Finspan
I’ve had my eye on Wingspan for absolutely ages and never got round to adding it to my games collection, then saw Wyrmspan and thought that looked cool. Again, never quite got round to adding it to my collection.
But as soon as I saw Finspan I had to get it, fish! (and it seemed a much simpler solo game than the previous two from the videos I watched)
You are a marine researcher seeking to find and observe an array of aquatic life in the colorful Sunlight Zone, ghostly Twilight Zone, and pitch-black Midnight Zone of the world’s seas and oceans.
In Finspan, the fish you discover over 4 weeks will generate a series of benefits as you dive deeper into the ocean. The winner is the player with the most points gained from fish, eggs, young, schools, and achievements.
Unlike a lot of games I own I actually started reading the rules and watching play videos a week after it arrived with the intention of playing it during my next week off!
For me that’s pretty much straight away!!!
The lovely big box with the flying fish art contains:
- 2 rulebooks (normal and solo)
- 5 ocean mats
- 125 fish cards
- 10 starter fish cards
- 30 divers (6 of each color)
- 90 egg/young tokens (double-sided)
- 40 school tokens
- 1 achievement board
- 9 achievement tiles
- 1 week tracker
- 1 first player token
- 5 player aids
- 1 scorepad
- 6 Ravel (challenge solo) mode scoring cards
- 7 Nautoma (solo) decision cards
- 3 Nautoma achievement cards
- 1 Nautoma player aid
So after about a week of watching play videos and reading the rules I felt ready to start a game.
I’ll just say this was much easier to setup than the last game I played, Final Girl but I’m sure Final Girl will get easier with repeated play.
I decided to have my first game with the Nautoma playing at level 2, just so I could get my head around the concepts and ways of playing, give myself plenty of time to read the cards and see what I could do about fulfilling the weekly goals.
Week one I went for as many fish and egg/young tokens as I could get out, also trying to build up rows of fish for the week two goal and did well I think, 7 to 3.
Week two I continued to build on the fish rows but also tried to get a few schools and setup for schools for week three, it was a 6 to 0 week but this is a week that Nautomata is at a disadvantage.
Week three was about schools and setting up for end game, this was a strong week for both of us as the Nautomata got a couple of divers onto the weekly slot this time without them being taken away, 8 to 8.
Week four is all about getting end game actions if you can, I only had one and that was eggs on one of the diving columns, so I set it up for this and achieved 4 end game points.
The Nautomata had gained quite a few schools throughout the game and built up a decent stash of fish, so after adding all the scores together I did win but it was only by 4 points. So if I’d been playing at a higher difficulty level I would have lost!
Great game, quick to pick up and not too much to forget whilst playing, forgot to give Nautomata an egg from an activated ability once but got there in the end.
Looking forward to playing this again at the easier levels then trying against the harder levels, really looking forward to playing against others to see how that goes as well.
Feel it’s an easily teachable game which is good for the audience I’d introduce it to.
