It’s an odd thing to say, given that Connie Vogelmann’s spinoff of Elizabeth Hargrave’s Wingspan is about fictional creatures rather than real-world birds, but Wyrmspan benefits from its sense of grounding.

Yeah, yeah, I know. But it’s true. Wingspan, which I’ve always had a fondness for, requires some degree of acceptance. You’re arranging its avian wildlife into three rows that represent… sanctuaries? Bird-watches? Meals? I couldn’t tell you. By contrast, Wyrmspan settles into a fiction of carving dragon nests into a primeval mountain. You feed the beasts, fill their hoards, raise their hatchlings. It’s every bit as pleasant and appealing as Wingspan, but heftier and more established.

Also, it sends my ten-year-old into paroxysms of joy. So there’s that.

Dragons and caverns. The two essential ingredients of a dragon hatchery.

Because Wyrmspan is a spinoff, its proximity to Wingspan is worn like a warm jacket. Like its predecessor, this is a game about enticing winged creatures into your tableau and hopefully triggering some powerful combos along the way. There’s a raft of things to consider: resources, cards, various placement bonuses and endgame scoring perks and intermittent contests between players, not to mention the iconography to support all that. In Vogelmann’s hands, however, the game stays true to its roots. Despite allowing extravagant moves, it never gets mired in extra actions. The icons are crisp, leaving very little margin for confusion. Above all, it has the tone of a celebration. Like Wingspan. it’s a gentle game. “Multiplayer solitaire” one might call it, although that sells it short. A better term might be companionable.

But the dissimilarities from its forerunner are where Wyrmspan sets itself apart. There are any number of minute changes that may enthrall the original game’s fans. Eggs can now be nested in any row! The action cube economy has received a shake-up in the form of dragon coins! Basic resources are no longer doled out at the whim of a birdhouse!

The meatier details also tend to be subtler. Perhaps the juiciest is that Wyrmspan affords greater control. Wingspan was always a game about pressing through bottlenecks, shortages of cards or resources that required a conservationist mindset to overcome. Wyrmspan pulls the same trick but more fluidly. Essential resources, whether we’re talking about the basic stuff like gold, meat, crystals, and milk, or cards and action-permitting dragon coins, are still prone to lean times, but there are broader methods for accessing them. Rather than clustering at the birdhouse to hopefully get the right food dice, it befits a dragon to scavenge for sustenance all over the place. There are still bottlenecks, but they’re less likely to stick you up.

A late-game tableau.

Meanwhile, the entire structure of the tableau has received an overhaul. All right, it’s more of an underpass. Once again there are three rows, this time representing three layers of a towering nested mountain. The entryways to these caves are spacious, letting you entice a few dragons to your sanctuary, but taming more will first require you to excavate new caverns.

This is where cave cards come in. These are placed directly onto your player mat to provide new living quarters for your dragons. Although they cost a precious dragon coin and possibly an egg or two to carve out, they also bring immediate bonuses as you uncover resources. Eventually, at the deepest reaches of the mountain, cave cards provide one of the few sources of additional dragon coins, letting you stretch some additional blood from that round. All told, this creates a secondary economy, one that’s both necessary for the serious business of dragon taming and, if you plan your cards right, provides a welcome infusion of resources or cards when you most need them.

The double-layered nature of Wyrmspan’s tableau is the biggest addition, but it’s far from the only one. Certain dragons are hatchlings. These require extra tending over the course of multiple turns, gobbling up milk or eggs or other nourishment. If visited often enough, they return the favor, producing a sudden boon of resources or points. Every dragon has its own personality thanks to Clémentine Campardou’s illustrations, but little touches like this go a long way toward fostering a sense of investment between players and their dragons.

There’s also the Dragon Guild, a circular track with variable goals that ticks forward whenever you trigger the proper icon. At first, this doesn’t seem especially useful; players tend to progress at more or less the same rate, and its trickle of resources is welcome but not often considerable. With some experience, its merits become more apparent. This is one of the ways Wyrmspan ensures a steady income and clears those aforementioned bottlenecks, without resorting to anything as crass as catch-up resources. With some attention, one can positively sprint around the track, earning goodies and variable perks one after the other.

The Guild is Wyrmspan’s biggest departure from Wingspan.

My favorite touch of all, though, is the ability to walk among your dragons. I’ve always had a soft spot for tableau-builders that not only ask us to create a space, but also to visit that space, to traverse it, to explore it. My regular example is Josh Wood’s Santa Monica, which invites players to move tourists and townies along its beaches and boardwalks even as they arrange the town’s layout.

Wyrmspan does something similar. As one of its actions, you can spend a dragon coin to explore the caverns you’ve excavated and filled with dragons. This lets you move a pawn from left to right, pausing at each station to nab something precious. The more populated your caverns, the deeper you can explore. The more interesting your dragons, well, the more powerful such an expedition becomes. In my most recent tableau, one layer of my cavern included a dragon that laid eggs whenever I visited. Directly below her was a dragon that feasted on the eggs of any adjacent nest to increase my reputation with the Guild. I bounced between those caverns as often as possible, laying and snatching eggs like a poultry farmer.

There are limitations to how often you can visit each level, gated not only by dragon coins but also by increasing costs payable only in eggs. Presumably, these offerings placate any dragons that have grown wary of your repeat appearances. But these combinations have a naturalness to them. It’s a delight to foster and then witness these interactions, to place a dragon that prefers to dwell among helpful kin, or an aggressive brute who prefers not to roost among competitors, or a shy hatchling that gradually grows into one of your best points-earners.

And, yes, Wyrmspan has found an adherent in my daughter. She delights in her creations, poring over the dragon factbook that comes with the game and reading out the one-line descriptions of her stable. Now and then she makes a decision based on which dragon she finds cuter, or whether she thinks it’s appropriate for one dragon to eat so many of its cousins. (“You’re getting too fat, dragon!” she noted, making me wonder whether dragon obesity is a topic that falls under body positivity.) But the game remains both breezy enough for her developing mind to comprehend and deep enough to hold her interest. She won our last session, and I wouldn’t even confess to Batman that I was going easy.

Exploring the caverns.

Back when Wingspan came out, almost exactly five years ago, I remember writing about how pleasant it was. Some took that as faint praise; others as proof that it was too light for its own good. Every time it gets brought up out there on the internet, somebody hurries to mention that they don’t get the appeal.

Wyrmspan, I get the appeal. This thing is lovely. It sparks my daughter’s imagination, true. But more than that, it sparks mine. Somewhere, in the accrual of illustrations and abilities, between the little personality tags and the ways they all fire off one another, something magical happens. More even than the aviaries of Wingspan, these mountain vaults become inhabited. They teem with creatures that are as alive as they are otherworldly. What an enchanting place to visit for ninety minutes.

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A complimentary copy was provided.