Objective

In Wingspan, each player will collect birds, each of which costs food and eggs to place. Each is worth points and has a special power. Make the right decisions and place the birds in the right environments. The player with the most points at the end wins.

Setup

Each player begins with:

• A hand of five randomly dealt bird cards
• One of each food type (seed, invertebrate, fruit, rodent, and fish)
• Two bonus cards indicating a personal goal

Before the game starts, each player must choose how many bird cards to keep. For each bird card kept, the player must discard one food. (So the more birds kept, the less food the player has at the start of the game.) Also, the player must choose which of the two bonus cards to keep.

Gameplay

The game is played over four rounds.

• Round 1: 8 turns per player
• Round 2: 7 turns per player
• Round 3: 6 turns per player
• Round 4: 5 turns per player

Each round has a goal for all players, different for each round, shown on the goal board. Example goals are "birds in wetlands", "eggs on birds with bowl nests", or "birds with brown powers".

• The competitive version (green) of the goal board has places for each player in order of rank (first gets the most points, second gets the second-most points, and so on).
• The less competitive version (blue) has each player earning up to five points for each of the given goal items earned.

Each round ends when all players have made the given number of actions. At that point, the round goal is calculated, the face-up birds are replaced with new ones, and the "first player" privilege rotates to the player on the left.

Actions

On any given turn, a player may do one of the following:

Food

Food is found in the birdfeeder, where five dice are rolled to determine what food is available. Each time a player takes a "Gain Food" action, they remove a die from the birdfeeder to gain the token shown on the die. When the birdfeeder is empty, the dice are rerolled. However, if all dice in the birdfeeder show the same face, the player may reroll all the dice before taking any food. They can do this in the middle of taking food as well.

You may use 2 of any food in place of 1 specific food.

Bird Powers

Nearly all birds have some text on the bottom of their card with some kind of ability or advantage. A skull icon next to the power indicates that bird is a predator.

"When Activated" (brown): When you take the Gain Food, Lay Eggs, or Draw Bird Cards actions, the action cube representing your turn is placed on the leftmost unoccupied space in the corresponding habitat. From there, the cube moves left onto each bird in the habitat. If the bird has a brown power, it activates. The "Play a Bird" action does not activate any of its benefits nor the benefits of other birds in that row.

"Once Between Turns" (pink): These powers trigger during the opponent's turn, but only once before your next turn.

"When Played" (white): These powers only activate once, when the bird is played.

End of Game Scoring

Scores are tallied from the following:

• Each bird's point value.
• Each card "tucked" under another bird card.
• Each food token "cached" on a bird card.
• Each egg on a bird card.
• Points earned from End-of-Round goals.
• Points from completing Bonus card objectives.

The player who has the most points wins. In the case of a tie, the player with the most unused food tokens wins.