Major Update - December 2023

[Deimos187]

Personally I agree with this, I feel that needing to keep track of things (for example the number of egg spaces available) is an integral part of the game. The interface does also now feel rather cluttered.

Please add me to the list of people who think this is going backwards rather than forwards. I applaud fixing bugs but please do not fix things that are not broken. The original adaptation was VERY faithful to how one plays in real life and all the information was already there. Now the information has been doubled or tripled, the same information just appearing in many places so it is harder now to keep track of everything and clutters the board. What makes strong and expert players in this game is being able to keep track of your opponents birds, their powers, guess their bonuses and anticipate their moves. Without this ability the game is just a game of luck. Having all this "extra help" just babies the game and makes me not want to play anymore.

Maybe we are in the minority, I don't know, but at least let me be able to get rid of the blue cartographer, historian, photographer icons. I already changed as many setting as I could to make it look more like before the updates, but I was not able to get rid of this one.

People complaining about this is kind of silly to me. Nothing made it more difficult for you to play. Just easier for newer players to learn.

"Now the information has been doubled or tripled, the same information just appearing in many places so it is harder now to keep track of everything"

I've never seen such a good example of someone contradicting themselves. How could having the same information in multiple places possibly make things harder to keep track of? When I'm driving and I see three different traffic lights at an intersection and they're all facing me over three different lanes, I don't complain that there should only be one light, I know that each light is there because sometimes there's a large truck in front of you and you can't see one of the lights. Sometimes redundancy can be really useful.

Thanks paramesis! I look forward to playing the updated version!

What's silly is essentially axing a large skill component of the game which is reading the board state effectively. Openly presenting this information significantly reduces the skill aspect as represented in the physical board game and leans everyone much more heavily into the luck component. This is a serious backslide for players of higher skill. Again, I'm not poo-pooing the entire patch--bug fixes, some automation, and the ability to go through the discard pile and discarded bonuses are truly welcome. I simply feel that whoever coded these changes went too far.

And that isn't me being elitist. Here's my elitism: I may cancel my premium membership over these changes.

[Winn81]

Thanks for these updates, they are a great improvement and I'm more likely to play Wingspan on BGA as a result.

[Mathew5000]

I fell it took a lot of fun and complexity out of the game and simlified it a lot. It deffinitely changed the games mechanics, which is the bad part of the update. Before you should track everything that is going on, now you automate it and take fun out of it. Will likely to play less

No game mechanics have changed at all.

Instead, what you're saying is that it makes it much easier to evaluate the game situation because some of the things you had to keep re-figuring manually and keeping mental track of, are just written there for you. For example, instead of painstakingly counting how many empty egg spaces you have remaining, over and over, and re-counting to make sure you didn't get it wrong, now you can just look at a number. Instead of having to repeatedly look at all your cards one by one to count how many have a color on their name, and repeating the count to make sure you didn't mis-count, now you can just hover over the bonus card and highlighting makes it really easy to count.

These are EXCELLENT changes. The make the game much more fun by removing some of the more frustrating and tedious aspects of it. They make the game much more accessible to new people who are trying to learn a lot of rules all at once. They avoid the bitter feeling of making wrong moves because you made a mistake counting something - which feels awful when you do it, and adds no value to the game at all.

Well said, Cos. I agree 100%.

[Cos-]

What's silly is essentially axing a large skill component of the game which is reading the board state effectively. Openly presenting this information significantly reduces the skill aspect as represented in the physical board game and leans everyone much more heavily into the luck component. This is a serious backslide for players of higher skill. Again, I'm not poo-pooing the entire patch--bug fixes, some automation, and the ability to go through the discard pile and discarded bonuses are truly welcome. I simply feel that whoever coded these changes went too far.

And that isn't me being elitist. Here's my elitism: I may cancel my premium membership over these changes.

That makes no sense to me at all. It's not "skill" to spend your time counting stuff repeatedly, it's just tedium. NONE of the skill based aspects of the game are affected here: Skill in this game is choosing your birds, deciding what to play, planning your moves, choosing the right bonus card and planning your play for the bonuses, choosing where to place your eggs, and so on.

It's not a game "skill" to be able to count how many eggs someone else has in platform nests and how much you have, to determine who is ahead for the round bonus. Stuff like that is just unnecessary work, but it's something anyone can do if they spend the time and mental effort to do it - and the result is always some fixed number or answer at any given moment, it's not something you're choosing and having to make the right choice about. None of this increases the luck component of the game - luck in this game is mainly a) what cards get drawn, and b) what food gets rolled. It's not "luck" if someone else makes a mistake in counting eggs, that's just rotten and makes the game worse. It's much better if nobody ever accidentally miscounts, and then you have to rely on _actual_ skill in the game rather than on hoping someone else makes a counting mistake.

I'm honestly a little bit happy to see people who hate this aspect of the update saying they'll leave, as I suspect those are people who would probably be less fun to play with.

[Ze Monstah]

Tiny issue: Before (I think even yesterday), I could hover over a bonus card (or a bird card) and that card would appear zoomed-in (for instance, the bonus card with the current points it brought). Now, this zoom-in doesn't appear anymore.

Any idea if a change was made (to paramesis) or if some settings need to be made?
I currenly have:
- display log BENEATH;
- display tooltips DISABLED - I am not even sure what these tooltips are;
- confim ALWAYS;
- background PAPER;
- auto-activation buttons SHOW;
- hand location BELOW MAT - not sure what this hand is;
- bird tray display LARGER CARDS;
- current goal ranking DISPLAY;
- high resolution ALWAYS;
- initial food discard CHOOSE FOOD TO KEEP;
- animations DISABLED - not sure what those are;
- shadows DISABLES - not sure what they are;
- interface WINGSPAN STYLE.

So any idea how/if the zooming of the cards can be made possible again and what those things in the settings are? Thanks in advance.

[Sherob]

Really loving the new and revised version with the updates. Well done BGA.

[paramesis]

Tiny issue: Before (I think even yesterday), I could hover over a bonus card (or a bird card) and that card would appear zoomed-in (for instance, the bonus card with the current points it brought). Now, this zoom-in doesn't appear anymore.

Any idea if a change was made (to paramesis) or if some settings need to be made?
I currenly have:
- display log BENEATH;
- display tooltips DISABLED - I am not even sure what these tooltips are;
- confim ALWAYS;
- background PAPER;
- auto-activation buttons SHOW;
- hand location BELOW MAT - not sure what this hand is;
- bird tray display LARGER CARDS;
- current goal ranking DISPLAY;
- high resolution ALWAYS;
- initial food discard CHOOSE FOOD TO KEEP;
- animations DISABLED - not sure what those are;
- shadows DISABLES - not sure what they are;
- interface WINGSPAN STYLE.

So any idea how/if the zooming of the cards can be made possible again and what those things in the settings are? Thanks in advance.

The first two preferences are built in by BGA and appear on all game implementations. If you want to see the zoomed in cards when hovering, set display tooltips to Enabled.

"hand location" refers to your hand of bird cards and bonus cards. The options are to have this located below your player mat, above it, or docked to the screen so it stays in the same place when scrolling.

animations and shadows are preferences related to visual features. With animations enabled, cards and dice will move graphically on the screen. Shadows can improve visual clarity on many elements, including text. The implementation looks better with these enabled (before this update they were always on), but they may cause performance problems or overheating on some devices.

[Ze Monstah]

Tiny issue: Before (I think even yesterday), I could hover over a bonus card (or a bird card) and that card would appear zoomed-in (for instance, the bonus card with the current points it brought). Now, this zoom-in doesn't appear anymore.

Any idea if a change was made (to paramesis) or if some settings need to be made?
I currenly have:
- display log BENEATH;
- display tooltips DISABLED - I am not even sure what these tooltips are;
- confim ALWAYS;
- background PAPER;
- auto-activation buttons SHOW;
- hand location BELOW MAT - not sure what this hand is;
- bird tray display LARGER CARDS;
- current goal ranking DISPLAY;
- high resolution ALWAYS;
- initial food discard CHOOSE FOOD TO KEEP;
- animations DISABLED - not sure what those are;
- shadows DISABLES - not sure what they are;
- interface WINGSPAN STYLE.

So any idea how/if the zooming of the cards can be made possible again and what those things in the settings are? Thanks in advance.

The first two preferences are built in by BGA and appear on all game implementations. If you want to see the zoomed in cards when hovering, set display tooltips to Enabled.

"hand location" refers to your hand of bird cards and bonus cards. The options are to have this located below your player mat, above it, or docked to the screen so it stays in the same place when scrolling.

animations and shadows are preferences related to visual features. With animations enabled, cards and dice will move graphically on the screen. Shadows can improve visual clarity on many elements, including text. The implementation looks better with these enabled (before this update they were always on), but they may cause performance problems or overheating on some devices.

Got it, thanks. So with the red DISABLED ones changed to ENABLED, all should work perfectly now.

[Adasaur]

Overall I appreciate the work that went into this and a lot of this stuff does make it easier (and quicker in some cases). I really appreciate the automation of certain actions; it makes a lot of sense to me and cuts down on unnecessary losses of time. Overall the new display helps a bit too; I've played Wingspan a lot since discovering it this year and would like to introduce my friends to this game (via BGA) so having the highlighted info should help a lot with that. There are a few things I have aesthetic issues with (I don't need the bonus card icons though I believe they're on the actual cards in non-English speaking regions so I understand their inclusion) but they're minor and I think there's a way to turn most of them off.

My main complaint so far (aside from a bug fix that was resolved on day one) is that inclusion of the Swift Start Pack isn't the default setting. Almost every table I've seen in trying to join a game since the update happened has excluded those birds and I don't know what reason one would have to be against more birds!

[JohnRM]

The egg-laying pink power automation should be enabled by default, requiring the player to opt-out rather than opt-in. It's a great feature but is pointless if no one actually uses it.

It's probably even a slight edge keeping it off in turn-based mode as your opponents will have a tendency towards a less optimal play if it means they don't have to wait for you to click on a bird to complete the rest of their turn.