Abstract A more accurate prediction of the mechanical behavior of wood is needed to increase its ability to compete with other building materials. Especially, when it comes to estimate failure loads, the lack of appropriate prediction tools becomes obvious. The present work contributes to this goal in two different ways: First, a damage concept for wood is revisited, which allows for transferring information about failure processes through different scales of observation. In this concept, the failure behavior of clear wood is linked to the different characteristic of earlywood and latewood layers in softwoods. This reduces the number of empirically determined strength parameters, while the definition of multisurface failure criteria is still possible. Secondly, it will be demonstrated that the combination of these models with discrete crack modeling based on the extended finite element method provides a numerical simulation tool capable to describe failure mechanisms more realistically than existing approaches. The results obtained by numerical calculations and experiments by means of a micro wedge splitting test show very good agreement, especially, if the load capacity and failure mechanisms are in focus. The presented approach shows a much better performance compared to linear elastic or elastoplastic simulations.