What Is A Good Wingspan Score?
A good Wingspan score is the one that wins you the game. Each game, how well you score comes down to several factors such as:
- How good is your starting hand?
- How good are the cards that you draw during the game?
- How generous is your opponent with resource sharing, specifically food?
- How well did your cards line up with the randomly determined round goals?
- What expansions are you using?
In a nutshell, it depends. That’s cliché but it’s true.
See our Wingspan Strategy Guide for more: Understand Skill vs. Luck and How to Break 100 points
It is generally accepted that if you managed to meet or exceed 100 points, you’ve had a very good game. Scores in the 90’s are also very good scores.
A Good Wingspan Score: Core Set
In my experience, if you play with just the Core Set, you can fairly consistently exceed 100 points once you’ve gained enough play experience. There are many strong and effective cards in the Core Set and most of the round goals (twelve out of sixteen) heavily favor “egg spamming” Grasslands engines. If you focus on developing a strong Grasslands and you play tucking powers there when you can, this is a setup for a high-scoring game. This is especially true when players utilize food-sharing birds such as Hummingbirds.
A Good Wingspan Score: European Expansion
With the European Expansion, I feel that the skill gap between beginners and experienced players increases. Many of the birds in this expansion cost two to three food, inflating the average cost to play the cards you draw and slowing down the game as a result. The bird powers introduced in the European Expansion add more complexity to the game, so there is a lot more to keep track of and plan for.
The round goals in this expansion shift their focus away from egg totals, so the overall pool of goals is diluted, lessening the chance that you will see egg-focused goals. None of the ten goals in this set are looking for eggs laid on your birds, and one goal specifically wants birds with zero eggs laid on them. This lessens the overall impact of Grasslands engines by a bit.
If you manage a score over 85, you’ve had a decent game. Scoring in the 90s is a pretty good game and breaking 100 points is an exceptionally good game.
A Good Wingspan Score: Oceania Expansion
If you use the Oceania Expansion, there will be an extra point scoring category for “Spent Nectar.” This can result in up to fifteen extra points for the players to fight over. It’s not very likely that any one player will end up getting all fifteen points. The more players that there are, the more these points will be spread out among them, as the competition for them will be much steeper as you increase the player count. Only two players per habitat are able to score these points at the end of the game.
There are many more bird powers in this expansion that share resources with other players. Additionally, the Forest was redesigned to produce more food and the Wetlands was redesigned to produce more cards. These factors combine to produce higher average scores in general. These higher scores end up being balanced out slightly due to the redesigned Grasslands producing fewer eggs.
Like the European Expansion, round goals are not egg-focused. Eight out of eight goals in this set do not check egg totals. All in all, you will still see a general increase of about ten to fifteen points in your average scores in most games with the Oceania Expansion.
When playing with this set, good scores on average should consistently land in the 90s. You’ll probably end up seeing a more scores that break 100 using just the Core Set and the Oceania expansion than you would if you were just using the Core Set with the European Expansion. Scoring 110 or higher is an exceptionally good game.
If you need more official Wingspan score sheets, Stonemaier Games has made them available for free here.
