The Castles

When Elizabeth Hargrave started designing her first game in 2014, she ran the numbers on what the hobby was making.

Of the top 400 games on BoardGameGeek, 540 of 583 designer credits belonged to white men. Seven of the top 200 had a non-male designer involved. The themes ran on repeat: medieval castles, Mediterranean trade, galactic empires, zombie apocalypses. She said it plainly: there were too many games about castles and space, and not enough games about things she was interested in.

She was a health policy analyst. She had spent twenty years modeling US Medicare data for the Department of Health and Human Services and working on the staff of Senator Tom Daschle. She had a B.A. from Brown and a Master’s in Public Affairs from UT Austin’s LBJ School. She was in her mid-forties. She had no industry contacts, no publishing deal, and no evidence that anyone wanted what she was building.

What she had was a spreadsheet.

The Spreadsheet

Hargrave designs the way she analyzed health policy: data first, then structure, then iteration.

For Wingspan, she built a 596-row, 100-column Excel spreadsheet sourcing data from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the IUCN Red List, and the National Audubon Society. Each of the 170+ bird cards reflected real biological behavior. Predators hunt small birds. Cuckoos lay eggs in others’ nests. Flocking species tuck cards beneath them. A unified formula calculated the victory-point value of each card based on its mechanical utility, ensuring a predictable cost-benefit ratio across the entire deck.

No prior nature-themed strategy game had achieved this depth of factual integration into mechanics at this scale. Evolution (2014) and Photosynthesis (2017) used nature themes. Neither built the science into the mechanical loops the way Hargrave did. Nature called the theme integration elegant. Science compared the engine-building to community ecology.

The spreadsheet wasn’t a design aid. It was the design.

The Row

Wingspan’s most distinctive mechanical contribution is the habitat-row action escalation system.

Players manage three habitat rows—Forest, Grassland, Wetland—each linked to a core action: gain food, lay eggs, draw cards. Playing a bird card into a habitat serves two functions: it grants a unique ability and it increases the baseline power of that row’s action. Executing an action requires sliding a cube from right to left, activating each bird’s power in sequence. More birds mean stronger actions but longer traversal times.

No clear prior example of this specific mechanism has been identified in research. Hargrave cites Deus (Dujardin, 2014) as an influence on the concept of triggering a row of actions, but Wingspan integrated row activation into a player mat that visually and mechanically represented ecological expansion—a synthesis nobody had attempted in this form.

Against this growing engine, Hargrave deployed her most distinctive structural choice: diminishing actions. Players start with eight action cubes in Round 1. Each round, they lose one—seven, six, five—as cubes are placed on the scoring track. The standard engine-builder arc gives you more to do as your engine grows. Wingspan inverts it. You must do more with less. Design analysts single this out as the tension that distinguishes Wingspan from the genre it inhabits.

The Sweep

Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games projected Wingspan would sell 10,000 copies.

It sold 44,000 in its first two months across three printings. By the end of 2019, nearly 300,000 units. In 2020, another 447,000. In 2021, 663,548—the year Stonemaier’s revenue hit $24.7 million, driven primarily by one game designed by a first-time designer with a birdwatching habit and a spreadsheet.

By early 2025, cumulative sales exceeded 2.4 million copies of the base game. With expansions, over 2.5 million units across 27 languages. Digital editions added another 674,000 copies across Steam, Switch, Xbox, iOS, and Android.

The awards followed the sales. Kennerspiel des Jahres 2019—the most prestigious strategy game jury award in the hobby. Deutscher Spielepreis 2019. Nine Golden Geek Awards. American Tabletop Award for Best Strategy Game. Play Creators Award for Tabletop Game Designer of the Year. Diana Jones Award shortlist in 2021. Guest of Honor at Gen Con 2025. Her design papers are now archived at The Strong National Museum of Play—a rare distinction for a living contemporary designer.

The commercial impact dwarfed anything in Stonemaier’s catalog. Wingspan outsold Scythe—their previous flagship—by more than four to one. Tussie-Mussie, an 18-card microgame published the same year, raised $80,000 on a $1,000 Kickstarter goal. By 2026, Avalon Hill (Hasbro) was publishing her games.

The Shadow

Here is where the story gets complicated—and where the methodology earns its keep.

Wingspan’s cultural and commercial footprint is enormous. But the question the scoring system asks about propagation is precise: did other designers adopt her mechanisms?

Within the Wingspan franchise, the answer is clear. Connie Vogelmann—whom Hargrave mentored as a DC-area playtest partner—designed Wyrmspan (2024) directly on the habitat-row chassis, with Hargrave serving as developer. Finspan (2025) followed the same template. These are franchise extensions commissioned by the same publisher using an adapted version of the original system.

Outside the franchise, the evidence thins. No external designer has been documented publicly crediting Wingspan’s specific mechanics as direct inspiration. The nature-theme wave that followed—Cascadia (2021), Ark Nova (2021), Meadow (2021), Earth (2023)—is commercially correlational. Everdell (2018) slightly predated Wingspan with nature theming. Photosynthesis (2017) preceded both. None of those designers have publicly cited Wingspan’s mechanisms.

What Hargrave demonstrated was commercial viability. She proved that scientifically rigorous nature themes could sustain complex strategy games at mass-market scale, and that a first-time designer with no industry pedigree could produce a phenomenon. That’s cultural influence. It’s thematic influence. It’s industry influence. But it’s not mechanical propagation—and the scoring system distinguishes between them.

Total: 24 points. Year: 2019.

24 points. 2019. The birder who made the hobby look up.

The spreadsheet is still open. The rows keep growing.