Stonemaier Games announces Wingspan Pocket, a lighter standalone version

Stonemaier Games has pushed Wingspan into pocket-sized territory with a standalone version that keeps the bird theme but strips the system down to a lighter, shorter card game. Wingspan Pocket was built by the original Wingspan team, with Elizabeth Hargrave joined again by artists Natalia Rojas and Ana Maria Martinez, and Stonemaier says each player now activates a single row of cards on every turn.

That compression is the headline for designers: the new edition keeps the tableau-builder’s recognizable structure while removing much of the table footprint and turn overhead that define the original box. Stonemaier lists Wingspan Pocket as a 1-5 player game, and the component set makes the reframe clear: 106 double-sided bird and food cards, 60 egg tokens, five player tokens, five Nest cards, five player aids, one first-player card, nine double-sided goal cards, 11 Automa cards, one solo Nest card, and two rulebooks. The box measures 110x160x50mm, a stark shift from the original Wingspan’s 30x30x7cm box that weighs 2.4kg.

The publisher made Wingspan Pocket available through its webstore on July 15, 2026, with orders shipping from fulfillment centers in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Stonemaier also set an early August presence at Gen Con, then a local retail release a few weeks after launch fulfillment, followed by online retail release a few weeks later. The rollout keeps the game in the hobby’s biggest summer spotlight while giving the smaller format a chance to reach both convention traffic and the broader retail channel.

Stonemaier’s own product notes frame the project as more than a simple shrink. In a July 6 post about product design playtests, the company said three days of conversations, playtests, and pages of notes led to a vastly superior product design and onboarding, with accessibility singled out as a priority. The same post said the original box shape was awkward and that the redesign aimed to fit better on a shelf, which makes Wingspan Pocket read as a usability pass as much as a rules reduction.

That matters because the original Wingspan is not an obscure design to simplify. Stonemaier describes it as a competitive, medium-weight, card-driven, engine-building game, and the Kennerspiel des Jahres jury named it the 2019 winner. Stonemaier said in 2024 that Wingspan had sold over 2 million copies worldwide, and its broader Wingspan line has since grown into a brand family with room for smaller-format entries. Wingspan Pocket takes the most legible parts of that success, the bird theme, the card-driven engine, the familiar iconography, and repackages them for a smaller table without abandoning the identity that made the original land.