FINSPAN - We Just Played It!

we just played fins span yes fins span the game that's had everybody talking a good batter or otherwise over the last made oh boy the puns have started uh but yes we have fin span on the table and Emily and I just played it so we're going to tell you what we think we're going to tell you a little bit about how we think it Stacks up in the span Universe uh and speaking of the span Universe you know what if you're watching this uh and you're not a fan of the span universe don't just watch this and hate watch it you know there's this is this is a great addition to the span universe and I personally just to get this out there I'm a fan of the span you're a fan of the span a fan of the span we're gonna you a button that says it I think that's a shirt I think that's a shirt in the making Jamie stagmire you're welcome uh no I am a fan of all of these games and for one reason or another there are some people who aren't um but this is clearly not the biggest example of someone you know utilizing a property and doing more games more than anyone else you know pandemic Ticket to Ride there's plenty of other games that have done this without much crying and there's a lot of other games in the ston Meer yesal catalog that are wildly different so get over it if you're here to watch and learn about fins span welcome we're going to tell you a little bit more about it so finpan is really simplified right because all you're going to do is you're taking six actions there's not more actions there's not less actions you have just six divers that's it every week um you're going to place them either out to play a fish um so you're exploring the ocean playing a new fish or you're playing them out to dive and they're going to go down an entire column activate anything that they can activate and activate a bonus at the end those are the main two things we're doing here and so in that way you'll see it looks like the other span games yes right you have the the three kind of columns or rows or spaces you're going down you have different fish this time that are coming out you're playing them onto your board for points and for resources tags and abilities um but again this is much more simplified I'd say than the other two games it is much more simplified but I will say this too that doesn't mean it's sort of like a just a dumbed down version of those games and just to give you some perspective after the original wingspan worms span finally came out what was it last year yeah I think so it is a more complicated but not wildly more complicated game but it does some things that are un uniquely different in that Emily already mentioned some games tighten the amount of turns you take like the original wingspan worms span was doing out extra turns which you could if you could manage it if you could manage it and I always chase that for sure because it's really fun this one it's set it's six turns it's very straightforward which makes this game it's one of the things that makes this game more accessible and more approachable because it's just one of those it's one less thing that you're having to think about in terms of how the base game operates and as we said it operates in much the same way you're either running sort of the rows or lines columns in this case or you're getting more fish out there the thing about paying for fish too that's simplified is that what you're using to pay for fish is other fish CS so in this game your hand of cards is actually face up in front of you um and you can have quite a few and you also have your own personal discard so that's new and different from all the other ones um when you're playing a fish out so say I wanted to to play this fish he's going to cost me two other fish cards and a young fish so I would take these two active cards put them in my discard so that I could play this guy out um and then I would should not be played there by the way I'm going to be a stickler for the rules he'd be played up in the he he could be played up he could be played up here one of those areas uh and then one of my young fish too would have to be used as one of the cost so the currency in this is just going to be other fish cards fish can create little eggs yeah which hatch into young fish three young fish coming together is going to create a school of fish um and that's all we got so you're really just you're paying one of those kinds of uh resources the other thing that they've taken that was like wingspan was that you can um eat smaller fish so each of the fish have their different fin span um here you go and they can eat anything that's smaller than that uh anything that they eat will be points at the end as well so you're really just saying like okay I want to get more fish I want to use more fish I want to get more fish I want to use more fish and there's some cool things you can do about taking them out of your own Discord yeah generally the concept of multi-use cards is what we're getting at here while it's not just the cards that you're spending that is a unique interesting mechanic that's been in plenty of other games but it's the first time it's really been added here other than like you said the cavern cards in worms span uh this is it's it's very innate most of the cards require spending other and's a meis that canate actually get some of those cards out of your discard and back into your hand yes it's a really and it just makes things while it's a little more not a little more thinky but it adds a layer of thinking in terms of like multi-use cards like do I want to get rid of this but you also have the safety net no pun intended uh of actually potentially going back in there so you can always see some of those um discard there's always one at the bottom of one of these colums that you can use and there's plenty of other cards you can get into play too that let you go into your discard pile and get some of those cards back what I also think makes this more beginner friendly too is the fact that you're cycling through so many cards and like in games like this where we have all these different cards they're all unique you're kind of like oh shoot this one looks so good I don't know if I want to give them up but because we're getting so many cards played so many cards in your hand so many cards in your discard you you kind of get to a point where you're like I like liked this one before but you know what maybe a better one will come out so I'm just going to put in my discard for now and see if I can get some better things out here yeah and on those cards you're going to see a number of different things there's a lot of things that happen when you play the card there's things that happen when you activate it meaning when you go diving on it there's also some endgame scoring these Yellow Boxes are endgame scoring there's a lot of really interesting things also some player interaction stuff you know and this is kind of like you've seen this in wingspan where you play this and this is if activated all players get to do a thing so you've got a lot of that sort of thing going on which is pretty familiar one of the things that's not terribly familiar is all those eggs that then turn into young fish that then turn into schools require some movement around the board which is really interesting this last column here when you dive when you get down to here there's a power and then you can get down here and use this power it should be noted these bottom Powers they are used the first time you dive in that column and around but not around again but when you move you can take any fish or school of fish and start moving them around so if you were able to move a fish here then once there's three fish there they can become a school the schools are going to be worth more points there's cards there's maybe some scoring things during certain weeks where you want to build towards schools to maximize your points but it creates a really fun little game where you're like okay I've got to do this I'm going to be able to flip some of my eggs then on the next turn I'm going to do this so I can move some of those consolidate to get it's like one of those little puzzles you know where you have all the little different shaped blocks and you're trying to like push them around because schools of fish cannot run into other schools of fish so like at some point so David has these three schools of fish in the middle of his he's kind of made it a little difficult for I can move him this way I can move him this way but I couldn't move this one down for example so you're getting to this place where you when you move things you can move them as far as you want in that straight line although again schools can't move through school so it has that little twist there but it's not like okay I have one movement and now I have one movement and now I have it's not little by little you can actually make some pretty significant moves if you got a fish sort of at the cross section you can move one over and one down and you're good to go good to go and that you could do generally speaking almost every time you run this column yes exactly and like we said you're going to do this for four weeks so this is very similar to the other span games too there's going to be this is sort of the basic side where you have these scoring mechanisms but they've got this side here and they have a bunch of a tiles in the box where you can like basically randomly put stuff out here so it's going to feel unique and different every time you play with different scoring then once you get to the fourth week you're going to get some basic scoring you get like a point for your eggs a point for your young young fish is it six points for the school points for the schools and of course all the fish have points innate on them and then some of those yellow things will either give you endgame scoring or you like for this one this one to let me put eggs on all of my sort of like predat Predator type fish so you're gonna score that up all of that's going to be feeling very familiar if you played wingspan if you played worms span I would say that if you're a fan of the series um if you find that wingspan wingspan is pretty straightforward but I don't think it's exactly the most Gateway game like you know something like cascadas a there's a lot of other games that are just easier to play I think you get to sometimes you're playing wingspan with folks who maybe aren't hobby Gamers and they get to their turn and they're like looking at these cards looking all these resources and they're like what what can I do what am I supposed to do what and this is going to be good for those it for sure be anybody because really again you're just two options you are playing a fish or you are diving that's all you're doing any turn play a fish diving you don't have to worry about like how many berries do I have how many leaves do I have or different types of resources or yeah or the I mean you do have to worry about where you're placing your fish but even that is more straightforward I think than some of the other ones the fish all have like icons on them so that you can put them up here in this middle row or down here and then some of them are colorcoded so you can see not all of them honestly so I I think there's a l a lot of them can go anywhere effectively well anywhere in their kind of section of the sea so I think it gives you a lot more flexibility than the other games too it's definitely not as tight definitely not as like crunchy of like oo I have this one but it have to go here a lot of the times you can find many places where you can put something and the fact that you can also willingly have a larger fish eat a smaller fish whenever you want like when you're playing a fish you can do that now some of them will benefit you if it eats something and it has fish under it it's going to score a little bit better so you want to try to do that but yeah it gives you that flexibility to where you're like oh you don't have to worry about like necessarily being out of spaces as long as you have a bigger fish and speaking of fish last thing the board has three fish printed on it to begin with yes now obviously when you run your rows and things in wingspan or worm span you do get some things without having anything on there but you always stop in this game you actually run the whole thing yes and you're going to get a few things as long as you have one fish in any of these sections and you'll always have in this First Column this one fish in this bottom section so you always activate this in this section you'll always activate this and in this section you'll always activate this even if you haven't played a fish card exactly but you could also like I did play Fish cards on top of those as long as they're bigger and the starting ones are very small so almost everything can go on top of them and they give you no points uh and they give you no points so now these new fish are going to give you points and they might have things like this one that says when activated so as I'm diving down I'm going to get to do anything that I have fish in this section and any of the ones where I have those brown if activated very very similar to like wingspan yeah it brings up some interesting um things for the more Enthusiast gamer too because while it's easy to play even some of the times where I was deciding okay I have a fish that needs a fish under it to score some significant points but you want to take a look at the fish under it to see whether or not you're covering up more points significant points because you have to determine what you're going to net there so you might want to get a fish out that's just one point or two points and then get that other fish on top of it but searching for those fish can take some time sometimes but I don't think like you said we're cycling through the cards so much I never in this play felt like H I don't have no I I need one of these fish for the bottom like you you you can run this particularly Midway through the game and this is the column where you're effectively drawing cards and you can get quite a few cards after aard I mean you're at least going to get one two three more cards four one from your discard yes so it's it's a lot of things happening it also is using tags like you would in the other games right so where you have like the Predator tag we talked about I would say right now it's not doing a ton with the tags um so it's prob more soon some I would guess more soon um but because of that too like it also feels again just very straightforward like we played this super quick yeah and that was the first playthrough I think it's going to with these helpful player guides I think it's going to be hit the table you're playing it you're done in like half an hour yeah and that's another thing and this is nothing new for ston Meer games a lot of these games in this weight anyway the rule book is very few pages yeah because it leans very heavily on kind of like using this player Aid as a companion to the rule book which I think is a smart thing um but it makes it even that much more accessible I think because you can very easily look at this and it has all these icons listed any icon you wanted to see but it also lists them as it relates to as the cost for a card here's what that means and here's what it means if you're getting it as a benefit from the card so kind of really spells everything out so again really accessible game if you're wanting more from wingspan or even more from worms worms span this is not that game no this is not more for sure it is different but I I would say I would get this so that way I could play with anybody who comes over anyone which I think a lot of us have said about worms or uh wingspan at times this one even more we could you could play this with any one if you've not seen this the actor Mandy Patinkin I think there's a famous video he was Indo Montoya from Princess Bride by the way but online look it up someone's trying to teach him wingspan and he's having trouble with it I think Mandy Patinkin can even play this game I'm Gonna Leave You with that and while you're sitting there scratching your head like Emily saying who is Mandy patinka who is anyway if you have any questions about this if you're Mandy Patinkin and you're watching this video please get down in the comments below let let us know what you think until next time make sure everyone has fun of the table and we'll see you then