Ruling — Wingspan

You asked

How much does it cost to play a bird card?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Wingspanbg-266192-en-1e

To play a bird, you must pay its food and egg cost.[1] The specific costs are as follows:

* **Egg Cost:** You must pay the egg cost shown at the top of the column where you are playing the bird.[1][2][3][4] There is no egg cost for the first column.[2][3][4] In columns 2 or 3, you must discard 1 egg to the egg supply.[2][3] In columns 4 or 5, you must discard 2 eggs.[2][3] These eggs are discarded from bird cards on your player mat.[2]

* **Food Cost:** You must pay the bird's food requirements, which are shown in the upper left-hand corner of the card.[2][4] If a bird has a crossed-out circle icon, it has no food cost.[5][3] A wild icon means you may use any of the five types of food (invertebrate, seed, fish, fruit, or rodent) to meet the requirement.[2][3] You may spend any 2 food tokens as if they were any 1 food token.[5][3] Food tokens must be discarded from next to your player mat, not from tokens cached on bird cards.[2][3]

[1] RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook · p.4 · Turn Structure

[2] RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook · p.6 · THE FOUR ACTIONS · OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand · When you choose to play a bird, do the following:

[3] RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook · p.6 · When you choose to play a bird, do the following:

[4] RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook · p.6 · OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand

[5] RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook · p.6 · Designer's Note: These

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 241 ms · ask 13427 ms · total 13678 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 13678 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.032266, "snippet": "Each turn, you will take 1 action. This section describes each action in more detail. Before choosing to play a bird from your hand, consider its habitat, food requirements, and egg cost. Each bird has habitat and food requirements, shown in the upper left-hand corner of the card. Additionally, ther", "headingPath": "THE FOUR ACTIONS · OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand · When you choose to play a bird, do the following:", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.031054, "snippet": "9 OPTION 4. Draw Bird Cards and Activate Wetland Bird Powers The cards available for you to draw are the 3 face-up cards on the bird tray and the top card of the bird deck. When you choose to draw cards, do the following: 1. Place an action cube in the leftmost exposed slot in the “draw cards” row o", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030579, "snippet": "Place an action cube in the leftmost exposed slot in the 'draw cards' row on your player mat, and draw the number of cards shown there from either the face-up cards on the bird tray or the bird deck. There is no hand limit. If the slot where you placed your action cube shows an egg-to-card bonus con", "headingPath": "When you choose to draw cards, do the following: · Managing the bird deck", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030282, "snippet": "On your turn, you will take 1 of 4 actions, as shown on the left side of your player mat: Play a bird from your hand (page 6) Gain food and activate forest bird powers (page 7) Lay eggs and activate grassland bird powers (page 8) Draw bird cards and activate wetland bird powers (page 9) To play a bi", "headingPath": "Turn Structure", "sharpsignalDocId": 49}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030118, "snippet": "10 Powers on bird cards fall into 3 categories: WHEN ACTIVATED (brown): These powers may be activated from right to left whenever you use the corresponding habitat. BIRD POWERS This indicates that the bird’s power involves tucking other bird cards under it to represent the creation of a flock. Each ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029469, "snippet": "1 . Bird cards. Shuffle the bird cards into a deck. Place it next to the bird tray, then populate the tray with 3 face-up bird cards. Supply. Place all food and egg tokens in the supply. These are tokens accessible to all players. Birdfeeder. Toss the food dice into the birdfeeder dice tower. Goal b", "headingPath": "Player Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.028665, "snippet": "fruit rodent no food : A crossed-out circle means a bird does not have a food cost. Or: This icon in bird costs and other places in Wingspan means 'or' (e.g., pay 1 fish or 1 fruit). When playing birds, you may spend any 2 food tokens as if they are any 1 food token. This exchange cannot be used dur", "headingPath": "Designer's Note: These", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.027912, "snippet": "These powers may be activated from right to left whenever you use the corresponding habitat. WHEN ACTIVATED (brown): Cache: This refers to putting a food token on a bird (the bird is saving the food for later). You cannot spend that food token; instead, it's worth 1 VP at end of game. If you run out", "headingPath": "Powers on bird cards fall into 3 categories: · ONCE BETWEEN TURNS (pink):", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Turn Structure", "sharpsignalDocId": 49}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE FOUR ACTIONS · OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand · When you choose to play a bird, do the following:", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "When you choose to play a bird, do the following:", "sharpsignalDocId": 49}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand", "sharpsignalDocId": 49}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Designer's Note: These", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 198 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 198 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
debug row retained until: Nov 5, 2026 13:02

retrieval — what the passage search returned

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	THE FOUR ACTIONS · OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand · When you choose to play a bird, do the following:	p.6	0.032266 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)		p.9	0.031054 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	When you choose to draw cards, do the following: · Managing the bird deck	p.9	0.030579 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 49)	Turn Structure	p.4	0.030282 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)		p.10	0.030118 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Player Setup	p.2	0.029469 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Designer's Note: These	p.6	0.028665 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Powers on bird cards fall into 3 categories: · ONCE BETWEEN TURNS (pink):	p.10	0.027912 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300

what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 49)	Turn Structure	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	THE FOUR ACTIONS · OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand · When you choose to play a bird, do the following:	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 49)	When you choose to play a bird, do the following:	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 49)	OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand	p.6	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Designer's Note: These	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 241 ms · first delta 11580 ms · total 13678 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 0 ms · retrieval 241 ms · ask 13427 ms · gateway work 13678 ms · total 13678 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2361
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 282
tok/sec: 138.3 tok/sec — 282 output tokens in 2.039 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 58s ago)
stream path: streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog: first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture: both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

6 errata cards registered for edition 3 — these are what the gate above had to match against

anatomist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.2
belted kingfisher · HAND_PINNED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bird Cards) · corpus doc 65 · p.17
ecologist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.5
oologist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.1
photographer · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.3
rodentologist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.4

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.