A copy of Wyrmspan was provided by Stonemaier Games for review purposes.
Introduction
Wyrmspan is an odd game to describe. On the one hand, it’s clearly the spiritual sibling of Wingspan, the bird-collecting blockbuster that has brought countless people into our hobby. On the other hand, it trades the gentle avian charm for fire-breathing dragons and cavern excavation. I know I prefer dragons, but I’m not sure if my wife will agree.
I’ll admit, I was sitting on a bus at 7 in the morning shortly after my son was born when I first heard about Wyrmspan, and I let out an audible “pfft”. What I expected at that point was just a full art reskin of Wingspan, perhaps as a collectors item. What designer Connie Vogelmann has done, however, was create something that feels familiar enough to have the “-Span” name, yet is distinct enough to stand proudly on its own.
How to Play
At its core, Wyrmspan keeps the same rhythm as Wingspan. You collect and play dragons to your tableau, hopefully craft an engine, and watch as your combos grow more satisfying every round. But instead of happy little ecosystems, your tableau is a mountain cavern, and your first job is to excavate chambers and then entice dragons to come live in them.
On your turn, you’ll spend dragon coins (a new form of action economy) to do one of three main actions:
Excavate – carve out a new cave, opening up space for dragons and gaining a small bonus.
Entice – pay resources (meat, gold, milk, crystals) to bring a dragon into one of your caves.
Explore – send your pawn through one of your three caverns, triggering resources from your dragons and the spaces between them, effectively activating your engine.
Along the way, you’ll lay eggs, care for hatchlings, and advance on the Dragon Guild track for extra perks. Like in Wingspan, you’re aiming to balance resource management, end-of-round goals, and long-term scoring opportunities, but while the gameplay beats are all familiar, the finished product feels fresh.
Review
The production is everything you’d expect from a Stonemaier Games production. Thick cards, gorgeous speckled dragon eggs, and beautiful artwork that gives each dragon personality. I particularly appreciate that the dragon lore isn’t crammed onto 5 point text on the bottom of the cards themselves, but instead presented in a separate booklet, something that I spent a surprising amount of time flipping through between turns. It’s a nice nod to the theme, and if I can’t use an app to hear each birdsong in my tableau, this is probably the next best thing.
I really have to comment how Wyrmspan improves on some of Wingspan’s rough edges. In Wingspan, early turns could feel painfully slow as you scraped for food and cards, before really opening up in the second and third rounds. Here, the excavation system gives you immediate bonuses, and the Dragon Guild provides a trickle of resources to easily keep things moving. The action economy with dragon coins also gives players more direct control over how and when the round comes to an end. It feels less restrictive, less at the mercy of a bad food dice roll or stagnant card row. I also appreciate that you have a bit of control on when your round ends, in the form of the silver coins. Instead of a set number of rounds, you can choose to keep playing, although it gets crushingly expensive as you choose to do so. I enjoyed managing my silver, choosing to have a lean round so that my next one could be bombastic.
What hasn’t changed, is that like Wingspan, Wyrmspan is still largely multiplayer solitaire. You’ll compete for end-of-round goals, but the bulk of your attention will be mostly focused on nurturing your own cavern of dragons. Personally, I wish there was a bit more friction between players, but the payoff is that Wyrmspan remains friendly and approachable, even with these added layers of complexity.
And speaking of layers, I love the cavern exploration action. Getting bonuses from excavating caves, and bonuses from attracting dragons, turning those bonuses into playing cards, and then moving your pawn through chambers and triggering each dragon as you go is incredibly satisfying. In one game, I had a dragon that cached meat to gain a resource, the next dragon cached meat to gain crystals, and the next dragon paid a crystal to lay 2 eggs, who fed into another dragon who ate eggs for Dragon Guild points. Each dragon fed into each other wonderfully, and made running through that cavern exciting. Discovering those combos is what brings me back to a game time and time again.
Final Thoughts
Is Wyrmspan better than Wingspan? Not necessarily. Wingspan is simpler, cleaner, and more universally appealing. It’s still the game I’d pull out with new players, and it’s the one that has some expansions that improve on the base game quite a bit. Wyrmspan is the heavier sibling, offering more control and more opportunities to shape your engine in clever ways, but overall does require more commitment from its players.
For my collection, the two can happily coexist. My wife still prefers Wingspan for its comfort and accessibility, but I find myself much more drawn to the richer systems of Wyrmspan. And honestly, having dragons to look at instead of backyard sparrows doesn’t hurt.
If Wingspan invited us into the hobby with open wings, Wyrmspan pulls us deeper into the mountain, and rewards us with fire-breathing companions once we get there. I guess the only question remains, is how does Finspan compare?
It’s a weird experience, starting a new top 100 series. In my head they sound like a good idea, after all, it’s 10 more posts for my blog! But I often forget how much effort actually goes into just creating the list, let alone writing out my thoughts for each game.
Regardless, what will be interesting is that unlike my board game top 100, I’ve been playing video games since I was 5 years old. A lot (and I mean A LOT) of these games are steeped in nostalgia and are created cherished memories that I hold dearly to this day. Speaking of nostalgia…
100 – Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose!
Year Released: 1992 | Platform: Super Nintendo
I didn’t watch any of the Tiny Toons cartoon series, but somehow the game Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose made its way into my household, and I loved seeing young bubs dash, slide, and jump his way through the levels. A pure platformer, the whole goal of the Buster Busts Loose is to make it to the end of the level, alive. Familiar faces show up frequently, from the Tasmanian Devil destroying the cafeteria, to a wild west train ride, to leaping to and fro on hot air balloons, I loved playing this game over and over. It was bright, colourful, and fast, often requiring daring leaps of faith at the climax of an exciting level.
99 – Fire Emblem Engage
Year Released: 2023 | Platform: Nintendo Switch
Hey, I actually wrote a whole review on Fire Emblem: Engage when I played it back in May. The summary of that review is that I had FUN playing Fire Emblem: Engage. I was engaged with the army building aspects, tweaking my characters classes, and getting through each battle without a casualty, which is what I really want out of a Fire Emblem game. I’ll save you the though, Fire Emblem: Three Houses didn’t make it onto my top 100, because SO MUCH of the time was spent in between battles. Running through the school, doing all the side tasks and talking to the ludicrous number of characters took up entirely too much time. I felt that Engage had a much better balance between the tactical combat (which I love) and the army management/dating sim aspects (which I’m less fond of). It also tapped into my nostalgia vein really well, as a longtime fan of the series, seeing all the old lords come back was a real treat for me.
98 – Sid Meier’s Civilization V
Year Released: 2010 | Platform: PC
It’s kind of hard to believe that I never played a Civilization game before Sid Meier’s Civilization V. That gap in my gaming history was mostly thanks to the fact that I was a console gamer for most of my life, until about 2014 when I build my first PC and picked up Civ V for cheap.
Civ V is a civilization building 4x game (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate). Players take control of a historical faction, complete with their own special bonuses, and lead their civilization through the ages into prosperity. You’ll create cities, expand your armies, and crawl across the world until you bump up against your neighbours, and eventually conquer them. Civ V is played on a hex map, so it’s basically a board game, but with enough math going on under the hood that you wouldn’t ever actually want to play it on a table.
Civ V is the kind of game that keeps you up until 4 in the morning, saying “Just one more turn…”. The game drip feeds accomplishments and achievements to you, always dangling the next carrot for you to chase. I’ve only finished a game of Civ V once, as I often just end up starting a new game, as that exploration and expansion aspect of the game is what I really enjoy, not so much the combat and conquering. At least not with these mechanics.
97 – Celeste
Year Released: 2018 | Platform: Xbox
Celeste is another platforming game, but this one doesn’t rely on blind leaps of faith. Instead, you play a red-headed heroine named Madeline as she scales a mountain and faces her inner demons and anxieties. The platforming in Celeste is tight and utterly satisfying, and the dialogue and characters are heartfelt. Most of the game has a sombre, melancholy vibe to it, especially when Badeline shows up and heckles Madeline.
Rife with themes of depression and anxiety, Celeste is so much more than a simple platformer, a-la Super Meat Boy. It’s beautiful pixel art drew me in, and the themes hooked me. Some of the platforming challenges are utterly frustrating, requiring near pixel perfect precision. But when you can overcome a challenge that felt unsurmountable, oh the feeling of euphoria makes those hundreds of attempts worth it.
96 – Braid
Year Released: 2008 | Platform: PC
Braid happened to be one of the first indie games I bought after building my first PC in 2013. I like platformers, and it was highly rated, so I figured I had nothing to lose. What I ended up getting was an amazing little experience. The platforming puzzles tickled my brain just right, the time travel mechanic made it easy to try tricky jumps again quickly, and the twist at the end caught me completely flat-footed.
Braid instilled a love of indie games in my heart. Games made by small teams that felt like they were made by people who love games, and less like pieces of product to be marketed and sold. It’s only a couple hours long, but it was absolutely worth the short trip!
95 – Mini Metro
Year Released: 2015 | Platform: Android
As much as I don’t like to admit it, I spend a lot of time on my phone. Mostly thanks to sitting on the bus. But in general, I don’t like scrolling through social media much, I’d rather be playing a game. Unfortunately the mobile gaming landscape can be kind of a mess. Thank goodness for games like Mini Metro. A simple puzzle game about creating routes to get passengers from location to location. Each game starts so simply, with only 3 stops. But as time goes on, the screen slowly pans out and more locations pop up. Each week you get access to some more things, like more trains, extra passenger cars, more bridges/tunnels, and extra lines. The goal is to just last as long as possible and deliver as many passengers as possible.
Mini Metro is a game my wife and I both got fairly competitive at. We would lay in bed playing the same maps to compare our scores. Never before did I think I would curse a circle out so hard, but when a cluster of stops makes a line have 7 circles in a row, it’s horribly inefficient! Really, any game that gets me invested to the point where I’m cursing basic shapes is a pretty excellent game.
94 – Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition
Year Released: 2018 | Platform: Nintendo Switch
When I first heard that there was going to be a Dynasty Warriors spin-off set in the Legend of Zelda world, I let out a groan. While I love The Legend of Zelda, I’ve never been a big fan of Dynasty Warriors. I’ve always found the gameplay repettive, and I’ve also never been fond of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which Dynasty Warriors draws its story and lore from.
I finally played Hyrule Warriors in late 2020 when my daughter was born. She had awful sleep patterns and would sometimes only sleep if she was being held. Now, if you don’t know, it’s unsafe to sleep while a baby is sleeping on you, so I spent many nights of my paternity leave laying on the couch at 3 in the morning with my daughter sleeping on my chest, and I needed a game that was active enough to keep me awake, but brain dead enough that my sleep-addled brain could comprehend it. I don’t find Hyrule Warriors a particularily phenomonial game, but I do cherish the memories that I associate with the game.
93 – Quest 64
Year Released: 1998 | Platform: Nintendo 64
Now here’s a game that I KNOW doesn’t hold up. Quest 64 has the prestige of being my very first 3D RPG adventure. Its simplicity made it an ideal starting point for my little 9-year-old brain, featuring all the basic elements of an RPG: character interactions, a story-driven plot, food upkeep, combat, levelling, and a search for those little magic gem things. It felt like a pure, early adventurer’s journey, the simple world offered a childlike charm that resonated with me.
However, Quest 64’s simplicity is a double-edged sword. I did replay this a few years ago, and found it utterly lacking in depth. All the mechanics felt watered down, and everything about this game is utterly forgettable. Town 1 and Town 2 are indistinguishable, and I can’t recall the name of anything without looking it up first.
That being said, it still holds a special place in my heart. I recognize that Quest 64 shouldn’t be on any “top 100 games” list, and yet it’s still a part of my history as a gamer, so here it sits.
92 – Pokémon Stadium
Year Released: 1999 | Platform: Nintendo 64
I tell this story often, but when I was 8 or 9 years old, my grandparents took my sister and I on a road trip to a family reunion. I was given $100 in spending money. At the first stop, I bought Pokémon Red from the local Wal-Mart for $50, and I spent the other $50 on batteries for my Game Boy. I was the perfect age for the Pokémon craze, the target demographic, and I was utterly hooked. So when Pokémon Staduim came out and had these amazing 3D visuals, I knew I had to get my paws on it.
And eventually I did. But I never did get the transfer pack, so my entire experience playing Pokémon Stadium was using the rental Pokémon to tackle the gym leaders and elite four. And beyond that my sister and I spent an amazing amount of time playing those little mini-games. I never did manage to beat her in Dig, Sandshrew, Dig…
91 – Tetrisphere
Year Released: 1997 | Platform: Nintendo 64
Hey look, 3 Nintendo 64 games in a row. Funny coincidence. Definitely not indicitive of how many Nintendo games are going to be on this list…
I love Tetris, as you’ll find out higher on the lists, but Tetrisphere is a wonky 3D take on the puzzle game. You twist the ball around, slide pieces around, then slam your pieces down on matching shapes that clear that piece, and any attached piece of the same shape/type. The goal of the game is to try and get to the core like it’s some kind of jawbreaker and release the prisioner. It’s pretty simple, I really enjoyed it as a kid, and I’m a little sad that it never made an apperance outside of the Nintendo 64!
A perpetual argument amongst ignorant anglophones in the board game community is how you pronounce certain game tiles. Orléans gets the or-LEENZ or OR-le-enh. Being a written medium, I don’t need to wade into this argument. I have the benefit of copy and paste, then everyone can read the word how they choose. My dilemma is if I include the accent over the e or not. Including the accent is technically correct, but leaving it off is almost certainly better for SEO. Is my goal with this blog to be seen, or is it more important to me to be correct? Bah, who’s even searching for Orléans these days, anyway?
Released in 2014, Orléans by designer Reiner Stockhausen hit the scene to critical acclaim, and was promptly nominated for the 2015 Kennerspiel des Jahres. Now, it lost to Broom Service, but I think that speaks more to the proclivities of the Spiel des Jahres judges, and less about the quality of the game itself.
Orléans is a bag building game. Players pulling worker discs from their sacks, then placing them on various work houses on their player boards. Once an action has all the necessary staff, players take turns activating those actions. Generally, they gain a new worker disc, and move up the corresponding track, gaining a specific benefit. Then, the worked workers are also tossed back into the sack until it’s time to draw again.
The actions you’re taking in Orléans are all fairly simple. You move a meeple around a board, dropping guild houses in each of the cities (hopefully doing so before your opponents). You’re earning coins, books, citizens, building new technology tiles, and eventually, sending your staff to the town hall, where they will go onto contribute beneficial deeds, and then… never come back to work for you?
Okay, the theme falls apart pretty quickly when you try to examine it closely. But what’s important here is that the game mechanics are solid. Each turn, you pull a handful of disks out of your bag, and you get to decide which actions you want to take that turn. Sometimes, you’ll be blocked out of an action because you didn’t pull enough blue fishermen. Other times, you’ll draw 4 of him, and get to do almost nothing anyway. I know that doesn’t sound like fun, but bear with me here. I promise it gets good.
The score track in Orléans features these development status spaces, which has the opportunity to multiply some of your endgame score (your guild halls + your citizens). I’ve already touched on the guild halls, just litter them across the province. The citizens generally rest at the end of each of the tracks, which means gunning for one of them is going to fill your bag up with one type of worker. Another way to earn those citizen tokens are for being the last person to contribute to a beneficial deed. In classic group project fashion, all the glory goes to whomever reads the conclusion, not whomever did the most work.
Orléans often feels like a race, you’ll nervously eye your opponents player boards trying to ascertain if they’ll be able to snag the bonus tile that you’re gunning for, or waiting for just the right moment to place your workers onto the beneficial deeds track. Remember, those workers won’t ever come back to your sac, but a well-timed placement can net you one or two of the coveted citizen tokens that multiply your development status.
On one hand, It’s hard to compare Orléans to anything else I’ve played because it feels so unique. Other bag builders (Quacks of Quedlingburg and Automobiles) don’t come close to the same feeling of strategy and engine building that Orléans offers. Crafting your bag to deliver you the perfect workers turn after turn feels satisfying. By the end of the game, you’ve built several new action spaces that only you can use, you’ve covered 4 worker spaces with gears so the actions have become way cheaper, and you’re pushing up on the end of each of the tracks. Orléans
There is such a sense of progression in Orléans. Your bag grows and shrinks, disks come in as you take actions and go up the tracks, and flow out as you commit them to the beneficial deeds. Your actions get stronger as you crawl up those tracks, making it feel like you’re making way more progress that you ever thought possible at the start of the game. That said, Orléans can be a long game, 2 hours or more in the higher player counts. It’s not terrible, but considering you’re kind of doing the same 6 actions/ manipulating the same tracks over and over, it can start to drag if players are ruminating too much on their turns.
It’s kind of fascinating to have such a luck element such as bag building in a strategic euro game. I feel like I should be frustrated by the handcuffs of only being able to take the actions based on the workers that came out of the bag. But that luck is what makes Orléans special. Also, it feels like there are several paths to victory, from having guildhalls all over the place, to running up on the tracks, to just amassing an impressive hoard of goods tiles.
Orléans is one of those rare Euros that manages to be both strategic and a little chaotic. You craft your bag and then just hope the right people show up to work. It rewards careful planning and punishes tunnel vision, offering a dynamic bag-building arc that’s hard to replicate elsewhere.
It’s not perfect. The theme barely hangs together, the rounds can DRAG with overthinkers, and at higher player counts it might outstay its welcome. But what it lacks in narrative flair, it makes up for in mechanical satisfaction.
For Euro fans who enjoy engine-building with just enough luck to keep things spicy, Orléans is a classic for good reason. It’s easy to teach, deeply replayable, and always leaves you wondering how you could’ve done just a bit better.
I was reflecting on how we as board gamers are constantly putting out top 100 lists. I’ve done 2 in the past 5 years (2021 and 2024), The Dice Tower does one for every reviewer every year, and so many others jump on this trend. I started thinking about putting together my top 10 video games of all time, and immediately had a mental overload. In asking my friends, they had similar experiences, the thought of listing their top 10 video games of all time seems like a Herculean task.
I could do top 10 of each console. I could do my 10 favourite video game series, but narrowing down my 10 favourite games felt impossible, and yet I’m so willing to do it to board games. And so, mostly as an exercise for myself, I’m going to take a trip down memory lane and list out my top 100 video games of all time.
Here’s my rules and caveats for this series. I’m going to mostly focus on single player games. I’ve always been a solo video gamer, but there are a couple of games that are just dramatically better with friends, and it’s the friends that make the game good, not necessarily the game itself. I’m disqualifying any compilations or collections of other games. Rare Replay, Super Mario All-Stars, disqualified, right out of the gate. I’m going to talk about games where I first experienced them, which may be a port or a remaster. And lastly, I’m creating this list with my nostalgia intact. I did not go back and replay any of these games, I’m going completely off my memory of these games. Some of the games will be waaay too high, and if I replayed them now, I’d proclaim them to be utter trash. But for the purposes of this list, I’m keeping my nostalgia goggles firmly on.
Each game individually is eligible, but not the collection as a whole
So, journey with me and let’s talk about some of my favourite video games! I guess to start, I should say that I identify as a JRPG kind of guy. At least, when I was a teenager, forming my identity, I absolutely preferred any game that had a sword over any game that offered a gun. I’ve also been a pretty loyal Nintendo fan for most of my life. I’m pretty quick to pick up any new game in most of their major franchise, which I’m sure will become apparent when Mario makes his 7th appearance. I’ve also really dropped off of major non-Nintendo games in the last 10 years. I never picked up a PS4 or PS5, nor have I gotten an Xbox X/S. I did get an Xbox One two years ago, but my time to play games has been dramatically reduced ever since I started giving all of my free time to my board game hobby. That, coupled with the birth of my kids, has made it quite difficult to find time to just sit down and play a game the whole way through.
Something else to know about me, I generally don’t like horror games, shooters, massively multiplayer anything or beat-em-up games. They’re just not my jam. There are a lot of very popular games that won’t show up anywhere on my lists.
My Honourable mention is and Rocket League. Rocket League is one of the few online competitive games that I’ve ever actually gotten into, and while the game does reduce me to a snarling goblin at times, I can’t deny just how much fun I’ve had over hundreds of hours of smashing cars and making some crazy goals. My hooting and hollering at Rocket League even turned my wife onto the game for a short while, which is pretty special in its own right.
Well, tune in next week to see my #100 – 91! Please share your favourite games with me as we go along this series!
Let me preface this by saying I usually steer well clear of the entire horror genre. As a kid I watched the classics, and read my fair share of Goosebumps books, but in my teen years movies like Saw and Hostel absolutely sent me running from the whole vibe. So when I say I devoured The September House in two sittings and loved every psychologically unsettling moment of it? That should carry some weight.
Here’s the premise: Margaret and her husband buy a suspiciously affordable, beautiful Victorian house in the woods. Shortly after taking ownership, they realize it’s haunted. Oh bother. Except this is no slow-build ghost story. The house goes full Exorcist every September. Walls gush blood, ghosts appear, each of them more broken and gruesome than the last. Something unspeakable lives in the basement. Hal (the husband) nopes out after four years. Margaret stays. Margaret stays.
This is where The September House hooked me. Margaret isn’t your typical horror heroine. She’s older. Reserved. Gripping to her routine and rules like it’s a life raft. She’s flexible. She doesn’t scream when the walls bleed, she rolls up her sleeves and cleans the mess. I found her fascinating. Funny, even. She reacts to supernatural carnage the same way a tired parent reacts to a toddler’s tantrum: with quiet, unflappable endurance and a mildly exasperated expletive.
The horror of The September House isn’t just spectral. It’s deeply psychological. Margret’s 30-year-old daughter Katherine discovers that her father has left Margret, and is now refusing to answer her phone calls, she descends upon the house in the middle of September. Margret tries her best to reason with the poltergeists (called Pranksters), and shield her daughter from the supernatural horrors, going as far as to slip Katherine sleeping pills so she won’t hear the ethereal howling that happens every night. The September House becomes more about the lies we tell to keep our own sense of safety intact. About what we’re willing to ignore, to normalize, cope with, and even to cover up, if it means holding on to a version of life that feels bearable.
I laughed. A lot. Not because it’s slapstick or silly, but because the dark comedy is interwoven brilliantly. Margaret’s narration is deadpan, bored, and describes the events as utterly mundane, even when she’s casually dealing with flies coming out of a 90-year-old priest (Well that’s never happened before), or that one pesky prankster who bites if you get too close (You just need to respect his personal space).
But then, slowly, You’re starting to pull back the layers. The real horror creeps up on you, not through cheap jump scares, but through slow, dawning realization. You start to ask yourself: Wait, what actually happened here? What has Margaret been dealing with all this time? Why is she so good at following these rules? Are her descriptions actually happening, or is this all happening in her head? An elaborate story she’s conjured up to cope with something real and horrific?
Would I call it horror? Absolutely, the final act cements it. There are certainly memorably grotesque moments. But it’s also a fascinating subversion of the genre. It’s more of a psychological thriller with a horror coat of paint. I’m so glad I gave The September House a shot and didn’t let my horror aversion stop me. This book is going to stick with me for a while, not because of the blood on the walls, but because of the way it used psychology to show who the real terrors are.
