Can fish really fly? - Finspan Board Game Review

hello everyone this is sonan and this is Joe hnis and you're watching board gaming ramblings and today we are taking a look at fin span the third game in the what is now Trilogy of span games it started out with wingspan which we really liked we have all the expansions we enjoy it a lot then worms span which we did the content on last year and we liked it for most part better than we liked wingspan and now we have fin span where instead of moving this way we're going to move this way and it's going to be fun let's talk all about it this was a review copy thank you for sending us the copy so we can take a look at the game and now we're going to tell you all about it not all about it we're going to tell you some things about it in fin span we're not going to do the full overview thing I'm guessing you have played wingspan or on some of the other games if you haven't basically what you're doing is that you're playing these cards which now have fish on them on this board you're going to activate the different rows to get different actions and abilities depending on what and where you have played them there are some differences from wingspan we're going to talk a bit M them I'm going to just do like some of the changes and then we're going to talk about what we feel about them so very briefly some of the changes are this time each fish can only have one egg so no like loading up on eggs that strategy is gone also you can hatch the eggs which never happened in wingspan on worm span which you flip them over and it comes out a little little fish then if you manage to move around these fish which you can with different actions and you end up with three fish in one space they disappear they don't and they end up being a school of fish which is basically then just doubling their points so each of these tokens is one point and this is going to be six points you will have three different rows which basically is cards eggs and hatching eggs and when you activate a row you're going to get a bonus if you have a fish up here so if I go here I see oh I have a fish I'm going to get a card then I'm going to go up here get what happens here if it's an activation I go here oh I have a card I get this I go here I have a fish I get this and then the first time you do a row or a column which is called yes I'm not good at those two things you will get a bonus as well uh so you're going to have six actions each time so it's not like wingspan where they get fewer and fewer not like worm span where you are can get coins to do more actions you're going to do six actions four times and that's going to end the game you're going to have your hand laid out here so everyone can see it not that you're caring too much about what the other players hands are spoiler alert but you are also going to win a discard cards put them into your own discard pile which is yours and yours only those are the biggest changes of the game I will say uh and you're drawing BL blind yes there's no display of card is BL drawing blind from the deck that was some things let's talk about both the things we liked and didn't like about fpan I can start start with a thing that I like and that is one of the things I really like about wingspan as well that the artwork is really nice you get to learn facts about many different fish in this game and both the illustrations and the facts that you learn I like reading those cards when I'm waiting for my turn I really enjoyed that it's great fish facts about cool fish and if you know how much we care about theme and we speak about this we like everything thing rest about the game as well and another thing I do like before we go into things we don't like is I enjoy this new eggs and hatching system that is like the biggest change the biggest thing that makes it a bit different and makes it fun of course it makes sense that you're going down because it's fish and that's another change is that you have like fish that live closer to the ocean floor not the ocean floor but the the top of the ocean and then you have fish that to the ocean floor that I actually enjoy that you have like a fish this one can only be placed in the green poch and only in one of these three and you can also like devour fish if it's smaller than them so you could do that most of the time you're not going to do it because that fish is going to give you points and it's not like you're going to fill up the whole thing and then have more space but sometimes going to be like oh this gives me eight points I have a fish that gives me one point so let's just do that and I will also get it for for it being eaten like in in in wingspan and R and some predators needs to eat a fish to be placed there for example this a a angel shark over there so or angle shark I I don't know there are some tags like this is a predator and it has camouflage so some of those things but most of the time they don't matter because they're just there like the Predators have like some kind of like there's some super predators that have like two St with blood on them and they're like you know that they're going to have like an ability that everybody gets to do but most of the time the other things are just there and then there might be like an achievement because this is like just a setup for the basic game you flip it over you will use like a random for each of the three first weeks and some of them might say like points for the camouflage or points for this which is of course then completely random if you get any or not yeah because you're drawing blind I think that's a negative from a negative change for me personally I liked it more when you had tree uh open like possibilities and I'm just like oh I don't want any of the these then I'm drawing blind but negative that I think this is that none of the abilities on the cards feel really exciting and to me there's some final scoring some if you play this you can play another fish you still have to pay for it and also some as you say when this is activated you get to do an ability as well but overall I'm not sitting like oh this is an awesome fish I'm going to Boom cool no no because also most of them feel the same yeah like they are doing the same four or five things with like some exceptions so it's not very interesting another thing I do like before a thing I don't like is that is the the discard pile because you are discarding let's say this one I to pay two cars and an egg so I pay an egg for anywhere I take two cards and I discard them and then other cards will then be able to give me for example this one says that whenever I activate this I get to look through my discard pile and take one card back so that way like if you it's not bandom because you get a card at but you already had Jo it random so hopefully you can get cards that way but I enjoy that so you can get like cards back another thing I don't like is that they have removed all of the resources MH so it's most of the time you have what you need to pay the cards I don't like that no because it it's only the different things it's it's the eggs it's the hatched eggs and it's the cards those are the things that you have to pay and sometimes like this you have to put it on top but most of the time those are the things and it's not exciting no and it feels less tight than wingspan when you we play wingspan just like especially in the starting resources I'm just like oh I can choose two things and Tre card like it's so tight from the beginning and in this game we had like one person we played with put all five of these workers to play Fish and only one to activate these roles and that means basically that you get to do a lot of stuff and yeah I like doing a lot of stuff but I don't like doing all the stuff I want to be like oh next time if I play a little differently I can do this and this and then I will get to do more stuff I'm missing that ah yes tension but of course yeah because that's what I want to say because in wingspan you have of course a randomness of oh no not the resources I want but you will be able to use them for something but you also have as I said the tension of oh I hope you don't take that resource because before it's my turn or I hope you take that one so there's only the same one so I can roll before it's my turn or or there's only one left so I can take that and roll I hope I get the thing I want because it's never been like wingspan or worm span it's never been like a non luuck game like that is part of those games so it's just like another part of that Stripped Away to a non-interesting thing also I I'm not super fan of the timing in this game because that also was a big deal in wingspan uh yeah of course you want to get the eggs before you hatch them because or else you will have existing egg yes but as long as I have a fish in this column like this part of the column it doesn't matter when I play something here unless they have like an if activated ability in wingspan I feel like oh I really want to play that card into that row before I activate it unless I will get a lot of yes the stuff doesn't matter I agree it's that all of it just feels like it's there I feel like the only positive I can say like we said a couple of things is it's quick yeah especially with two people perfect it's very quick we can play it in 20 minutes maybe 25 with two people and the other reason for that is that there's no interaction wingspan wor span was never a big interactive game but in wingspan you had to try to win the goal he is like oh you get some points but when you play the other side you get like three bonus points if you have the most which is kind of like something but I feel like they tried to make it very simple and ended up making it so simple that it's just not interesting yeah because like there's no no tension there's no reason for me being like Oh I have to do that try to do this sometimes I'm going to be like oh I have this couple of times I will say this there was a couple of times I played a cool card that gave me like nine eggs and the other people like two and that felt cool that is like the only cool thing I I felt like I was going to do in this game I think this is one of those videos where it's hard for me to say who is it for because I'm not sure because I I would say that it's not that much simpler than wingspan so it's not like oh this is so simple that you can just play this because if you understand everything about this game and just like add a little bit more you have wingspan so I don't really see who is this who is this appealing to oh I agree I would we're into final thoughts now really this is like my my who is it for yeah I don't know so let's do some final if you love fish yes you need a g fish there's other games about fish that are cooler but if you want to learn facts about fish and don't like the internet this is for you bu a yes uh yes I don't know um for me personally there's no reason for this game to exist because it doesn't do anything better than wingspan does and yes I maybe you can play it a little faster or like if you have some friends that think wingspan is too much and you really like wingspan and you want kind of the same um yes type of game yeah then this might be for you but for me it's it's not for me H I think they have distilled it too much to the level that the fun for me and attention is not there and I I'm going to give it I'm unsure because like it's not a bad game I I don't like it it works uh I just don't want to it's meh it's very meh for me it's like 4.5 fiveish it's just like just h i yeah it's I agree with everything saying like I I think that I because I like wingspan a lot and I really like worms span a lot so I was hoping this would also be fun I felt like it's it's not that I am bored when I play it but I'm on the edge of being bored uh when we played it four the downtime was horrendous because there was no reason for me to care about what you're doing other than like and most games and this is true for all games so we like a lot of multiplayer Solder games so when there's many games where I'm like interested in what you do on your turn just because I'm like oh I'm excited about what is your strategy what are you doing here it's just like you play some cards and they do kind of the same things that my cards do and you play it there okay that was four points minus three okay that is what you did and I don't really care so playing it with two was better but mostly because it was quicker because there is and I would love to and probably a lot of people like it and that's awesome and I would love to see I would love to like hear the reasons why you like this for example over WIS wingspan or if you why you think this is like different enough because for me it's just there I think I'm going to land on a five it's an average game like because it's not a bad game it's just like it's a game that is there and it exists and I guessing people will like it for me it's just like it's too light not giving me the tension and interesting fun stuff I guess from wingspan and worms span which are both pretty light not like games I play when I want to play like heavy strategy so this is just too little for me if you disagree with us let us know in the comments if you agree with us yes let's do the Keo call hm wonder what it's going to be one two three boom it's a c yes that is as I said if you disagree or agree with us let us know have you played it are you interested in playing it um if you played it I hope you liked it more than we did yes because games are supposed to be fun and people will have fun with games and that's it there is something you can do for this channel which is called subscribe yes I was this channel is not called subscribe the channel is called well board gaming ramblings yes and what you can do is subscribe board gaming rambl yes do it because it makes us happy like this yay thank you for watching you're awesome I'm Johannes I'm and you've been watching board gaming ramblings and bye-bye