Good evening. This is Three Moves Ahead, and I am your host for the evening, Troy Goodfellow.

Today we're going to be talking about one of the most celebrated board games of recent years.

It is Elizabeth Hargrave's Wingspan, which was released in 2019 and pretty much became an instant

classic, nominated for pretty much every game award, did one quite a few as well.

This fall, a new digital version was released on Steam, also to rave reviews and applause. So it's a good

time for us, I think, to take a look at Winspan, what makes it successful as a board game design,

and what makes for a good digital app. To do this, we've brought in two authorities on tabletop games.

First, our regular panelist and board game expert and freelance writer, Mr. John Bolding.

Howdy, howdy.

And making his first appearance on three moves ahead, and we'll see if it's his last or not, depending on his

performance, see how many eggs actually hatched from his nest. Editor-in-chief of Dicebreaker,

Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me on. Hopefully, it's not judged on my

performance in Wingspan, because I played three times in preparation for this, and I got beaten by

the AI every time.

So, yeah, that was a little deflating, but, you know, I'm here to kind of state my revenge on birds

and robots of all kinds. Birds are robots. Birds are all fake as the internet has told us. So, Matt, let's start with you. Wingspan is as Sons described as an engine building game. Can you actually what we mean by an engine building game and how that applies to wingspan specifically?

Yeah, so in terms of an engine building game, I suppose in some ways it's almost a bit of a misnomer

because it's more like just getting your engine going than building it from scratch a lot of the

time. So engine building games tend to be that you start with a small pool of actions or weaker

actions. It can depend on the game. And over the course of the game,

you'll either add more actions that you can then use on your turn or you'll increase the

strength of the actions you already have. So it's this feeling of gathering momentum. And so you'll

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