Stonemaier Games: Wingspan by Elizabeth Hargrave

Why it's worth it

Wingspan is a bird-collecting engine builder with more than 170 illustrated bird cards, pastel egg tokens, and a little cardboard birdfeeder that holds the dice. It plays one to five people in about an hour, and it works for a couple, a family, or a solo evening.

Wingspan does the hard part of gift-giving for you: it impresses people before anyone reads a rule. The bird art gets pulled out of the box card by card. The egg miniatures come in soft colors. The birdfeeder dice tower gets assembled once and then sits on the table looking like a prop. Owners keep coming back to that first-impression moment, and it's a real advantage when your person opens this in front of family.

The rules land in about ten minutes, and setup takes roughly six. Each turn you do one thing: play a bird, gather food, lay eggs, or draw cards. That simplicity is deceptive, because every bird you play makes your later turns better. If your person likes puzzles but hates rulebooks, this is the sweet spot.

From our review of 6 gifts for board game lovers

What we like

• +Wingspan does the hard part of gift-giving for you: it impresses people before anyone reads a rule
• +The rules land in about ten minutes, and setup takes roughly six
• +It scales in a way most hobby games don't
• +It won the Kennerspiel des Jahres, the German connoisseur game of the year award, and Stonemaier has since sold more than a…

What to know

• –There's almost no direct interaction
• –The first play is fiddlier than the setup time suggests