Pat and Mary

It’s the Fritz family’s fault. They were the ones who introduced me to the game Wingspan.

It comes with four or five thousand moving parts, some of which have to snap together like something out of a cracker jax box. It’s got a ton of birds. There are enough rules that the IRS might as well have written them up:

Section 142.2 If the slot where you placed your action cube shows a food-to-egg bonus conversion, you may pay at most 1 food token to lay an additional egg

When you’re the new kid on the block, someone takes you under his wing (har) and helpfully explains all the information on the bird cards you’re going to need. This up here is what the bird will eat. This down here is what kind of nest it has. This little thingy means it eats other birds. Here is where it’s allowed to live. This is how wide it is. This is how many eggs you can fit in its nest. At some point the newbie has absorbed all the information she can because she still doesn’t know what to do with any of it and no longer gives a chirp, and she needs laser surgery to scrape the glaze off her eyes. “Let’s just play it and see how it goes,” she says, and everyone says “Yay” and we’re off and flapping.

And none of it makes any sense. “Okay, it’s your turn, you can play a bird, or you can get bird food, or you can get eggs, or you can draw a new bird.” But what should I do? Nobody can tell you that. At some point you just pick and discard birds based on how cute they are. And that works as well as anything else. If by “works” you mean “gets you through your turn so someone else can have a turn.”

I would have bet money that a very complicated game in which you have no idea what you’re doing the whole way through would not be fun, and I would have lost that bet. It’s such a weird game that I couldn’t even tell who was ahead at any point, including at the end, although it was never me. I have now played it five times, and five times have won a metaphorical Participation Trophy and zip doodly else. And as soon as the game was over I wanted to play it again.

How can this be?

I think it’s because this game is just like my life. And I love my life. My life is a testament to the fact that you can get by just fine without knowing what the hell you’re doing.

Bird powers are always optional.

Which college to apply to? How about this one with the good psychology department? Okay then. Arrive at college months later with no longer any interest at all in psychology, and take a random group of courses. German. Music. Logic. Black Literature. Calculus.

Discard food tokens to the supply (these must be from next to your player mat, not food tokens cached on bird cards, a concept that will be explained later).

Second year, still no idea what to major in, and all the grownups say it doesn’t matter—you’ll figure it out. All you know is it will be something in the liberal arts. Then you take your first science course and it’s all over—science courses from then on out. All of them. By the time the years and money have run out, there’s only one field you have enough of the required credits in to get a degree—Biology—even though by then you’ve fallen in love with Chemistry and taken nothing but chemistry courses your senior year.

This power adds cards to the wetland’s draw cards action, but it has a cost. You cannot use this power if you have not laid any eggs yet.

You find a job in your new field. In all likelihood, you got the job because you wore a low-cut dress to the interview, but a job is a job, and even though this one pays almost nothing, you leave it after two years because you’ve broken up with your boyfriend and you’ve killed way too many mice in spectacular ways. Then you move across the country just for the hell of it.

When you activate your Bewick’s wren its power is to move from habitat to habitat but only if it’s the last bird in that row.

You sell your art in a street market, and when the Postal Service offers the letter carrier test you take it and pass with high marks because of your skills honed playing Concentration with your mom when you were five.

You must have laid an egg on another bird before you can use these powers.

Now you’re a letter carrier with a biology degree and a pretty stout devotion to beer, and thirty-one years later you cut out with a full pension at 55, and you start writing, which turns out to be the thing you were meant to do and which gives you great pleasure.

The winner is the player with the most points accumulated from birds, bonus cards, end-of-round goals, eggs, cached food, and tucked birds.

And I’m going to finish this life without the most fish or the most rats or the most eggs or the most points and I’ll still want to play it again.

There are a few options in the game of Wingspan. You can play a bird, you can gain food, you can lay eggs, or you can draw a bird. Game over if you play with Mary: the girl can draw a bird.

Original watercolor by Mary Jansen