Wingspan

I had it on Steam, as it arrived there before I could get it on GOG. It's a relaxing way to spend time, and the way it's constructed is psychologically gratifying. You're not competing to destroy your opponent, or dominate them; you're trying to do what's best for your birds, and grow them as well as you can in a connected ecosystem. There are random snippets about the birds you play for informational purposes, and the tweets and warbles are cheery and bright. Can be played solo against the game's AI (which varies from "slightly competitive, to be enjoyed with a mug of hot chocolate" to "Quite canny, to be enjoyed with mugs of coffee and a good degree of concentration and thinking". And as mentioned, can be played against other people, with a lot of time between turns to sit and think with no pressure. Don't know many people to play against? No problem. There's a Discord channel full of people who want a nice relaxed game.

I own the board game with expansions, I bought the digital edition because its a really good digital version of the board game. And I want to say Thank you developers(Respect) that you not only make themes for Christmas, but also make themes for Ramadan. Thank you, never seen any other developers do what you did.

I really enjoy the gameplay of Wingspan and the digital version is a good translation of tabletop experience. The AI is fairly easy to defeat but I generally want a more chill experience from the game anyway. A few months ago I would have given the digital version 5 starts but... I stupidly installed an update and now the startup process is slower and every time I start the game there's an advertisement for one of the DLCs. I don't and never will play Wingspan online and the PC I play it on isn't even connected to the network. The startup process being slower while it attempts to connect back to base and the ads seriously undermine my enjoyment of the game to the point that I will just play another game about 50% of the time. It has ensured that I won't buy any DLCs.

We got to play this game via Steam Remote Play last night and it worked great. We had never played the board game version, so we went through the tutorial first, and to be honest we were a bit overwhelm, but once we got started it all came together and was really easy to play. The animations and added flavor of bird knowledge mixed with calm music and natural sounds was so relaxing. The game itself has some great mechanics and the random scoring goals keeps the game different on every play. There are many ways to win overall and the draw of the cards can drastically change your approach. This game was a pleasure to play and one that I will come back to over and over. Here is our video if you want to see it in action, it includes our thoughts on the game right at the start, then the game session.