Wings the board game: a review

This is a review of Wings the board game that I played with SA and NA et al.

It must have been the fact that most of us were playing it for the first time but the game progressed quite slowly. It's one of those 'engine building' game where the 'engine' is the operation of the game. You collect three types of resources, leveraging lots of one to buy more of other, and keep buying 'upgrades' to increase the rate of collection of resources. As you collect more resources, you can use them to further speed up point collection, and further accelerate resource collection. The randomness of the die often throws a 'wrench' in your strategy: if you're focusing on 'eggs' for example in this game, and get unlucky so the die rolls end up helping with 'bird' resource, the player needs to change their tacks, but it's always a game of chance, depending on how the rolls might come in.

I thought I was winning, but in the end I came in second. This was due to another player, who had played the game before, collecting an abundance of eggs, a strategy I was not aware of for optimizing the values of the rolls toward the end of the game.

The game isn't terribly hard to learn, we ran through two initial rounds and I got a good sense of the rules and mechanics.

Maybe it was that all of us were really tired and sleepy on an unusually cold night, but the energy had drained out of the group halfway into the game. Regardless, this was a pretty decent game, even if I didn't find it as enjoyable as Catan or Ticket to ride. Something fun to play with a younger board gamers more likely!