🐟 Finspan Board Game Review🐠🌊

dive deep in the ocean to discover amazing aquatic creatures and fish in fit [Music] span thank you for joining us at tantrum house Studio D I'm Melissa Delp I'm Kevin Delp fin span is an action selection engine building game for one to five players that's all about fish it takes one to two hours to play it's designed by David Gordon and Michael oconnell with development by Elizabeth Hargrave it's published by ston Meer games and they sent us this review copy in this video we'll give a quick overview of the game and then share our thoughts in finpan you're a marine researcher seeking to find and observe Aquatic Life the game is played over four rounds and you take six actions each round on your turn you take one of your diver mles and perform an action with it you can either play a fish card from your hand or dive at one of the three dive sites to play a fish you pay the cost on the upper left of the card and then place it on your board in one of the indicated zones either sunlight Twilight or midnight some of the fish also have a column requirement shown by a blue purple or green Edge the fish can go in any empty spot or on top top of a smaller fish num nom fish cards can have several types of abilities one played activated by a dive action or game end some game end abilities are actions or resource collection and some give scoring opportunities when you take a dive action you choose a column and move your diver from the top to the bottom gaining the benefits shown on your board but you only activate the sections that have a fish card or pre-printed fish you also gain any brown if activated powers on the fish in that column and the first time you dive in a column each round you gain a special bonus at the bottom each dive site has an emphasis the left column gives you cards the middle column allows you to lay eggs and the right column let you hatch eggs into young tokens and move those tokens around your board getting three young on the same space turns them into a school of fish which is worth a lot of points that's good the tokens for eggs and young are often needed to pay the cost for placing fish but they're also worth points at the end of the game and possibly during the game based on the randomly selected goals for round and scoring after each player has taken six turns the round ends at the end of four rounds you activate your game end cards and perform final scoring the player with the most points is going to be the winner surprise so that was a very quick overview we we didn't cover everything but we'll go into more details as we talk about our opinions we're separating the video into four sections the four sees our thoughts on components our critiques our commendations and finally our conclusions so let's begin with looking at the components so one of the components that I usually look for in a game is a player Aid especially as you get to medium level games and above and finpan has a I would say a pretty good play a it talks about the fish cards and the different icons so that's really helpful when I'm trying to teach the game to people or to reference things I can look at the player Aid instead of digging through the rule book so yay player Aid yeah and it helps everyone at the table the other big part of this game are the cards and I like the artwork on the cards I think it works great I mean there's all these different kinds of fish that are and some are scary looking some are cool looking some are cute looking so yeah and there are facts on them too I mean if you compare it to the other games we know a lot about birds yeah dragons are fful made up but there's some really weird stuff in the sea like some really weird fish and creatures so yeah I I think that is a big big point of this game big part of this game and I like them the tokens your player tokens are little diver meeples so that's kind of nice they they're cute and you can count them easily to know how many you have left so I I thought that was a good component the divers there are some other cardboard tokens in the game the one side has like a fish um drawing and the other side has like an egg I would say they're serviceable they're okay they're not like wingspan the cool bird eggs like there's nothing like that in this game um but they're they're kind of it's nice that they're efficient and that like the egg becomes the fish and the fish become you know then you get the school of fish so they're very bright and colorful so they do stand out on your board so like Kevin was saying they are good for the gameplay and the mechanics but maybe not so much for theme or immersion just little cardboard tokens another thing in the game there is a tray that you can use to hold the cards and the tokens um again nothing that not amazing but it it works fine we don't use it usually during gam playay it's just mainly for packing up yeah for storage so there one other big part of the game oh yes the player boards the player boards uh but I think Kevin has some critiques so why don't we move to that section so now our critiques so these boards are big they're they take up a a lot of space on the table I think that's my critique for the boards the table um just the table space not the table presence it's the table space it just takes up a lot and if you're playing five players I mean you need a you need a very large and they're they're vertical boards so I don't think he said that they go up and down not sideways like we're usually used to and we have you know a nice size table that we use for a lot of our gaming um like a you know regular game matte size table and we actually have to like sort of C like sort of stagger them so that they fit and then you're not sort of like exactly across from each other on at the table so so I do I I know we're in the critique section and we're talking about the boards I do think thematically it makes sense for them to be vertical and mechanically it's very helpful so in one sense I like that the boards are vertical but the critique is it may uh be difficult to fit it on tables at max player count I agree with that yes okay um so one of my critiques and this is something that comes up a lot in games with a lot of cards so when you're drawing cards is that I know where she's going there is some Randomness so you have to play tactically you can't be like oh I have this long-term goal because you may not draw the cards that you need for that that goal the there are some some cards I'm like man we were playing one time I was like man that other player has some amazing like action cards they were able to get and they synergized they hatched two eggs like one card was like woo that's so that was very rare to get that type of card compared to many of the other cards will only hatch one young right and because there are end of round goals it the goal may be something like you get points for mediumsized fish there's no guarantee that you'll draw those fish to then be able to play them so some players could have a slight Advantage because randomly they were able to get more of that type of fish but I find in that you know tactical gameplay you're like looking ahead like there is four rounds so you can look at another round and be like oh I may not have medium fish but I do have this other uh thing that will benefit that will help me get more you can work towards something else so this is not a game breaker for me it's just something to be aware of with this type of game that there's going to be some Randomness there's going to be some games where it all works out and everything synergizes and it's awesome and then there'll be other games where it seems like the deck hates you and you just can't get the things that work together yeah we don't like being my this is my third critique our third critique um we don't like being rle Nazis we have to be really careful because you know you don't want to be looking over people's shoulder big brothering them but this game I have found um you have to be careful because certain fish have to be placed in certain spaces some people just they're not doing it on purpose they're just like oh I want to place this fish here and they don't think oh it has to go in uh the blue section or the green section or and the daylight section or and that could actually break that game is a little bit cuz you're getting a special benefit maybe when you walk down that line if it's in the wrong column yeah it's happened to me before I'm like oh this is a great fish I'm going to put it here so then I can activate all the things and then when I go to play it oh it can't actually go in that space and hopefully I realize that and don't play it there but we have had it's definitely happened in our games multiple times especially when people are learning or they aren't paying like close attention it's easy to put a fish in a wrong spot because you can unlike wingspan or worm span you can basically put them anywhere you're not going left to right mhm you can put them anywhere as long as the icons match and some fish they're can go in any space and then others are more restrictive yep all right let's move on to our commendations so I've really enjoyed games with variability so I can experience new things or try out new strategies and F fan has some variability with the end of round goals there's it's double-sided that board one side has pre-printed goals on it but the other side you can use the goal tokens and I believe those are all double-sided so kind of like wingspan or worm span there's a lot of variability in what you're trying to get points for in that game and then just the amount of cards is going to make it feel different each game because some of them give you endgame scoring or trigger in different ways so it really does have that more tactical feel of what's the best thing I can build with what I have and then how can I make that engine run to get the best score so I do enjoy games like that where there's familiarity each time you play but the way you're going to go about getting your points might be slightly different and I just like the cards too cards are pretty cool yeah you you can get distracted by reading all the facts and be like hey did you know such and such um this game's a little different and that there is you have your own personal discard pile so as you're going through your you know your those cards are going in your discard pile and then you're like oh there's ways to get this fish out of the discard pile so sometimes you're thinking oh I'm getting rid of this fish but there's ways to get that fish back so that's really I think that's a cool part of the game you're discarding it now I will say say higher player counts especially playing at 5 there is a possibility that the main draw deck will run out there is a rule that basically says all player discard piles do get shuffled back in so just to be aware of that possibility you could be like Oh I'm I'm paying with this card putting in my discard pile because I'm going to fish it back out uhoh right now it's gone but yeah I enjoyed that too that was an interesting um extra strategy to Think Through of oh I'm paying for fish with cards but they're not necessarily Gone Forever they have the potential to come back a little bit yes um I really enjoyed the ability to place fish on top of other fish so it gives you more options because if the fish you are playing is larger than a fish on your board and it meets all the requirements you can just put it on top of that other fish instead of needing to have an empty space and there may be some strategy reasons why you would do that now the fish below is only going to be worth one point it doesn't have its full points or Powers anymore um but maybe it's something you weren't using or it was a pre-printed fish on the board so you can get some points that way there are some fish the Predators as part of their cost they do have to go on top of another fish so sometimes you're trying to lay something cheap or something that has an immediate benefit and then put them on top of it so it can munch it and lay that so I thought that was an interesting twist to this version of the game a lot of games are you know like a multiplayer soliter game this game has a little bit of that but there is definitely interaction between boards and I would say it leans more towards the friendly side of that and let me explain there are CS that basically say you know when you're activating or when they playing them that will basically help everyone else around the table that's cool now you can sort of plan your uh turn around oh I see Melissa my card says everyone gets eggs in their middle column I see Melissa um Hardy has a lot of eggs in her column that means she's not going to put putting more eggs in the middle of column which that's you know you want that kind of stuff so just being aware of what's going on yeah you can play as friendly as you would like or even try to use those cards in a more strategic way where you're not benefiting the other players as much because basically everything is open information in this game you see how many young tokens how many eggs people have and where they are technically your hand of fish is face up on the table in front of you so that's not even Secret mhm I feel like you took advantage of that in one game being next to our friend Ben yeah Ben was going to play one of the uh cars that basically said put an egg or something on a on all the like Predator fish and I was like oh that's going to happen I'll make sure I don't have eggs on my Predator fish so that or I'll put more Predator fish out so that I will be able to take advantage take advantage of that when he plays that card so you can if you are paying attention to what other people have you might be able to get some benefits he may not have ever played it but I knew he probably would because I think it was a goal or you know if if you have a great white shark or something like that you're going to play it so um yeah so it can be as like solitire as you want or you can pay a little bit more attention to other people and kind of hope for some benefits all right when moving on to our conclusions conclusions so we can't really finish this video without talking about finpan in relation to wingspan and worms span it even says a wingspan game on here so we we thought we would do a few comparisons between them yeah I would say right off the bat fin band feels the most streamlined of all the games like it's taking all the things that you might know about Wing SP wor SP and just like hey you're just laying you got two actions you're laying the fish on the on your cards and then you're diving down to you know take the extra benefit so very simple and streamlined I would say of all three of them this one is the easiest to get the resources you need to play cards because often it's discarding cards out of your hand or tokens the egg tokens and the young fish tokens it doesn't have like three four five different types of resources it's not berries and fish or crystals and well rats' Wings B so it's not like I have to collect a variety of things to then be able to play Fish it's do I have cards do I have the eggs and the tokens I can get the eggs and and tokens by diving so I felt like it was easier to get the fish down onto my board and have what I needed there wasn't as much um you know trying to scr for resources there interesting thing that's different are the number of actions well actually they're the same number of actions in fin span so you everyone's going to take the same number of actions same number of turns whereas in wingspan you actually lose actions as you're going through even though you're getting sort of more powerful in wingspan to do lots of really cool things but you're losing the number of actions in worms span you actually can gain more actions with the getting coins and things like that where but in finpan you get the everyone gets 20 24 actions right everyone going to get the same number four rounds six actions now some of your cards may give you extra benefits and let you do more but it's not an extra action or turn yeah um I I feel like the layout of the board the vertical board makes that dive action a little bit more intuitive oh then going straight across mhm I agree um because in in wingspan you're walking backwards so it's like what's your empty one you get that and then you walk backwards and then worm span it it was a little you know at least you're going left to right but you stopping make sure you stop at the right spot right stop at the right spot whereas in F ban you all all the time go down the B now there has to be a fish in order to get some of the benefit in a section to get the benefit but I did feel like it was maybe a little simpler to teach and that hey just go down here if the section's empty you don't get the benefit but if there's something there you get that benefit and then keep going down all right I'm going to compare them I'm comparing and in our conclusions I'm comparing the three games so personally I still like worms span the best just I enjoy that game the best what is bringing to the table the game play awesome enjoy that actually right now currently we'll put fin span above wingspan all right so you have worm span fin span then wingan and I the reason is I think finpan not comparing it to Wing finpan comparing to wingspan not woran anymore but the reason I think I like finpan in the spot I chose is because it plays quick mhm like there is only 24 turns and I think people's turns go pretty quickly on that and it's easy to pick up and play it's not just the game time length but also it's easy to bring people on and play yeah I would obviously we have played all three games and can compare and have oh these mechanisms so we understand that one I I think finpan if you haven't played any of them MH Finns fan might be the simplest the easiest one to understand because it's a little bit more streamlined what do you think yep agree all right so Kevin gave his ranking and I'm going to be boring and basically independently I had the same ranking of ditto worms span at the top because I like it it's a little bit more complex there's a little more going on um so I like worms span the best I like the streamlined of fin span and I find the fish really interesting and I like that I don't have to deal with the bird feeder of Doom that never has the resources I need and then uh wingspan at the bottom there's a little bit more Randomness in wingspan and I prefer having a little bit more control that I think fin span gives a little bit more control cool um I have one more thing I say but not necessarily about the game what what do you want to say k so we will have this copy At tantum Con I don't know exactly when people start getting it um in the mail but if you're going to be at tantrum con 2025 that's January 23rd through 26th um we would love for you to um come and you know play this copy with you know we'll have it with us so oh uh should I tell them where it will be sure go for it so I I plan to put this on one of our hot games tables so it should be set up the entire convention for people to walk up and play get a little demo um so if you're interested in fin span you can check it out Janu when you said where I was like oh yeah I forgot tant from cons in Charlotte North Carolina so come to Charlotte North Carolina January 23rd through 26 we would love for you to be a part of our event um tant yes so Vince ban will'll be there yeah let us know in the comments um if you played worms span or wingspan which one of those two because you probably haven't played fin span yet which one of those two do you like better would love to know your thoughts please like subscribe all those [Music] things e for