Players add bird cards to
their personal board to
build up an avian tableautabletopgaming.co.uk 29TAKING WING
While Hargrave says she didn’t set out with plans to
make Wingspan as big as it’s become, she hopes to add
even more birds to the game.
“I am actively working on at least one expansion for
Wingspan,” she con rms.
Among the designer’s ambitions is to introduce species
from outside of North America, hoping to include cards
representing birds from each continent – and more
focused regional packs if Wingspan takes ight with
players. Even with the potential for almost endless
variations of bird (approximately 18,000 species exist in
the world, at last count), Hargrave reassures that the game
- and her future projects – won’t grow beyond its limits.
“I don’t think I would ever start out designing a game
thinking, ‘ is game is going to have a bazillion cards,’”
she says. “You start small and you iterate and you iterate
and maybe it needs to grow and maybe it doesn’t.”
Having tackled ambitious scale in Wingspan and
compact minimalism in Tussie-Mussie, Hargrave reveals
one of her nished designs lies in the middle of the
complexity scale, at a “kind of gateway-level”.
“I don’t know that I have a personal
sweet spot design-wise for game
weight,” she says. “I kind of like
playing a range of stu . I would say
the weight of Tussie-Mussie is not
a weight I gravitate towards. So
de nitely heavier than that.”
When we speak, Hargrave
is waiting to hear back
about her game inspired
by monarch butter y
migration that she
had pitched to a
publisher. She
suggests that her game based on the
experimental Russian domestication of
foxes will likely become her next focus.
“It’s like trying to trace the genetics of what’s
actually involved genetically in domestication,” she
explains. “I have a game around that that’s de nitely a
heavier puzzley, thinky [design] – not necessarily more
complex component-wise, there aren’t that many
components, but it’s de nitely a very thinky game in its
current iteration.”
While Wingspan marks Hargrave’s major debut and
the beginning of what could be a newfound stardom
on the tabletop among players, for the designer it’s the
long-awaited culmination of almost ve years of work
that have nally paid o .
“I pitched it to Jamey at Gen Con in 2016, and at that
point I had been working on it on and o for a couple
years but not solidly the whole time,” she says.
“To everyone else it seems like it came out of nowhere
and to me it’s like I’ve been waiting for this for forever!”EGGS &
SPOON
Elizabeth Hargrave
tells us about her
favourite bird – the
roseate spoonbill –
and why it reminds
her of home“I grew up in Florida, and we
have a bird in Florida – I think
it’s across the southern coast
of, like, Texas as well – called
a roseate spoonbill. I think
there’s a Eurasian spoonbill as
well. But the roseate spoonbill
is a metre tall and bright pink
and it has this crazy bill that
literally has like a spoon shape
on the end of it. So that’s just
a crazy-looking bird
and beautiful and
reminds me of
home as well, so
I usually say that
one’s my favourite.
It’s definitely in
the game.”