Wingspan for Mandy

“Wingspan but smaller, simpler, and shorter” isn’t half-bad as pitches go. That’s precisely the niche Wingspan Pocket carves out for itself. In every way that matters, this is Wingspan, Elizabeth Hargrave’s 2.6 million bestseller, all birds and combos and speckled eggs, but slimmed down to a blue-footed booby’s webbed footprint. I’m convinced that it might even be better than the original. For the doubters, it’s certainly shorter. A compact, single-tiered tableau of birds. Like the best exercises in compressing a game to a more portable version, Wingspan Pocket captures the appeal of the original while also nipping and tucking the experience down to its most essential components. Gone, for example, are the player boards. Gone is the dice tower; it would look silly without any dice. Gone are the resource tokens, traded for the reverse side of each card, adding decisions to the market by way of shuffled grains, worms, fish, and berries. The remainder represents Wingspan at its most…