Finspan is now the third full game in the X-span series, or the second spinoff of Wingspan, depending on your perspective, with all games sharing the same core mechanics of tableau- and engine-building with cards. Where last year’s Wyrmspan delved into the fantastical and provided a more complex playing experience than Wingspan does, Finspan goes in the other direction, simplifying some of the rules for a game that’s easier to learn and generally more forgiving without sacrificing what made the original so great.
If you couldn’t catch the hook from the title, Finspan is a game about fish, and players’ boards show three diving sites in their part of an unnamed ocean, with each ocean divided into three zones representing different depths—the sunlight, twilight, and midnight zones, top to bottom. Your player board is now oriented vertically on the table, the first difference you’ll spot from the other ‘spans, so divers will move down a column (dive site) when you choose that action.
In all of these games, players play cards from their hands to their player boards, paying an appropriate cost in resources, and in most cases one of three things happens: they gain an immediate, one-time benefit from playing the card; they gain a benefit every time the card is activated on later turns; or they gain a game-end bonus. In Finspan, the resources are much easier to manage and it’s impossible to go more than one turn without somehow getting enough stuff to play a card on the next go-round.
Over the course of the game, each player will take 24 turns, six per round (‘week’), playing cards and diving, then taking additional actions like laying eggs on fish, hatching eggs into young (you can tell they’re young because the fish icons are on their phones), and combining three young on one fish card to form a school. The resources you need to play cards are all listed in that last sentence—you may have to discard one to three cards from your hand, or discard eggs, young, or even a school. In Finspan, you can also play a fish on top of another fish, as long as the covered fish has a smaller … uh, finspan, listed in centimeters (because we’re not savages) on the lower left of each card. Some cards even require that you play them on top of another card, consuming the latter one, because they’re predator fish. Fish may be playable anywhere on the board, but many require that you place them in a specific zone or two, or into a specific column. Fortunately, the game relaxes the requirement that you fill spots sequentially, so you can play cards anywhere within a dive site as long as you’ve met the card’s criteria.
There are some other key differences from Wingspan and Wyrmspan that make the game easier to play for newbies. Player boards have three fish printed on them already, called forage fish, that allow you to take advantage of one zone bonus at each dive site before you’ve even played a card there. You start with two eggs and a young on your board, and with five cards, two from the deck of starter cards and the rest from the regular deck. You discard cards to a personal discard pile, and there is an action that allows you to go through that pile and take a card back into your hand.
The scoring is also streamlined, and I think easier to follow as you go along. Each fish on your player board (as long as it hasn’t been consumed) is worth some number of points printed on its face. Some fish offer game-end bonuses if certain conditions are met. You score one point for each egg or young on your fish, and one point for each consumed fish. You score six points for each school, so converting young to school before the game ends is usually an obvious call. And there are objectives for each of the first three weeks, with a simple side for beginners and then variable objectives for other players where everyone gets points if they’ve met it at all and the player who fared the best gets a 3-point bonus.
The result of all of these changes is that the game is faster to play than its predecessors, and thus shorter overall, and I think just generally more accessible. It also lacks some of the tension of the original Wingspan, where you always feel like you just barely scraped by on a move, or that you just needed that one more turn to get to the big points. It’s just much more forgiving about what you can do and where you can do it—when you get to lay an egg on a fish card, usually it’s on any fish card on your board, to pick one common example. The most ‘stuck’ you can get here is that you have to spend a turn drawing cards or laying eggs so you can play a card on your next turn; it’s not like Wingspan, where you might have to wait several turns for a specific food token to appear or just can’t draw a bird card with the right nest type. That alone makes it a better game to try with newcomers, those friends who come over and ask if you’ve played “the bird game” but maybe haven’t tried anything of that difficulty level yet themselves. Yet it hasn’t lost any of the fun of building an engine of sorts, even though you’re making it out of fish instead of birds or dragons,
Finspan comes in at the lowest price point yet of the three ‘spans, at $50 list on the publisher Stonemaier Games’ site. (Quick shout-out to Stonemaier’s reprint of Tokaido, an all-time top 100 game for me and one that never, ever should go out of print.) Wingspan is still the champion of this line of games, as it hits the perfect balance of weight and accessibility, but Finspan offers an easier way into the game for newer players, without sacrificing the aspects of Wingspan that made it such a global success.
Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.
