Wingspan: Americas expansion is the latest addition to this awesome board game that has been a smashing hit since its release in 2019. This expansion adds to the soup, birds from Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. This is a quite extraordinary region that features more than 3000 birds, including those with the smallest and largest wingspan in the world (Bee Hummingbird and Snowy Albatross).
New birds!
Apart from new birds, the expansion features new gameplay elements by introducing a new special hummingbird deck along with nectar and hummingbird tokens, a hummingbird garden board and hummingbird tracks.
Hummingbird garden board
Hummingbirds are smaller cards than the usual bird cards, aligning with them being in general small birds. Each hummingbird has one of five special symbols in the upper left corner representing a broad taxonomical group. This symbol is used to advance on the hummingbird track.
Hummingbirds
During setup, in addition to the normal setup procedure the following steps must be taken:
- The deck of hummingbirds is shuffled and put face down in the middle of the table
- Five hummingbirds are drawn from the deck and put on the hummingbird garden board
- Each player adds a hummingbird overlay on the left section of their player mat. A hummingbird card is drawn from the deck and put on the grassland section on the hummingbird space
- Each player takes a random hummingbird track and places 5 hummingbird tokens, one from each kind, on the spaces marked START.
The hummingbird track
Wingspan plays as usual, however whenever one uses their forest, grassland or wetland he/she also takes a hummingbird action at the end of their turn. This action depends whether the relevant space is empty or not:
- If the space is empty, you attract a hummingbird and place it on the empty space. You draw a card either from the garden or from the hummingbirds deck. Then you gain the benefit shown on the bottom left of the hummingbird card.
- If the space contains a hummingbird, return the hummingbird. Place it on any space in the garden, even covering another hummingbird. Then advance on the hummingbird track by moving up on the column that matches either the bird you return or the bird you cover. If your token lands on a space with a bird symbol on it, take another hummingbird action, in any habitat.
At the end of the game you will score points for each token on the hummingbird track according to the numbers printed on the right of the track.
There are 5 new double-sided End-of-Round goals in this expansion as well as 8 bonus cards. There are also 15 egg miniatures and nectar tokens. Nectar is a wild food type, first introduced in the Oceania expansion.
New goal tiles
Let’s see how the game scores inn our usual scoring categories:
Components
This expansion is full of beautiful and high quality components. The bird cards are just awesome. They are made of high quality cardboard and have large resolution enabling them to depict birds with the highest level of detail. Colors are vibrant and images are astonishing. Whenever I play, I often catch myself being mesmerized by the imagery and feeling that the bird is going to come to life and flutter around me.
The hummingbird tokens are made of sturdy wood and feel very nice. They are the right size to fit on the hummingbird track. The track itself is made of hard cardboard and its background is a beautiful image of nature which is unique for every player.
The game box doesn’t take much space and inside it you can find a nice insert where all cards can fit nicely. 9/10
Nice insert!
Gameplay
The gameplay twist included in the expansion is a beautiful addition to the original game giving even more depth and strategy to the original. The new mechanics of hummingbirds are integrated seamlessly in the game, maintaining balance and adding a new layer of information and goals to achieve.
The addition of 111 new birds also helps enrich the game experience and add randomness to the birds used in each game.
On the other hand, players not having played many games with the original may find the experience overwhelming, adding one more element to think about as if they didn’t have enough already. If you are very familiar with the base game and ready to deal with something more, I am strongly recommending this expansion otherwise it may seem too much to deal with. 7/10
Replayability
The new bird cards when mixed with the basic ones or even with more expansions certainly enhance replayability. Now the possible combinations of birds appearing in a play session become even more random, making each session unique. However, the sheer size of the combined bird deck can make it harder to see specific expansion cards unless you curate the deck, which slightly dilutes the focus on the new content.
The new gameplay elements with the hummingbirds present an interesting addition. They add a light entertainment hue to the game, just the right amount to spice it a bit without being overwhelming. Because the hummingbird garden resets and changes throughout the game, no two sessions will feel the same. 7/10
Learning Curve
Integrating the Americas expansion is surprisingly smooth, though it does add a “beat” to the rhythm of a standard turn. The biggest shift is the Hummingbird Garden, a separate board where players manage tiny birds. Learning the “hummingbird action”—which occurs after your standard habitat row activation—requires a few rounds to internalize so you don’t accidentally skip your bonus resources. It feels like a natural evolution rather than a complete overhaul, much like how Oceania introduced nectar without breaking the game’s back. While it adds a layer of “action economy” management, the clear iconography keeps the overhead low for veteran players. 7/10
Theme
Stonemaier Games continues its streak of high-fidelity production, and the theme here is nothing short of spectacular. The expansion captures the dazzling variety of Latin American avian life, from the microscopic Bee Hummingbird to the majestic Snowy Albatross. The thematic link between the hummingbird’s real-world “hovering” and the game’s new “out-of-phase” actions is a stroke of brilliance. The artwork by Natalia Rojas and Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo remains the gold standard, making your tableau look less like a board game and more like a curated Audubon exhibition. 10/10
Player Interaction
I always felt that the original Wingspan game was a bit of a solo game. This expansion ignites some tension with the Hummingbird scoring tracks and each player racing to the finish line trying to pass the opponents. Certain hummingbird powers and end-of-round goals reward players that have advanced more on the tracks. There is do direct interaction, like messing with other player’s progress but still it’s a decent try. 7/10
Final Thoughts
If Wingspan belongs to your favourite games, then I can’t recommend more the Americas expansion. It enables you to get familiar with new exciting birds from a vast region and it has new cool mechanics, which are also highly thematic. If you would like to spice gameplay so that it feels a bit more competitive while also keeping it fun and simple then you need to look nowhere else. Did I mention how mind-blowing are the new bird illustrations?
