Today’s Two Player Treat is soooo pretty! Look at that classy cheesecake! 😍I got to make use of my baby springform pan again, and we finally sat down and tried our friend’s copy of Wingspan Asia, which includes a two player mode I’d been curious about. Keep reading to learn more!

At a Glance…

The Sweet Treat

This little delight from The Banana Diaries is super easy to throw together, looks gorgeous, and is so tasty! You got a base of vanilla wafers (or graham crackers in my case), then a cream cheese layer, then a strawberry cream cheese layer (including fresh and freeze dried strawberries!), and finally a crumb-y topping of more vanilla wafers (or biscoff in my case), blended with more freeze dried strawberries. Amazing. This one solidified nicely with about 6 hours in the freezer, and then we were too impatient and had to eat it. I think I got a little confused in the recipe and it was supposed to make TWO 4″ pans worth, but I tried to squeeze it all into one pan. I ended up with some strawberry cream cheese and crumb topping that didn’t fit, so we’ll see what we can do with that. Maybe freeze it, maybe throw it over some vanilla ice cream, who knows! But it’ll be great! I can’t wait to eat this again!

The Strategy

Wingspan has become a modern classic! First debuted in 2019, it and its expansions have now sold over 2.6 MILLION copies! 😱That’s insane! And we are not one of those copies, haha. It’s a great game, but since so many people own it, we never felt like we needed to. We’ve played friends’ and family copies many times and played it online. BUT, we had yet to try the two player mode that came with the Asia expansion. So we borrowed our friend’s copy and gave that a try recently.

For those who haven’t played Wingspan at all, in it you are birders getting birds into your notebook in the forest, grasslands, and water. You do this by paying their resource costs, which you get from the dice in the dice tower bird feeder (the components of this game are off the charts). As you play birds into each habitat, their abilities get more powerful and can trigger each time you do that action. The forest gives you more resources, the grassland more eggs (points), and the water more bird cards. There’s even an app where you can scan the bird card and it will play the actual bird song! So cool!

Anyway, the Asia 2 player mode doesn’t drastically change the game, but does add a fun twist. You have a token on each spot where you can play a bird. When you play a bird there, you put the token on another little mini board and claim a spot. Sometimes they give you bonuses, but mostly you’re doing it to fulfill the 2 player specific goals of the game, and to get the largest group of adjacent tokens. I thought it was an interesting addition and it definitely caused me to explore new strategies I hadn’t before. Jon was a little skeptical and felt it doubled down on some of the randomness of the game. If you like Wingspan and like 2 player games, this one is worth a try!

Want to buy these games? Check out your friendly local game store (FLGS), Amazon [here], or get a first-order discount at Board Game bliss [here].