Viticulture Essential Edition: Rapid Review
Information:
Mechanics: Worker Placement, Engine Building, Contracts, Hand Management
Player Age: 13+Player Count: 1 - 6 PlayersTime to Play: 45 - 90 Minutes
Game Designer: Jamey Stegmaier, Alan Stone
Player Age: 13+
Game Designer: Jamey Stegmaier, Alan Stone
Rundown:
Viticulture is a worker placement game where players are placing workers and playing visitors over years (rounds) to build the best vineyard and score the most points until someone reaches 20 points. Each year consists of four seasons; Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter.
Spring:
Spring has players determining player order by placing their rooster on the track and gaining the bonus associated with that number. These bonuses include cards, a victory point, libra (money), and an additional worker for this year. Once all roosters are placed, this will determine the turn order for the rest of the year. You may find that you get worse benefits early on that leads to better opportunities during the worker placement section in summer and winter.
Summer:
During summer, players will place their workers on the yellow spaces to the left half of the board. Be careful as once a worker is placed, they are there for the entire year.
Summer focuses on three things; gaining libra through doing tours or selling grapes/fields, drawing and playing vines into your fields for later harvest (shown below), and building structures. These structures can expand your wine cellar, allow you to plant certain vines, gain you points for performing certain actions, and open a private location to harvest/uproot vines.
Fall:
During fall, you will either draw a summer or winter visitor. If you have previously built the cottage, you will be able to perform this action twice. In the winter and summer sections of the board there is a worker location that will allow players to play the card matching the season. These visitors will have certain abilities that will either help you during the game or will allow you to score points. The visitors tend to have actions that match the season they are in.
Winter:
Winter is all about reaping what you sow. It has players harvesting grapes from the vines previously planted (vines are not discarded from this action).
Transferring up to two grapes into wine. If you have upgraded cellars, you can combine grapes during the harvest to make blush and sparkling wine. You can also use a worker and four libra to gain another worker for each year going forward. In this season, you can also gain wine order cards and fulfil these orders (by discarding the matching wine) to gain victory points and residual payments that will give you money at the end of every year.
Year End:
The year will end with players collecting their workers, discarding down to seven cards, passing the first player marker counter-clockwise, and collecting residual payments. The other occurrence is that all your wine and grapes will age one value if it can move to the next number. The game will continue until a player has reached 20 points within a year, then the year will be resolved and all points tallied.
Appeal:
As someone that doesn't play many euro games, the theme didn't instantly appeal to me as it may to other gamers. The game is circulated around the vineyard theme with the buildings and grape/wine system, but once the game really started going, my mind was changed. I particularly like the passing of time in this game. Each round is a year and as a player, you will play several years. This makes you feel the effort and time it takes to properly grow your internal systems. One year may have a large focus on building your fields, or a focus on gathering funds. Then you have the opportunity to finally have a year focusing on selling the wine you have been working so hard on. The other passage of time comes from the mama (red cards) and papa (blue cards) at the start of the game which has players feeling that passing of the torch to a different generation. Gaining a building (or worker) that your papa worked hard on developing and relying on the knowledge and relationships that your mama built (creating a starting hand of cards).
Production:
This is truly the essential edition for this 10-year-old classic by Stonemaier Games. The components and game container is great. There is space for additional cards/sleeved cards and containers to hold all the player's components in the box. The most interesting part I find is the see-through tokens that players use for grapes and wine. This denotes the wine and grapes players have while still allowing them to see the value.
Interaction:
There is plenty of interaction between players due to the restrictiveness of the board, as you are constantly blocking each other's potential. Each location has only one available worker spot for every two players. 2 players have one spot in each location, 3-4 players have two locations, and 5-6 players have three locations. This restrictiveness continues further when there are more than two players as the second location always has a bonus ability so players will always want to place there. The saving grace of this constant blockage is the grande worker who can go to any location even if there is not any space available and, more importantly, pick the earlier turn in spring if you have very clear plans within that year.
The restrictiveness continues as players only have a certain amount of workers especially if they never train new workers. So players have to carefully consider how they want to spread out their workers throughout the year knowing that once you use a worker they are spent for the year.
Determination:
- Interesting determination for player order.
- Tough decisions on how to spread out your workers throughout the year.
- Interesting choice with parents during the setup of the game.
- Restrictive board state.
- Wide range of visitors to shake up the game.
Viticulture is a game that took me a long time to get to as I am not someone that tends to gravitate towards euro games. Even when I received the review copy the game seemed daunting to learn. Once played I found that this wasn't the case. After a year or two, the structure and rules become apparent fast. The strategy comes from how you are going to spread out your workers, and what is the main focus you have year to year. Determining turn order plays a big part in this, as the better bonuses come from further down the priority. Choosing these benefits may result in you constantly losing opportunities and being blocked in summer and winter. This is a grape game that has me vinely focused throughout the time. I had to constantly weigh up my strategies, often leaving my opponents to wine about how long this took (LOL). If you enjoy euro games this is a classic but if you are like me and don't gravitate towards euro games then this is still the game to try as it already has me eager to play again.
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