Finspan

It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of Wingspan, I can say it was the first game I truly fell in love with. So much so that it started the trend of me playing full player count solitare, I would spend nights going around the kitchen island, playing all 5 players, doing different strategies, and seeing the outcome of it all. It made me feel like I'm a chess grandmaster playing different games all at the same time.

And by love, I do mean I kitted it out with all sorts of extra tokens, premium bits and pieces (golden ones too!), and played a ton of it. Logged 55 plays so far, my highest logged out of all my games, and I bet there were still games that I didn't log of Wingspan and others because I didn't start logging until a bit into the hobby.

For now let's focus on Finspan - this is the last of the "span" series spinoffs, but there will certainly be expansions for the three games that use the Wingspan system. Why does Finspan get a post written before Wingspan or Wyrmspan (yes, I briefly covered Wyrmspan during OrcaCon 2025 - Day 3, but I'll eventually do a full post)? Well, it's a recent release, so have to blame the excitement of playing a new game happening first.

In many ways, Finspan is a much simplier game compared to the other two. It focuses a lot on the hand management aspect and often you'll be spending cards in order to play fish onto your board. The twist here is that each player has a personal discard, so fish that you've spend for a cost aren't lost forever - in fact, its often the case that you'll play around the fact that cards are a cost and figure out ways to get it back so that you'll use it.

So gone is the extra layer of resource management and distilled to just cards, eggs, and young fish. There's also a focus on positive player interaction, with many abilities giving something to all players. When doing randomized end of round bonus tiles, only certain tiles go for certain rounds which is a double edged sword of less flexibility but at the benefit of avoiding difficult goals for the early rounds. Speaking of abilities, its a lot simplier now, as there's only "if activated", "when played" and "game end" abilities. The downside is that it very much is multiplayer solitare as there's only positive interactions with other players, otherwise you don't really care what anyone else is doing. Outside of the end of round goals everyone is swimming in their own lanes.

In fact, one of the major strategies in Wingspan has been almost pruned, which is the cross-habitat abilities. Since these are action economy games, you're often looking to get the most value out of each of your turns. Cross-habitat abilities in Wingspan let you take the main ability from one of the other engine rows, such as gaining food, eggs or cards, from a different row, so you were in essence avoiding to take a whole other turn running another engine. With Finspan, its a lot rarer to get those cross-habitat abilities. Often, the "if activated" abilities of a fish are locked to the same habitat. The design very much leans into pushing you to run the different habitats each round.

Out of the 125 fish cards of the base game, there are only a handful of flexible habitat "if activated" for the main habitat actions:

• 3 allow card draw, but 1 is locked as a starter fish
• 4 allow laying eggs, but 1 is locked as a starter fish
• 3 allow hatching eggs, but 1 is locked as a starter fish
• 5 allow for moving young fish and schools

That's not an inherently bad thing, clearly the designers were focused on making this a lighter and simpler game, and these aren't game-breakingly crazy compared to say the Ravens of Wingspan. But it does make strategy a bit more narrow, at least how it feels coming from Wingspan or Wyrmspan. And if your starter fish contains this ability, you definitely could have a leg up in doing more than your opponents per action.

And it is simpler - instead of the complexity of losing an action per round in Wingspan, you just have 6 actions for the 4 rounds, and there's technically one less "bonus scoring" round as the 4th round is always only end of game abilities. With Finspan you will only have 24 turns each game, that's two less than Wingspan - and while that sounds like such a small difference I can say Finspan feels a lot faster to play. This is probably due to the fact that you're usually not comboing off like you do in Wingspan and Wyrmspan with abilities and bonuses. Turns are simple, straightforward and quick.

I'll briefly talk about the solo experience, especially since I haven't tried the Ravel Mode variant. I like how simple it is: there's a set of cards that determine what Nautoma will do, and you get very familiar with how it operates pretty quickly. Each round you'll setup the cards with one less, so there's a little bit of variance in what they will or won't do each round. And its scoring is weighted more in the eggs, young fish and schools, which is very similar to how Wingspan Automa was. It's a very pleasant way to play single player Finspan.

Overall, I think the designers here achieved creating a family version of Wingspan, with a lower complexity which allows for an easier bar of entry. It also feels unique from the other two games with the way it does hand management, personal discards mitigating opportunity loss, and the whole hatcing fish and gathering them into schools for extra points give it a different feel compared to the other "span" games. For a game about the deep sea, I don't have the impression that the game is as "deep" as the other two, but I recognize that it wasn't trying for that either. It's still a great game, but in the back of my mind a part of me is already saying that it needs expansions for variety's sake.