Finspan Review

Whether you’re sick of -span games or not, Finspan is here, and you know what? It’s good. Good enough that someone who has never played Wingspan (read my review here) or Wyrmspan should get it? Yes. Different enough to Wingspan to buy it if you’ve already got the bird version? Maybe, but it depends on a few things. Let’s get into it.

If you’ve been living under a hobby rock for the past few years and have no idea what Wingspan is, let me enlighten you. It’s a game about collecting birds in the form of cards, adding them to a tableau/engine in front of you, and doing your best to score lots of points in the process. It was a smash hit for designer Elizabeth Hargrave, owing to its theme’s widespread appeal and apparent approachability. In a nutshell, Finspan is the same thing, but with fish instead of birds. Crack that nut open, however, and there are plenty of differences under the surface.

I caught a bluegill! Do you think it calls me “pinklung”?

The most obvious thing you’ll notice when you play Finspan if you’ve played Wingspan or Wyrmspan, is that it’s a lighter game. Not to the extent that it feels like a massively cut down version of its siblings, but it definitely removes some of the things that might prove too much for younger players. For example, in wingspan you have the bird feeder and the necessity to take and spend food to play more birds to your tableau. That entire part is absent from Finspan. Instead, to play fish to your board you have to discard cards from your hand, or spend some of the eggs or fish you have on your board.

You still have lanes to place your cards in, but this time they’re vertical instead of horizontal, which lends itself to the fishy theme. Fish may be from close to the surface, from the deep, or somewhere in-between, but they still belong in one of three columns. In Wingspan you have to fill those columns (or rows as they are) from left to right, but in Finspan you place wherever you like, as long as the fish is valid e.g. a deep-sea fish cannot be at the surface. In the bird version, the bird cards had to match the habitat types, but in fishgame the majority of the cards have no prescription as to whether they have to go in the left, right, or center columns.

The equivalent of predation is when big fish eat smaller fish. A couple of tiddlers are pre-printed on the player boards, which is great because people with less experience of modern games may not plan ahead and find themselves with predators that have nothing to eat. I really like the way that a fish gets placed on a smaller fish card to eat it, but then later a bigger fish may eat both of those by going on top, and then a bigger one again. It’s all very through the planet core, Phantom Menace fans.

Other than that, it all feels very familiar. On your turn, you either play a card from your hand to your board, potentially triggering a ‘when played’ ability, or activate all of the cards in one of the columns, top-to-bottom. Instead of moving a cube from right-to-left in Wingspan, you move a little diver meeple from the top, adding a little thematic touch which is really nice.

Merger talks

If you’ve got a smartphone, there’s a good chance you’ve played at least one ‘merge three’ type game. Whether it’s animals, buildings, plants, or whatever else, the concept is the same. Push three of the same thing into a space and they transform into a single, bigger, better thing. Finspan borrows this mechanism and does so with another thematic flourish of its flippers.

Eggs get added to your fish cards during the game, which later hatch and become young. Young are single fish which, through different actions, get pushed around the board. They move rook-style in straight horizontal or vertical lines. If you manage to get three of them into the same space, they come off the board and get replaced with a school instead, and schools can be worth big points at the end of the game.

From a thematic point of view it all kinda works. You discover fish in your part of the ocean, those fish produce eggs, the eggs hatch into young, and the young group up to make schools. There’s nothing too abstract for new players to have to get their heads around, and I like that. Like I hinted at before, I wouldn’t say Finspan is a dumbed-down Wingspan, but there’s certainly less mental overhead. I played my first game of it with my son and he got it straight away. He knew what he had in his hand, he knew what the scoring conditions were in each of the four rounds, and he could formulate a plan to make it happen. He’s 12 and coping happily, and I could see 10-year-olds coping without too many problems too.

Final thoughts

There’s not too much to say about Finspan, other than to say it’s a solid game which will appeal to both fans of the other -span games, and to people who like fish. That might sound like a bit of an odd qualifier – to be a fan of fish – but I found myself attached to more varieties than I realised. Thanks mainly to extended periods of fishing in Animal Crossing during lockdown, but it still counts. I love it when people draw cards and get excited when they see what they’ve drawn.

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It’s a lower-quality production when you compare it to Wingspan. The boards and cards are lovely, but gone is the cardboard bird feeder, and gone are the lovely eggs and dice. Instead, cardboard counters make up the eggs, young, and school tokens, with the option of buying an upgrade pack to get the nice bits. It’s not a problem if you’re not expecting anything, but my initial thought when opening the box was “Oh, that’s not as good as Wingspan”. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s worth knowing.

Finspan is lovely, though. The artwork on the fish cards is gorgeous, the variety of fish is nice, and the player boards are really nicely illustrated. It’s easy to explain, easy to pick up and play, and a lot of fun. It’s a great family option, and a great option for fans of lighter games. The gameplay loop is simple enough to learn with plenty of scope for tacticians to tune their engines to milk the most out of every turn. If you can pick it up for around £30 or so, I think it’s great value for money. There’s almost certainly going to be expansions with more fish in them, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to resist.