![]() ![]() Their art is the first thing most buyers will see. Stegmaier honored Hargrave’s commitment to accuracy by commissioning artists Natalia Rojas and Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo to do original bird illustrations, a bright collection of lifelike colored-pencil works. “There’s something about birds that instantly captures a human desire to collect, sort, and admire.” “I knew within a few minutes that Elizabeth had something special,” he said in an email. The game’s confluence of theme and play mechanics caught the attention of Jamey Stegmaier, co-founder and president of Wingspan publisher Stonemaier Games, when Hargrave pitched it in 2016. And Horned Larks in Wingspan can form point-producing flocks, as the real birds do in winter. Northern Harriers and Barred Owls can earn points by preying on smaller birds. Brown-headed Cowbirds can boost a player’s score by adding eggs to other birds’ nests, just like they do in the wild. The game lasts about an hour, and the player with the most points wins.īirds are the stars of Wingspan. Every aspect of the game’s strategy and scoring draws on their real-world behaviors and traits, such as diet, preferred habitat, and nest shape, which she gleaned from Audubon's field guide, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and other sources. It’s what’s known in board game parlance as an engine-building game-one in which players try to create an increasingly effective system for generating points. Up to five players take turns placing these cards into their appropriate habitat, collecting food, laying eggs, or drawing new cards, with each action unlocking new resources. The heart of the game is its deck of 170 illustrated bird cards, each depicting a North American species. Wingspan players take on the role of bird enthusiasts aiming to attract avian visitors to their wildlife preserve. “It's been a long time in the making, and it's just mind-blowing to see pictures of this game being played all over the world,” Hargrave says. Now, her debut board game Wingspan is one of the industry’s hottest titles for 2019 and is netting rave reviews. “Why,” she posed to the group, “are there no games about things we are into?” That conversation led Hargrave, a health policy consultant in Maryland, to a realization: She should make one. All their friends were similarly outdoorsy. Hargrave and her husband loved nature, and had recently started birding. But at one such get-together in 2014, a question began to nag at her: Why did it seem like all the games were about Mediterranean traders, medieval castles, or galactic conquest? For Elizabeth Hargrave, it doesn’t get much better than gathering around a table with her husband and their friends to play board games. ![]()
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