If you're anywhere near board game culture, you've probably heard of Wingspan. This mildly themed strategy card game about running a wildlife sanctuary for birds has received almost universal praise from critics and a hype train that can't help but attract attention. Don't let the theme fool you, Wingspan is an economic strategy game that can be quite complex. But that doesn't matter when a game transitions to digital. Any game can only do well if it is ported well, and "Wingspan" on the PC is a pleasant surprise. It is visually stunning, with beautiful audio design, engaging animation, superb attention to detail, and a layout that serves the experience of playing on the PC better than emulating a tabletop game.

Simply put, Wingspan is the new gold standard in boardgaming.

Wingspan is a strategy card game where you build your strategy around available resources and cards. Each turn you take one action: play a bird, get food in the forest, let a bird lay eggs in the field, or draw a new (bird) card at the water's edge. When you add birds to your reserve, they empower these basic actions, building an engine of bird actions and card synergies. For example, put a "Great Crested Flycatcher" into the forest and pay one Berry and one Insect. From then on, each time you perform a forest action (get food), you can take one additional insect from the bird feeder.

In each round of the game you take multiple actions, but in later rounds you take fewer actions. In other words, it's all about finding the right strategy: you need to power up your actions early in the game in order to be able to fight until the end of the game. One of my favorite strategies is to draw two extra cards and discard one, like the waterfowl, the red-headed duck or the common yellowthroat. Drawing as many cards as possible means taking fewer "water" actions to draw cards, saving those actions for more valuable birds to play or spawn.

Wingspan is a competitive game - there are many ways to score points, but the player with the most points wins - but there is little aggressive, direct competition. Players compete over resources and cards, and over who can achieve the most scoring goals, but they do not play cards that directly negatively impact others' boards. Indeed, some of the more expensive, low-cost cards have the trade-off of providing resources to other players.

Wingspan play relies on some very random elements in all of its strategic nature. This is part of the game design often cited by those who dislike the game. Available food comes from the roll of the dice, and birds come from a huge deck of cards. Neither resource choice is regularly updated without player interaction: players must strategize from what is available.

If no bird appears that satisfies one of your bonus cards, you are out of luck. Likewise, if you need a lot of, say, fish to play a bird, but the dice do not show a small blue fish. While not as random and frustrating a system as the War Games' hit dice, Wingspan's tight balance of scoring can make you feel like you've been prevented from winning by a bad roll of the dice.

That said, I find Wingspan's balance of random draws and random hoods to be a mixed bag of bait seeds that draw me back again and again against deliberate, powerful, and reliable card power. I'll see what combos I can come up with on my next play.

Poor digital adaptations of board games simply replicate the graphical and visual aspects of the base game. A good digital adaptation knows which visual and game elements to change, cut, or rearrange so that the play experience flows smoothly; Wingspan is neither; Wingspan is a great digital adaptation, and this card Wingspan is a wonderful digitalization and a radical addition to the game-playing experience. I meant what I said at the beginning of this review when I said that all future board game adaptations will have to be evaluated both in comparison to this game, both in its superiority and its lack thereof.

Wingspan is a beautiful game to play. The tabletop game's carefully detailed scientific illustrations are reproduced here in larger, more vibrant colors, complemented by even more engaging animations. There is also a wide variety of backgrounds to choose from in which to play, all of which are animated.

You can also click on the birds to hear them sing, and when you do, a narrator will read you trivia about the birds. All of this is surrounded by a lovely ambient soundscape of birdsong, nature sounds, and classical guitar. It's a soundtrack that will be in my permanent collection.

The user experience has obviously been carefully thought out as well. The bird and bonus goal cards have been redesigned from their tabletop form to be more readable on the screen. The same goes for the player view: instead of one wide play mat, there are multiple screens for each action. The overview of the entire player can be selected as a separate option.

Not that the UI is perfect. It can get crowded if there are many hands. It is also not always clear which elements are active or what to click to progress in the game. Also, it is not as easy to keep track of the length of the game as it is on the tabletop, and the concept of an "action cube" to time moves does not fit well into the digital world. Nevertheless, tutorials are available to teach the game in detail, the rules are no different from the tabletop version, and there are plenty of videos on the Internet that teach the rules. Nevertheless, "Wingspan" is a game that seems to have improved in playability with the move to digital.

It has also gained other experiential benefits, such as reduced play time and the ability to play against appropriate AI. The game also includes a variation of the tabletop solitaire "automa," which feels great, and the weekly "Champ of the Birds," which allows players to optimize their scores in set scenarios against global leaderboards.

All of these options make Wingspan an excellent couch multiplayer or remote play game. Online multiplayer also works well, with up to five players in pre-made custom games. (Matchmaking is available for both real-time games with a five-minute turn limit and asynchronous games with a 24-hour turn timer. Matchmaking is limited to three-player games, which may seem odd, but there is a widespread consensus in the tabletop community that three is the optimal number of players.