![]() Each card even features a little factoid about the bird’s behavior, habitat, or conservation status. Icons display what food the bird eats, where it lives, what kind of nest it builds. A California condor, disheveled and grumpy in its black robes like a judge at the bench. A yellow-billed cuckoo perched on a twig, brows furrowed quizzically over its down-curved, golden beak. A white-throated swift slicing through air, wings extended. Inside a bright plastic container nestle 170 cards, each bearing a beautiful hand-painted image of a bird in action. The stars of Wingspan, though, are the birds. That company, Stonemaier Games, has now sold 1.3 million copies of the game and its expansions, plus another 125,000 digital editions on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and iOS. In 2020, as the pandemic drove Americans both into their homes to stare at their families and out into the woods to stare at birds, Wingspan blew up, outselling every other game its publisher makes combined. When it was released in 2019, it was an instant hit, and that was before everyone found themselves stuck inside during the pandemic. Wingspan, the game Hargrave designed and spent years testing with groups of friends, is the board game of the moment. And that led to another question: What did she like enough to want to make a whole game out of it? This led her to a question: Why weren’t there games about subjects she actually found compelling? Maybe she would design one, she thought. “At one point we placed a moratorium on games about castles,” she said. Thanks to Catan, Carcassonne, the Castles of Burgundy, and games like them, board games transformed from an industry aimed at children, dominated by Hasbro and Mattel, to an $11 billion industry in which adventurous companies and superstar designers make complicated, $60 games for grown-ups.Īs Hargrave played, though, she and her friends found themselves annoyed that all the games seemed to revolve around medieval villages, or trains, or trading economies in vaguely Mediterranean locales. ![]() And in Eurostyle games, players are never eliminated-unlike, say, in a game of Monopoly, where players who go bankrupt have to sit around and watch everyone else complete their conquest of the board. In “Eurostyle” games, players complete complex, evolving challenges more involved than simply traveling around a game board answering trivia questions or paying rent. She loved the math of them, the way they became puzzles: How many trains do you need to build a line from Winnipeg to San Antonio, or how many points will you get if you complete this six-tile walled city? In her newfound fandom, Hargrave was like thousands of adults who’ve rediscovered the joy of board games, especially as a new kind of game took over the market. ![]()
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