Alter
Spezial
PORTUGUESE WINE GAME
VINHOS
Export, Sales or Wine Tasting Fairs?
2010 was the Year of Wine, at least when looking at new releases at Spiel in Essen.
For me, the most interesting of all those wine games is called Vinhos, meaning wine in Portuguese, and was published by a small Italian company by the name of What's Your Game? This publisher first got my attention a year before with their game of Vasco da Gama. I did not expect that an Italian publisher, after releasing a game on a Portuguese seafarer, will publish a game on Portuguese wines, but maybe someone at the company has a soft spot for this country in southwestern Europe, and the game definitely does not suffer from it.
That the topic is Portuguese and not Italian wines is probably due to the designer of the game, Vital Lacerda, who is Portuguese. His name was totally unknown to me before, but that’s quite understandable as his only other published game so far has been a Map of Portugal for the game Age of Steam.
Players are taking on the roles of wine makers and try to market their brand in the country itself and abroad.
Vinhos is played in 6 rounds = Years. Each round comprises several phases. At the end of rounds three, five and six Wine Tasting Fairs are held, where players need to present one kind of wine each.
Each round starts with a weather forecast for the coming year, made by turning up a randomly chosen tile. This weather forecast influences the quality of the wine you will harvest at the end of the year. Furthermore, the tile shows the currents preferences of the managers, more on the consequences of this later, and it also causes the markers on the scale to be moved for some characteristics.
This is followed by two action phases in which each player has one action each. There are nine different actions arranged in a grid of 3x3 squares. Each player has an action marker moving in this grid enabling him to execute the action of the square reached by the marker. Moves into an adjacent square are free, diagonally adjacent square are also considered to be adjacent. Movements exceeding this distance cost 1000 Bagos. You cannot pass to move. For each action marker that has already reached the target spot you must pay 1000 Bagos to each owner.
The actions you can execute are acquiring of vineyards or cellars. Wineries or Enologist, all of these in one way or another either improve the quality of your wine or allow its production. Furthermore there is the Banco do Vinho enabling you to shift money between your account, investments and cash – a more detailed description of those possibilities would go beyond the scope of this review! Then there are Sales - enhancing the balance of your account depending on the quality of the wines sold, Export - functioning similar to Sales, but earning you victory points instead of money, Hiring Wine Experts – bringing you small advantages during the game or being useful in Wine Tasting Fairs, and finally Passing. When you pass you can choose a new position in the sequence of play, which is valid from the next round on, and – if you want to do so – you can present a wine for the next Wine Tasting Fair.
You can only present one wine at a Wine Tasting Fair.
For a Wine Tasting Fair you choose a wine and determine its value, which depends on the number of wine experts you can put up in the next Fair for this wine. Then you choose a free Fair square. Each Fair square determines two of four characteristics. Depending on how far the characteristics have advanced on the characteristics scale you score Fair points. Furthermore, in the next Wine Tasting Fair you can only put up wine experts of the corresponding characteristics (there are four different wine experts corresponding to the four different characteristics). Each Fair square also earns you a bonus, which can be either money or Fair points or a wine expert.
Finally, you need to check the current demands of the managers depicted on the weather tile and compare them to the wine presented at the Fair. If a manager is happy with your wine you can place a barrel there. Each manager allows 5 different advantages. Before, during or after one of your actions you can discard any wine to use an advantage of a manager, provided you have marked him with a barrel that you can move. The manager advantages can give you additional actions or victory points for several items you own, but when you have moved your barrel onto a spot for victory points you cannot move it anymore.
After the action phases it is time for upkeep. Each enologist costs you 1000 Bagos, Furthermore, you are paid money for investment made, or you need to pay debts that you incurred.
Then the wine ages. Each wine you own is moved one step to the right. When there is no room to the right, the wine has turned sour and must be discarded. This is the point where a Cellar can help. It allows longer storage time and enhances the value of aged wines.
At the end of the round – when applicable – the Wine Tasting Fair is implemented. All players simultaneously can put up wine experts within the limits mentioned earlier. Each wine expert earns the number of points corresponding to his characteristics position on the scale. Then you check who has most Wine Tasting Fair points and victory points are awarded according to the ranking.
At the end of the game you can use wines remaining in your possession for manager action. Then you score victory points for managers, money in your bank account and wines exported, according to a majorities scheme which I need not go into in more detail here. If you then have most victory points, you have – not really surprisingly – won the game.
You will easily have come to the conclusion, after this short summary, that Vinhos is not really a game that is easy to learn. You should plan 45 minutes for explanations for your first game, if you have someone at the table who can explain at, if you need to read the rules yourself, you should plan more time. If you have mastered that initial barrier, you are rewarded with a very good, well-designed and well-planned game. Its biggest advantage is its biggest disadvantage, too. Vinhos offers a plethora of possibilities to score points and thus several strategies one can try and in consequence offering a high enticement to play again. But, those many options also make optimizers take ages to figure out their moves, resulting in long down times and playing time. Especially the last round and the end game issue an invitation to start calculating, especially as results are usually rather close.
Thus, the overall playing time depends very much on the players, but rises in dependence of the number of players anyway. Two to four can play; my impression has been that the game has been optimized for four players. Even for two players there are no rule changes or limitations on the available components. In consequence, in a two player game you rarely encounter any limitations, but in a four player game it can happen that components become scarce and you must pay your fellow players regularly for actions. The game for three players is situated somewhere in between those two extremes, which does not mean that the game for two or three does not function well.
There is nothing whatsoever to criticize in the components or the graphic design of the game. Highlight among the components are the wooden wine barrels, the majority of components is made up by pretty and functional card board tiles, more than 200 of them all in all. Ziploc bags in sufficient numbers, to my delight, have been included in the game.
If you want to gripe or grouse, then you could criticize the colors chosen for the regions, which are somewhat similar and sometimes too similar. During play itself this does not matter at all, you just have to pay attention in the preparation phase of the game.
The extensive rules, too, have been made up in model fashion, well structured, clear and leaving no questions unanswered.
All in all, in a nutshell, Vinhos is an excellent game for fans of complex game that can easily keep up with the landmarks of the genre, Agricola or Le Havre.
Spieler 2-4
Dauer 90-180 min
Autor: Vital Lacerda
Grafik: Mariano Ianelli
Titel; ident
Preis: ca. 35 Euro
Verlag: What's Your Game? 2010
Genre : Development game
Zielgruppe: For experts
Version : de
Rules : de en fr it
In-game use of language : no
Kommentar:
Many rules, many possibilities
Lots of strategies to try
Beautiful components
Well-structured rules
Long playing-time
Vergleichbar mit:
Agricola, Le Havre
Gesamt: 6
Markus Wawra:
I like complex development games offering lots of choices and I do not care of a game takes up to four hours, so I like Vinhos, too, because in that league it is one of the best.
Zufall 2
Taktik 2
Strategie__ 3
Kreativität
Wissen_
Gedächtnis 1
Kommunikation
Interaktion 2
Geschicklichkeit
Action