Viticulture

We are a game-loving family, and recently got this game. You are the owners of vineyards, and whoever can run their vineyard most efficiently wins the game. It is a very straightforward worker placement game, where you have a couple of workers to start with, but can train more workers as you go. Each round is considered a year, and in each season you can have your workers take different actions. In the summer, you can build structures necessary to run a vineyard,, give tours to make money, plant grapes, sell your fields, or have visitors come who can help you in some way. Winter spaces are focused on the winemaking, harvesting grapes, making wine, storing it in your wine cellars, filling wine orders and hiring more workers to help out around the vineyard. Winter visitors can also come to help you, and you never know what your opponents visitors have up their sleeves! The game plays smoothly and once you understand the structure of turns, it is very easy to play and so much fun. There are many different strategies that can bring you to the end goal the fastest, and the use of visitor cards give you so much re-playability, you can play it often and never tire of it! We have a lot of games, but this is my favorite! When our adult kids come to visit, this is the game they want to play! Don't even hesitate or think twice about it, this is a great game! We also have the Moor Visitors and Rhine Valley visitor expansion cards which enhances the gameplay. Did I mention you place a rooster at the beginning of the season to determine "wake up" order? Love it!

Viticulture is an excellent mid-weight euro game that sits firmly in the Worker Placement genre. I picked this up to play 2 player games with my wife and am happy to say that we are both very pleased with the game after 4 plays and will be playing it a lot more incorporating the Tuscany essential edition expansion. The components and presentation of the game is beautiful. The board depicts various building spaces to send your workers to obtain various resources (money, cards, points), with spots for the various card decks at the top and a point track at the bottom. The action spaces themselves are basically divided in half with summer actions (mostly for building up) and winter actions (scoring points and creating wine). Each player has an individual playerboard that represents their vineyard with an assortment of different building and worker meeples that they can use for upgrading their vineyard and executing actions. The game feels very well executed at the 2 player level. Each action only has 1 space available (more with more than 2 players) but each player has one "grande" (a bigger worker meeple) that can go to an action space thats occupied. The game involves the use of a lot of cards that represent either types of wine grapes / summer visitors / winter visitors and order cards. There is a flow to the game, where grapes must be planted, then harvested, then made into wine. At the end of each round, grapes and wine age, and you can plan ahead to fulfill an order when your grapes/wine have properly aged. Money is tight, and each player will not be able to do everything in a game. There is also a lot of variability added from the cards. Most visitor cards will offer up two options where players can capitalize by trading resources for points or money. We've noticed that its possible to take a card-focused strategy by building a cottage and then using cards as much as possible throughout the game. Turn order is also very well done in this game, where players can choose something they really need (an extra vine card, coin, point) and it will determine the order that they get to take their turn in. The last point is that the game does not have a set number of rounds, it is more a race to see who can get the first to 20 points which makes the game very exciting as it feels very neck and neck up to the end to see who can squeeze out the couple last points through efficiency. If you enjoy other worker placement games (Stone Age, Agricola, Lords of Waterdeep), Viticulture will likely be right up your alley. Neither my wife or I are wine connoisseurs, but that does not diminish our enjoyment of this game at all. In fact, we've concluded that this game will ultimately replace Agricola for us as there is not nearly as much stress involved during the course of the game. The game still has a good amount of scarcity for actions where one cannot do everything they want to, it is just not as pronounced.

So I finally pulled the trigger and purchased Viticulture, (Essential Edition) (which followed the first and second editions) has a couple things pulled from an earlier expansion (Tuscany, I believe) which make the game far more interesting. One is the introduction of the "Mama" and "Papa" cards (which give you a random setup and starting resources). This is a very nice design element. GAMEPLAY: While I have only played 2-player versions, I can say it is pretty solid. One thing about worker placement games that some people don't like is when you keep getting locked out of an action you want to perform by your opponents. There is a nice design element here, where one worker (the big meeple) which I called "the boss" (maybe call him "il capo" since the game takes place in Italy?) is a larger meeple and that one worker can be placed at a location to do the action, regardless of whether other spaces are available. This lessens the sting of getting blocked over and over. In this game, I never felt the worker placement element was overly cutthroat, and while it was something you worry and plan for, you have that big meeple to save the day. SCORING: there are multiple ways of scoring, and while gaining a point here and there through "visitor" cards might seem minor, that coupled with things like the windmill and/or Tasting room can be a reliable Victory Point generator. However, you really want to go for "order" cards where you sell the wine you've made for bigger VP rewards and passive income. The random distribution of the order cards means you could get many difficult ones early on, meaning if you aim for those, it will take a long time to score. So don't be afraid of drawing more and more "order cards" until you get some easier ones to get you on the road. FINAL ROUND: The rules as written (aka "RAW") says as soon as one player passes the 25VP spot on the VP track, that signals that this is the last round of the game and that players continue to finish their turns for the round and then the game is over. In a few of the games we played this resulted in rather abrupt ends of the game where someone jumped from 20 to 26 points by turning in a big VP order as one of their last actions. So keep in mind that once someone hits 20 points, the game is virtually over unless they have no wine. I am not sure how I feel about this aspect of the game. I will update my review after a few more plays. MINOR NITPICKS: While it is a pretty game, it could probably use a little more iconography to explain things and for ease of use. Also, it would have been useful to have reference cards that only reminded you of the building effects. Again, iconography would have helped. Your player mat kind of spreads out important building upgrades and they are in some slightly awkward positions (I kept bumping my trellis ad my irrigation unit off my board because it is next to where the vine cards go (representing the kinds of grapes you are growing in your vinyard). Another tiny nitpick is the image on the three field cards is meant to mirror the playmat that rests below them, but there is a layout issue (at least with my deck) where the images overlap on the second and third cards and if you are just a tad "OCD" about things, this might bug you a bit. Finally, with all the unique meeples, having round cylinder pieces for the scoreboard was a poor design choice. One good bump of the table and those can fall and roll all over. Simple cubes would have sufficed...or why not wine cask shaped pieces? VERDICT: Stonemeier's first game, this worker placement game is lighter than two of his (company's) other worker placement games, Euphoria and Scythe. It is maybe a tiny bit heavier than their most famous game (...which I play several times a week these days...) Wingspan. It is a very nice game to play, and it is not really confrontational so that can be a real boon if playing with a spouse or partner who doesn't like that kind of thing. A very solid game...well worth the price of a modern Hobbyist game. 8 out of 10 stars.

Fantastic Rulebook. Terms explained on back cover.These points are often overlooked but very important. Also: Art work beautiful. Solid game, scales well w/player count. You need to plan ahead and it really is a decent game, the best in years. This edition is the best, and it is finally a worker placement game that I actually like. I played the tuscany + essential and did not like that very much. It feels "finished", instead of others that feel incomplete and are shouting for expansions. Compared to other wine board games it is simpler than Vinhos and less cruel than grand cru. It actually teaches how wine is produced. For kids however it is not very spectacular, would play it with intelligent adults, that may or may not like wine. Oh and did I mention you can play it solo against the AI of the game?

Lovely production, good worker placement mechanics and very accesible. Highly recommended for medium-lightweight game.

Love the game^^

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One of the most well-balanced and structured board game, with heavy reliance on strategy. The build quality and graphics are excellent. The board map design could be better, but the overall gameplay has no drawbacks. Although quite complicated with a learning curve, the unique gameplay makes it well worth learning and it flows quite smoothly once you get used to it. Good enough for an evening of family fun. Smart enough to involve a variety of players. And you can make teams if it feels too complicated. For me, it’s good value for money for the quality and uniqueness of gameplay.