Finspan

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the game shop there’s a new title in town circling your boat in the shape of Finspan. Does this name sound familiar? Well if you’re even vaguely familiar with modern board gaming then yes it will and you’d be correct to align it with the rather well known and popular Wingspan. 

So is this just a fishy version of Wingspan? Well in many respects yes but it’s been pitched as a lighter game with slightly less rules overhead. I’m not sure if the requirement for this game comes from feedback that Wingspan, which has had considerable appeal thematically to people outside the hobby, was still found to be quite a hurdle for newbies to get to grips with rules wise or if the designers just felt fish deserved the same attention as birds.

What you’re going to find with both this review and your time teaching this game to others is the use of the phrase ‘in a similar fashion to Wingspan’. So let’s start by talking about the general structure of Finspan, where in a similar fashion to Wingspan each player has a board depicting three different areas of an environment, which obviously here is an ocean instead of trees and grassland like Wingspan. Also as you would expect and again in a similar fashion to Wingspan this game is built around filling the different regions of this environment with fish, with certain fish only being able to be placed in particular parts of the ocean. The similarities don’t stop there as the general turn structure is also very similar with your available actions being to place a fish, or send one of your divers on a dive down one of the three available areas of your ocean board triggering actions on their way down and activating fish located along the route, sound familiar?

Unlike Wingspan you won’t be collecting food types here in order to place cards, the system of payment is often discarding cards from your hand sometimes along with eggs, yes Finspan also has an eggy currency, as well as some other requirements like consuming a smaller fish with the card you’re placing by covering it over, as long as the size of the new fish is bigger than the one being consumed. Interestingly your discarded cards are not lost to a general discard pile, they simply sit in stasis next to your board like you’re putting them in some sort of paddling and you often have a means of fishing through them (pun intended) and retrieving them back into your hand. 

In terms of the actions available to divers as they venture along their respective areas should you choose that action, are things like allowing you to draw more cards, lay eggs or hatch eggs into young fish with a final action being able to swim young fish around and group them together with other young fish to form schools. That’s right not only do you have fish on cards you also have tokens representing small individual fish and groups.  

The mechanism of grouping fish into schools is a pleasant spacial puzzle and offers a way of potentially scoring points throughout and at the end of the game. Each of the four rounds in the game ends with a scoring phase based against a different criteria, again similarly to Wingspan. This is often things like total eggs, schools of fish, etc and so timing the activation of gaining eggs or converting fish into schools can be tricky but very satisfying when it works effectively and you rake in the end of round points.

This style of staggered scoring can be positive and negative depending on which way you look at it. Gauging how well you’re doing against the other players at multiple points in the game can offer you a structured approach round to round on where to focus your attention to stay in the race, however on the flip side if after two or three rounds it becomes apparent how far back you are and that you’re effectively out of the race you then somewhat check-out for the remainder of the game knowing you can’t win. Having said that nobody in our games has ever really been that far behind in any given round to make this a large issue.

Finspan can feel like even more of a solo experience than Wingspan, as there is next to nothing you can really do to impact the other players progress. There is no open market allowing players to swipe cards before other players can get them and in its’ base game state no cards can have an action that will actively impact anybody else. Is this a bad thing? Well not necessarily as some people don’t particularly like having their progress hindered but you can sometimes feel that you’ve drawn cards which don’t really work with your plans, whereas someone else has and you can see they’re running away with it points wise with nothing you can really do to stop that. 

I suppose the vibe of Finspan and in many respects Wingspan doesn’t really scream mean gaming, more cosy competition, if competition at all as I’m sure some people might play purely to try and beat their own previous scores. For our group however we have enjoyed the Wingspan expansions that introduced some degree of player interaction to spice up proceedings.

Overall Finspan is an enjoyable experience, with solid mechanisms, relatively pain free setup and teach meaning it runs at an appropriate game length resulting in it being very easy to get to the table. The production and artwork are of a very good standard as you’d expect and it’s reasonably priced. The game can feel slightly safe, it didn’t ever really feel like you made an amazing play or a disastrous one, perhaps this was the area they wanted the game to sit in, more of a swimming pool than an unpredictable ocean. 

Really don’t want this to sound in any way negative as it’s certainly a decent game which is pleasing to play but there was perhaps just a slightly lukewarm feeling towards it instead of a passionate one, be that positive or negative. Would never turn a game down but also feel there wont be a huge push to play it a lot from our game group. However, our group Finspan owner did pick up a copy of the new Sharks and Reefs expansion from UKGE which hopefully will give this game more bite and encourage us to get our feet wet a bit more regularly. Feedback to follow!