| 👨👩👧👦 | Players: 1-5 |
| ⏳ | Time: 45-60 Minutes |
| 🎂 | Ages: 10+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Card Placement, Engine Building |
Fishie-span…ahh I mean Finspan, is the third game in the Wingspan universe. Set in the ocean, you play as a marine researcher whose job is to discover new fish as you explore the murky depths.
Finspan is played over four rounds of six turns each. You only have to decide between two actions, adding fish to the board or going diving. There are 3 dive sites, each focused on giving you a specific type of benefit. The blue zone gets you cards, purple gives eggs, and green lets you turn eggs into young. There’s no specific action to collect resources, instead cards are paid for with other cards from your hand, eggs or young, all of which are easy to get.
In the basic game you’re working towards a standard set of goals, but there are also variable goals you can swap in to keep things fresh. We added these in after our second play and really liked the extra tension they added to the game.
We also like how cards are discarded to a personal stash out of your hand, and that there are actions to recover them. This lets you use those large fish to pay for others early on, knowing you’ll have the chance to get them back.
To our mind the best part about Finspan is that they’ve added a spatial puzzle to it. Schools are a new mechanism and whenever you get three hatched eggs (young) onto the same card you trade them in for a school. Worth six points each, these can really make a difference when it comes to scoring time. Much like schools in general though, it’s not all fun and games, because it adds another layer to think about. Where you place eggs, which you convert to young and where you take them from when you need to spend them all come into play. It might make my head hurt a little, but I found this extra puzzle really engaging and it adds a lot thematically as well.
Our one complaint is that it’s a bit of a table hog, with the boards being quite long. It works thematically, as you’re diving deep into the ocean, but I’m not sure we could play with more than four space wise!
While we both still rate Wyrmspan as our top spaniverse game, without a trout Finspan is a worthy addition to the lineup. It’s a fintastic adventure that is also a little lower in complexity than the other games so would be especially suited to newer gamers.
Thanks to Stonemaier Games for the oppor-tuna-ty to give this a try!
You can see this post on Instagram here and if you are interested you can find out more about the game on the Stonemaier Games website!
The copy of Finspan used for this review was provided to A Tale of Two Meeples by Stonemaier Games
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