If that sounds like a game you'd enjoy, then perhaps Wingspan is for you. This game gets major props for it's design: The game pieces are substantial. The cards are nicely coated and won't whither away. The art is beautiful. The multiple instruction books/guidebooks/helper materials are heavy and coated and nicer than magazine quality. But what about the GAME PLAY? Ask yourself if these are the types of things you like in a game: Complicated: The rules are complicated enough that the game includes these very nice starter cards for each player to use the first time you play an open-handed game, they show you how to set up the game and dictate/explain your first several moves. This is a really nice touch, but it speaks to how confusing the game can be. There are 10 different ways to earn points, and you have a LOT of options on every turn, so to get good at the game, you have to be thinking many, many moves ahead and considering a lot of possibilities. To play well, you have to map out of a lot of things in your head. And there are far too many bird cards to learn them all. Not Very Competitive or Interactive. Every player has a limited number of turns in which to build out a thriving bird habitat. The things you put in your habitat earn you points, and those points are tallied at the end to determine the winner. Some of the things you do can affect the other players' scores and resources, but that is by no means a major driver of your behavior. This is definitely not a game where you can screw over your opponent. In my experience, planning your moves gives you so much to think about that there's it's hard to even pay attention to what the other players are doing, let alone chat with them (of course, if you're able to process and keep track of all that, you'll have a slight advantage). Limited Engine-Building: What does this mean? The beauty of the game is the fun you may have building "engines", which means you've constructed a bird sanctuary that sustains itself beautifully (and earns you points without much additional work). But each game of Wingspan is exactly 26 moves. This keeps games manageable, length-wise, but can be frustrating in two ways: 1) you will inevitably have choices to make that limit what you can build, and 2) if you've done a really great job, then your final 25% of the game will be pretty boring -- you'll stop building and just collect points on your turn. This is satisfying points-wise, but pretty unsatisfying if you like the building part of the game. UPDATE: Get the Oceania expansion pack (often on sale for under $20 here) and the game becomes much more balanced, interesting, and forgiving, with loads of new end-of-game strategy options. Highly recommended. Impossible to conquer: I like games like poker that are impossible to truly conquer, but this one has me really mystified. I've played a dozen times and the only conclusion I've made about strategy is that I need to study the 200 available cards a little better to understand how to best combine them in future games. I guess the limited number of moves per game makes for a really long learning curve, because I feel like I don't have enough turns every time I play, or I need to do better with the math part of the game (and I'm pretty good at math). The final score always surprises me, whether I came in first or last.