracted. Road rage at an all time high. This game is such has such a great soothing factor that I have to point that out. You forget when you don’t get out in nature what things like bird sounds do for you spirit.

I have not tried the multiplayer. I often don’t but if I do I’ll come back and update my review to cover that.

Oh, also, in terms of speed of gameplay, this is pretty zippy when playing solo. I always feel like it’s over just a hair too soon, but that has usually been because I’m laboring with an inefficient “engine” (tuck, food cache, card draw…the many mechanics that intertwine to make an “engine” if you will). Leaning into that concept is how you get better and better. Also, really start to pay attention to how you get beat by the AI and look at their boards. It pays to pick some strong cards early and get them on the board.

Not sure what has happened but this most recent update has broken the game. I had 2 games I was playing online in a-sync and they disappeared after updating and never came back. And just now I was playing a game and me and my buddy both had 1 more turn left - it showed 2 blue cubes and then out of nowhere it was round over... not sure what happened we both texted eachother that we lost a turn...

I wanted to love this game but there’s a glitch in the tutorial so you can’t learn how to play it. When I reached out for support from the developers I got no response. If I can’t figure out how to play the game (tutorial essentially freezes when instructing you on how to lay eggs), what’s the point of getting the game? Now I’ve spent $10 on something worthless and not even sure how to get my money back.

The game is gorgeous and I'm impressed at how the packed such a complicated table top game onto a phone screen.

With that said, I get a lot of games the get into various crash loops. It's very frustrating to get most of the way through a game then not be able to finish.

I even deleted and reinstalled once. Not only did it not fix the problem, I lost all my collected bird cards and preserve records...

We play this game in board and digital versions. BEWARE the 5 minute synchronous mode. The game will time you out with an online error and then you will get kicked out of the game and lose 5 karma points, which purportedly affects your ability to be matched with other similar players. I have contacted the developers and they REALLY don’t care. Too bad they’re not more interested in the UX of their game.

I like the game but…
1. It can crash while in game.
2. Frequent errors in end of round bird/egg count that mess up order of finish and resulting points.
3. If you switch out to another app and come back it often freezes.
4. If you close the app you can’t return to your game. No save/ resume.
5. Because of #2 above, I presume the end of game point total can be off, although I haven’t totaled all the points manually.

I love the game and the setup is well done. However, when playing the online version with 5 minutes per turn it is awful when your opponents take the full 5 minutes every turn. Either reduce the time to 2 or 3 minutes per turn or stop the app from shutting off completely and needing to reload when it is your turn and you’ve navigated elsewhere on your phone while annoyingly waiting for your opponent to finally play.

On my first game, it wouldn’t let me play even my first bird. I had to get out of that game and start a new one. On the next game, I got three birds played when it suddenly stopped letting me get food. I paid $9.99 for this!

I just did the update and it didn’t help. After I play a bird, it’s still my turn and I can’t do anything else. This works on the switch, but it’s not working on my phone. I want my money back!

The game itself is always fun, but the recent series of updates has led to so many glitches that the app is starting to seem unusable. Random crashes in the middle of the game have been common, which is annoying but manageable, but after the most recent update I am no longer able to resume those crashed games after reloading the app. It’s hard to get interested in starting a new game when there’s no telling if I will be able to finish it.

Absolutely love this game! Whether it is the physical game or app it’s great. Currently though I have been having problems with crashing while playing online with friends. I’m in a game currently that has not been able to move forward because of consistent crashing. Everytime I try to pick a food from the bird feeder with my turkey vulture the app completely crashes. I’ve tried everything at this point and nothing seems to solve the issue :( please help!

iOS app has not notification badges which make it almost impossible to know if it’s your turn in multiplayer games. New update makes online play forever to load. Have to force quite and retry several times before app opens online portal of app properly. Also when setting up multiplayer games it’s always a 50/50 chance if all the players will be able to join the game properly. Have to re-invite all players several times often before getting a game that works.

This was my favorite game to play on my phone and iPad, and even purchased the expansion. However, the new update completely bugged out online play to where I lost all 8 of my current games I had going. They all disappeared completely, and starting a new online game also bugged out. Considering the harsh penalties for quitting/timing out a game, if I lose karma for all 8 games that disappeared I will never play this game again :( very unfortunate bc I loved this app

I love the board game, so I was willing to put up with the app crashing several times a game, often multiple times in a single turn. But I had to uninstall it after realizing why my battery was suddenly draining insanely fast. And simply uninstalling it wasn’t enough; I had to go through settings and manually delete the app, watching the battery drop another percent about every minute through the process of figuring out how to do so. Once it was finally fully uninstalled the battery stopped dropping.

I have played this game 4 times single player, and it has crashed every time near in the 3rd or 4th round. Good thing it saves the game, but I will echo the other reviewers sentiments in poor coding. By comparison, a similarly priced digital board game adaptation on iOS, Root, which is also a complex game, has only ever crashed once in a year of gameplay.

Also, having to buy Wingspan in every platform is a greedy pricing model. The counter example is Catan, which is a buy once, play any platform sort of deal.

I love this app so much. Got it after getting addicted to the board game version. I play the app all the time and am absolutely obsessed. Lately, when playing online 5-minute per turn games, it will get “stuck” showing it as another player’s turn and will not move on to show when it is my turn. I try leaving the game and coming back to see if it will reload. But then the game just crashes and when I reopen it, I get a notification that I took too long on my turn and have left the game and lost karma points. How can I report this issue so it can be fixed?

I cannot invite players by name, I always receive an error: player not found. We have tried adding each other as friends on Game Center, rechecking the names, changing names, restarting, completing an offline game, etc. I simply cannot play this game with my wife on our respective iPads because online player invites do not work.

Until this mess is fixed I have to give this a 2 star review because it simply is not working.

You’re better off playing this on Steam or maybe Android assuming that version doesn’t suffer the same exact issues as iOS.

I’d return this game if I could.

I love the board game and was thrilled to find the app. But it takes all the fun out of playing because the app is so buggy. I’ve had three games with a friend ruined in the past week - two that got stuck on an AI player that wouldn’t play, and just now one where my very last move won’t go through, the app crashes every time. Even in games where I don’t get stuck indefinitely and get to finish, the game constantly crashes. Over and over. I really wish it were better, but at this point I need to take a break because it’s so frustrating. Hopefully they find some folks to fix the never-ending kinks.

Wingspan itself is a great strategy game, but this version has many functionality problems. Sometimes the number of turns remaining does not display properly and even increases between turns. Sometimes the game abruptly ends even though the final round hasn’t yet happened. It often crashes at the final score screen right when you click on the button to save or discard the match. These errors were not present in earlier versions of the game, but have become persistent annoying bugs that seem to be getting worse.

Since the game developer has no tech support or contact method, leaving this text in the review is way to get their attention.

I absolutely love this game and refuse to delete the app because we play it so often and love it. However, the app is HORRIBLE. It’s incredibly buggy and glitchy and I’ve had so many games where I didn’t get cards dealt to me or I got to cache food 10 times because it said another player laid eggs 10 times which is impossible or I get an error code and then am no longer able to open the game so I can’t finish it, etc. SO. MANY. BUGS. 2 stars because I love the game, but this app itself deserves 0 stars honestly. Plus it’s gotten worse over time. It was totally fine when I first downloaded it like a year ago, but it is significantly worse than it used to be.