The Kennerspiel-winning bird game that got a generation into engine-building is about to fit in your bag. Wingspan Pocket, Elizabeth Hargrave's slimmed-down standalone version of Wingspan, arrives from Stonemaier Games on 15 July 2026, and it is not an expansion or a straight travel reprint. It is a ground-up rebuild of the hit that plays in 25 to 35 minutes for one to five players.
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Find events near youIf you have never tried the original, Wingspan is a medium-weight game about attracting birds to your wildlife reserve, building a tableau that snowballs into satisfying chains of actions. It won the 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres, the German award for the year's best connoisseur game, and it has become one of the best-selling modern board games around, with the base game and its expansions past 2.5 million copies.
Pocket keeps the feel while stripping out the fiddle. Instead of managing three habitat rows, you activate a single row of cards each turn, and the deck's 106 cards are double-sided, working as either a bird or the food to play one. That trims setup to a couple of minutes and cuts the rules down to something you could teach over a coffee. It also lets Hargrave add a new trick: green "ongoing" powers that quietly shift your options turn after turn. As Stonemaier's Jamey Stegmaier put it, ongoing powers "are a lot to keep track of on a busy Wingspan player mat," but with a single short row "they stand out and are much easier to remember."
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Set up your group for freeThe birds are brand new and drawn from around the world, illustrated once again by Natalia Rojas and Ana Maria Martinez, so it is a fresh collection rather than a repackage. The cards don't mix with the original game, so don't expect to shuffle the two together.
It reaches Stonemaier's webstore on 15 July, Gen Con in early August, and wider retail a few weeks later. A short, gentle standalone like this is tailor-made for a learn-to-play night. If you fancy introducing your group, set up a game night on Backseat Gamer and get some new players hooked on birds.
Sources: Stonemaier Games | Meeple Mountain | Wikipedia
