Bird collecting games: from Wingspan to your own backyard

Bird collecting games come in three shapes. On the table, Wingspan (Stonemaier Games, 2019, designed by Elizabeth Hargrave) has players build a preserve out of 170 illustrated bird cards, and smaller card games like Birdwatcher turn birding into set collection. On a screen, Wingspan has digital versions on Steam, Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, iOS and Android. And in the yard, Warble plays the same collecting loop with real birds: you record a song, the phone names the species, and it becomes a card in an album for your state.

Wingspan, the game that made birds collectible

Wingspan was released on March 8, 2019 by Stonemaier Games. Elizabeth Hargrave designed it after a long career in health policy in Washington, D.C., and after getting tired of what she called too many games about castles and space. She built the bird data from Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society sources.

The game is an engine builder. Each player runs a wildlife preserve with three habitats: forest, grassland and wetland. Playing a bird card into a habitat costs food and improves the action that habitat gives you, so a forest full of birds gathers more food, a grassland lays more eggs, and a wetland draws more cards. Over four rounds you score for the birds, eggs, stored food, tucked cards and round goals. The 170 bird cards, painted by Natalia Rojas, Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo and Beth Sobel, are each a real species.

It sold 44,000 copies in its first two months, passed 1.3 million by September 2021 and 2.6 million by March 2026. It won the 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres, the 2019 Deutscher Spiele Preis and the 2020 American Tabletop Award for strategy game of the year. Expansions followed for Europe (2019), Oceania (2020), Asia (2022) and the Americas (2026), each adding a new deck of birds to collect.

Wikipedia's summary of the reviews is telling: critics singled out the satisfying feeling of collecting beautiful things, alongside a balance of strategy and ease. The strategy is real, but a lot of people keep playing to see the next card.

Wingspan on a screen

The digital edition, developed by Monster Couch, arrived on Steam and Windows in September 2020, Nintendo Switch in December 2020, Xbox One in June 2021, iOS and iPadOS in July 2021, Android in November 2021, and PlayStation 4 and 5 in October 2024. It is the same game with setup and scoring handled for you.

The smaller cousins

Wingspan is the heavyweight, but birds as a set to collect travel well into smaller boxes.

Birdwatcher (designed by Zakir Jafry, illustrated by Lauren Helton, published by Oni Press after a 2021 Kickstarter) casts two to four players as nature photographers chasing birds-of-paradise. Most birds are worth more if you photograph more than one of the same species, and identical birds only pay out in full when they sit next to each other in your photo journal, so the tension is about sequence as much as quantity. Games run 25 to 60 minutes and the box says ages ten and up.

The obvious comparison from the phone world is Pokémon Go, released by Niantic in July 2016. Its loop is walk around the real world, find a creature at your location, catch it, fill the Pokédex. Studies cited on its Wikipedia page found players took about 194 extra steps a day on average after installing it, and the game passed a billion downloads by early 2019. Strip away the cartoon monsters and you have a description of birding: go outside, find something where you are, identify it, add it to the list.

Why collecting works so well

There is research on this. A study led by Martin Reimann at the University of Arizona, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, looked at collecting across crowdfunding, video games, vinyl records and tourist sites. The team's conclusion was that collecting satisfies a need for control and structure: a set is a complete, bounded thing, and finishing it feels like putting the world in order. People who scored high on desire for control were more willing to spend time and money to finish a set, and in the video game the researchers studied, players were more motivated when a collection was nearly complete than when it was barely started.

That last finding explains a lot about bird games. An album with 96 of 100 birds filled in nags at you in a way an empty album does not. It also explains why the good games give you a visible frame: Wingspan's habitat rows, Birdwatcher's photo journal, a Pokédex with grey silhouettes where the missing entries go. You need to see the holes.

Two more things make birds unusually good material. Every species is genuinely different, so no card is filler. And the set has rarity built in: a cardinal is on every feeder and a Cerulean Warbler is not, and nobody had to invent a drop rate.

Playing it with real birds

Warble is the same loop moved outdoors. You hear a bird, press the button, and the phone names the species from its song, no signal needed. The bird becomes a card. Each state has an album of 100 birds, and how rare a card is comes from real sighting data for that state, so the birds that are actually hard to find where you live are the ones that are hard to catch. You get one free catch a day, the pacing of a daily puzzle rather than a slot machine; Pro removes the limit. The catch is that a real bird has to be singing near you, and the app can be unsure in wind or traffic, which is also what makes a completed row feel earned.

If you are starting an album, these four are the cards most yards in the eastern half of the country hand you first.

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Questions people ask

Warble is a game, not a field guide. Where this page states a fact about a bird, it comes from the sources above.