Best Games Like Wingspan

First work out which part of Wingspan you actually liked

Wingspan won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019, the German award for the more demanding end of the hobby, and it has stayed near the top of every recommendation list since. That success hides something useful for anyone shopping for the next box: the game is doing four separate things at once, and most people who love it only love two of them.

There is the engine. Every bird you play makes a later turn better, and by the fourth round a single action can cascade down a whole row of cards while everyone waits. There is the collection, which is 170 real species with real wingspans and real nesting habits on them, illustrated by Natalia Rojas and Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, and which is the reason people who do not normally finish a rulebook finished this one. There is the calm, because at a complexity rating of 2.48 out of 5 and with almost no way to attack another player, nothing that happens to you is anybody's fault. And there is the solo mode, built by Automa Factory, which is good enough that plenty of copies get played alone more often than not.

Those four things point at four completely different shelves. The games below are each much stronger than Wingspan on one of them and usually weaker on another, so decide which one you are shopping for before you spend anything.

The easiest answer: Stonemaier made three more of them

Most people skip this section because buying the same game again feels like a failure of imagination. It is not. Stonemaier has turned Wingspan into a four-game family, and the three newer boxes are genuinely different games rather than reskins.

Wyrmspan, Connie Vogelmann's 2024 design with art by Clémentine Campardou, is the one to buy if your complaint about Wingspan is that it ends too soon. You excavate caves, lure dragons into them and nurse them through three stages, and the result is noticeably meatier: 90 minutes against Wingspan's 40 to 70, a complexity of 2.83 against 2.48, and an age rating of 14 and up rather than 10. It sits at rank 124 on BoardGameGeek with an average of 7.94 across just over 17,000 ratings, and it picked up a Dragon Academy expansion in 2025. We recommend it for the group that already likes Wingspan and wants more game, not an easier one.

Finspan, from 2025, goes the other way. David Gordon and Michael O'Connell's fish game spreads your tableau across depth zones instead of habitats, runs 45 to 60 minutes, and comes in lighter than the original at a complexity of 2.31. It currently averages 7.67 across roughly 8,000 ratings, which is the lowest of the family, but it was also Stonemaier's biggest release of 2025 at 233,584 copies sold in the year. A Sharks and Reefs expansion followed in 2026. Our read is that Finspan is the right pick if Wingspan was slightly too long for your weeknights rather than too short.

Wingspan Asia, from 2022, is the quiet best-rated thing in the family at 8.21 across more than 10,000 ratings, good for rank 89 overall. It is a full standalone game built specifically for one or two players, and it also folds into the base game if you want to push the player count higher. If your table is usually a table of two, this is the one we would buy first.

If the engine was the point and the birds were a bonus

Plenty of people who love Wingspan could not name three of the species in the box. What they like is the cascade: the moment a card you played twenty minutes ago pays off four times in one turn. That feeling is the engine of the modern hobby, and these are the games that do it better.

Everdell is our first recommendation and the closest fit. James A. Wilson's woodland city-builder, illustrated by Andrew Bosley, has you playing critters and constructions into a tableau where cards discount one another, exactly as Wingspan's birds do, with worker placement layered on top. It plays 1 to 4 in 40 to 80 minutes, sits at rank 46 with an average of 7.97 across more than 70,000 ratings, and at a complexity of 2.84 it is a modest step up rather than a leap.

Lost Ruins of Arnak is the better pick if the cascade was the part you wanted and the gentleness was not. The Czech Games Edition design by Elwen and Mín fuses deck-building with worker placement on an island of ruins, and it rates 8.08 across nearly 59,000 ratings for rank 30 overall. It was nominated for the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2021, where it lost to Paleo in what most people at the time read as an upset.

Two games sit at the far end of this road. Terraforming Mars, Jacob Fryxelius's 2016 design, is the card engine taken to its logical extreme: 120 minutes, a complexity of 3.27, rank 9 overall, and an average of 8.33 across more than 115,000 ratings. Ark Nova, Mathias Wigge's zoo-building game from 2021, is currently rank 2 on BoardGameGeek with an average of 8.54, and it is the one people most often name as the game Wingspan fans graduate to. Be honest with yourself about the jump, though. Ark Nova runs 90 to 150 minutes at a complexity of 3.80 against Wingspan's 2.48, which is not an adjacent box on the shelf, it is a different hobby weight entirely.

If it was the calm, the table presence and the nature theme

This is the biggest group of Wingspan fans and the best served. The last five years have produced a whole category of quiet, beautiful, low-conflict games about the natural world, and several of them are easier to teach than Wingspan is.

Cascadia is our single best recommendation here. Randy Flynn's 2021 design for Flatout Games and AEG won the Spiel des Jahres in 2022, plays 1 to 4 in 30 to 45 minutes, and asks you to solve two puzzles at once: place habitat tiles so terrain connects, and place wildlife tokens so animals score. It holds rank 61 overall, the number one spot among abstract games, and an average of 7.88 across more than 57,000 ratings. At a complexity of 1.84 it teaches in about five minutes, which makes it the easiest game on this page to get onto a table.

Harmonies is the newer challenger and it is extremely good. Johan Benvenuto's 2024 design for Libellud, illustrated by Maëva da Silva, has you stacking coloured tokens into small three-dimensional landscapes and placing animal cards that score for specific terrain patterns. It averages 8.03 across more than 33,000 ratings for rank 51 overall and second place among abstracts, it plays 1 to 4 in 30 to 45 minutes, and it won the Swiss Gamers Award for 2024 and was nominated for the As d'Or Jeu de l'Année Initié in 2025, where Behind took the prize. If Wingspan's appeal for you was watching a pretty thing accumulate in front of you, start here.

Forest Shuffle is the pick for people who liked Wingspan's cards and could do without its board. Kosch's 2023 design for Lookout Games is a pure card game: you draft trees and then tuck animals, plants and insects into their canopies, each scoring off something specific nearby. It plays 2 to 5 in 40 to 60 minutes, sits at rank 150 with an average of 7.73, won the Deutscher Spiele Preis in 2024 and made the Kennerspiel des Jahres recommendation list the same year. The one catch is that it has no solo mode, so skip it if you play alone.

Three more are worth knowing. Earth, Maxime Tardif's 2023 design, is the closest thing to Wingspan's engine with the downtime removed, because everyone takes a follow-up action on every turn rather than waiting; it plays 1 to 5 and sits at rank 213, though at a complexity of 2.91 it is heavier than it looks. Parks, from Henry Audubon and Keymaster Games, walks hikers across a trail and is worth owning for the Fifty-Nine Parks Print Series artwork alone. And Calico, Kevin Russ's quilt-and-cats puzzle with Beth Sobel art, is the most purely brain-burning of the lot, which is either exactly what you want or precisely what you do not.

If you mostly play it alone

A large share of Wingspan copies get played solo against the Automa, the card-driven opponent system built by Automa Factory, and that changes which recommendations are useful. Several of the games above are poor substitutes for exactly this reason.

The ones that hold up solo are Cascadia, which has a clean solo scoring challenge and is quick enough to replay twice in an evening; Finspan and Wyrmspan, which carry the same Automa approach forward from Wingspan; Lost Ruins of Arnak, whose solo campaign is genuinely well regarded; and Terraforming Mars, where a solo game is simply a race against the clock to finish terraforming in 14 generations. Earth and Parks both play one as well.

The ones to skip if solo is your main mode: Forest Shuffle is 2 to 5 players with no solo mode at all, and Harmonies supports one player but the solo mode is the least interesting thing in the box.

What is new right now

Three things have happened in the Wingspan family this year that change what we would tell someone shopping in October 2026.

Wingspan Pocket is the big one. Elizabeth Hargrave's small-box version arrived direct from Stonemaier on 15 July 2026, reached local game stores in mid-August and wider online retail at the end of that month, and it runs around $20. Everything in it is one deck of 106 double-sided cards, where each card is a bird on one face and a food resource on the other, so your hand is constantly a choice between playing a bird and feeding one. It plays 1 to 5 in 25 to 35 minutes at a complexity of 1.91 and is rated for ages 8 and up, which is two years younger than the original. It currently averages 7.86, but across fewer than 2,000 ratings, so treat that number as early rather than settled. The important practical note is that it is standalone and its cards do not mix with Wingspan's.

The Wingspan: Americas Expansion also landed this year, going up for preorder on 21 January 2026 and reaching retail at the end of February. It covers the birds of the Americas beyond the United States and Canada, hummingbirds included, and it needs the base game. Early ratings are strong at 8.43, though again across only about 1,100 of them.

The wider context is that this family is now the engine of its publisher. Stonemaier's revenue hit a record $25.1 million in 2025 on the strength of the Wingspan, Wyrmspan and Finspan trilogy, which has passed 3.3 million lifetime copies between them. Outside the family, Forest Shuffle has grown into a line of its own: Dartmoor arrived in 2025 and Smoky Mountains in 2026, both standalone games rather than expansions. Smoky Mountains has only a couple of hundred ratings as we write this, which is far too thin to draw a conclusion from, so we are flagging it rather than recommending it.

Check the box, not just the title

Almost everything on this page has a near-namesake that plays differently, and the Wingspan family is worse for this than most. These are the mix-ups we see most often:

• Wyrmspan and Finspan are standalone games, not expansions. You do not need Wingspan to play either, and their cards do not combine with it.
• Wingspan Asia is a standalone 1 to 2 player game that also works as an expansion to the base game. The small print matters if you are buying it as a gift for someone who does not own Wingspan.
• The European (2019), Oceania (2020) and Americas (2026) expansions all require the base game. None of them is a way into Wingspan.
• Wingspan Pocket is standalone and deliberately incompatible with Wingspan's cards. It is a different game in the same world, not a travel edition of the original.
• Forest Shuffle, Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor and Forest Shuffle: Smoky Mountains are three separate standalone games. The plain Forest Shuffle box is the award winner.
• Cascadia has a Junior version, a Landmarks expansion and roll-and-write spin-offs. The Spiel des Jahres winner is the plain original.
• Harmonies has three expansions out now. None of them is needed, and we would not buy any of them on a first purchase.

Our short list

• Best next box in the family: Wyrmspan, if you want more game, or Finspan, if you want a shorter one
• Best for a table of two: Wingspan Asia, the highest-rated box in the family at 8.21
• Best engine builder next step: Everdell, with the same tableau cascade and a gentle step up in weight
• Best if you want the engine without the calm: Lost Ruins of Arnak, rank 30 and a Kennerspiel nominee
• Best nature game to teach a new group: Cascadia, Spiel des Jahres 2022 and a five-minute teach
• Best table presence: Harmonies, rank 51 overall and second among abstracts
• Best card-only option: Forest Shuffle, Deutscher Spiele Preis winner in 2024, but no solo mode
• Best new release right now: Wingspan Pocket, from July 2026, at about $20 and half an hour
• Best long-term destination: Ark Nova at rank 2, once your group is genuinely ready for a three-hour evening

Wingspan has lasted seven years and grown into a four-game family because it does several unrelated things well at the same time. That is also why no single game replaces it. Work out whether you are shopping for the engine, the theme, the calm or the solo mode, buy deliberately for that one thing, and check which box a listing is actually selling before you order. Most of the games named here have a full page on this site with player counts, teach times and our honest take on who they suit, so follow the link on anything that sounds like your table.

Games Mentioned