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Grand Cru
Harvest wine cubes from the vine tiles
The harvest of the „Wine Autumn“ 2010 is rumored to have yielded very little fruit due to the weather. The “Game Autumn” 2010, on the contrary, has produced four economics games on the topic of wine making: There is “Grand Cru” from eggertspiele, and then “Vinhos” (Huch & friends with What’s your game), „King´s Vineyard“ (Mayday Games) und „Toscana“ (Aqua Games). As an earlier game on this topic I can only recall „Vino“ (Goldsieber 1999) ein). „Grand Cru“ has been accorded a complexity level of 3, represented by four foxes’ paws. This is true if you allow for the restriction that there can be even more complex games with a marking of five or six paws – which would definitely be the case for the competitor “Vinhos”, which surely qualifies for that category. The basic mechanism of „Grand Cru“ really is very simple, even a little trite: We buy vine tiles which are available in five varieties/colors, and which yield a production of 1 wine cube in each round, a round equals one year in the game. After harvesting these wine cubes – or „gleaning” them as we say in German if we are enologically informed – we can sell those cubes, which earns us the money that will decide the game. Several special abilities and actions contribute diversity and appeal for the game, but are a bit confusing in the first game of Grand Cru.
A beautiful element of the game is the variable number of rounds played and the variable number of actions per round. At the start of the game all players are provided with just one personal game board, which shows a small vineyard for the tiles and a few barrels for storing the wine cubes, otherwise and moneywise we are bankrupt. In consequence, we have to take out a loan for starting capital. The game ends immediately if one player manages to pay back all his loans, which does not necessarily mean that he has won. Another end-of-game condition is that one player goes bankrupt because he cannot take out an additional loan to pay interest on his loans. You cannot accrue a debt of more than 77 Franc in total– yes, in this game we really still, or may we say, again, use Franc to calculate our accounts. The applicable number range of 100 – as elementary school teachers are wont to say – offers a nice transparency for your calculations, you need not trouble your wine-fogged brain win numbers ending in a lot of naughts, but can concentrate fully on the strategies that you want to use or that you can use. Your first consideration must be the compulsory paying of interest in each round. 3 to 13 francs do at first not sound like a huge amount, but for your micro-loans this sums up to an interest rate of between 17 and 43 % per year. But your yearly income is rather meager in the first rounds. So in those first rounds you often face the tough decision that you need to take out another loan simply to be able to pay your interest, which of courses rises your interest dues in the next year. This being constantly worried about your business existence results in a very tight, peculiar feeling of being driven, you could compare it so some kind of tunnel vision.
The mechanism of buying vines and the so called operation tiles has been given an interesting solution, too: I can either buy a tile for 7 Franc, which is really rather expensive, as you normally need more than one tile – or I try to get them for a special price between 1 and 6 Francs. But this carries the risk that another player is ready to pay a higher price for the tile which I do want to acquire and thus I either do not get the tile or must pay a higher price than initially planned for, after all. At the first moment, this seems to be yet another cumbersome and brooding-prone auctioning mechanism, but in reality it is a very nice innovation: Each offer or each following consecutive rise costs one more action in addition to the one action later maybe needed for the yet not-guaranteed buying action. Maybe it is therefore better to buy for 7 Francs immediately because you can hold on to other actions A round – representing one year in the game – can, depending on the strategy chosen by your opponents, end already after only four actions! Too much fiddling around on the buyer’s market can easily cost you harvesting of grapes and selling of wine cubes.
This cute and inventive buying mechanism has its down-sides too: First, in some rounds an automatism without interaction can appear, resulting in each player buying his tiles for 1 Franc each. Or strategists playing “clever” can feel treated in a random way due to a somewhat irrational ways of playing by another player: For instance, Player A wants to buy the red vine tile for 1 Franc, Player B want so seem less greedy and wants to buy the purple vine tile for 3 Francs. Despite knowing this, Player C does not rise the price for the red vine but that of the purple one. Player D is not interested in all this at all; he prefers to sell wine cubes. And the result: Player A acquires a red tile extremely cheap; Player B gets nothing and even loses an action without being compensated or having a chance to avoid this.
The designer has a tolerant attitude towards and an open ear for house rule variants. At the beginning there was a lively discussion on the net whether the game might not be “broken” due to the minimum possible four actions per round, because a player could deliberately try to ruin the strategies of his opponents. This opinion was countered with the argument that the others can avoid this by simply paying more attention to this player and deny him the possibility to acquire certain operation tiles or if you could acquire them then only for the maximum price of 7 Francs. During this dispute the designer noted that you could easily play with a minimum of five or six actions per round if you deem that to be more feasible. My contribution to this was the suggestion that you could be given one point on the prestige track as compensation for each overbidding when buying or for each being thrown off the auction table, as these points on the prestige track can be used at the end of each rounds to implement certain special actions – comparable to many worker placement games.
The author called this suggestions „very interesting“, but neither he nor I have ever tried it out. I have to offer two more suggestions, which I believe to be useful: For using the tile „plentiful harvest“ you should have to pay 2 Franc instead of only 1 Franc, and in the final scoring the evaluation of the sellable, already ripened wine cubes should yield not only 1 Franc but bring in half of the current sale price, rounded down.
A considerable amount of interaction is possible too, when selling wine cubes: The current sale prices for the five colors are taken from a joint rate table for all kinds of wine and fall by 1 Franc per color for each sale. On the other hand, rising the price is simple and can be done in a separate action of your own. This of course then primarily benefits another player who wants to sell wine of the same color immediately after you have done so and is able do to so. At the same time by doing so he lowers “my” price again. This can result in groups that play “uncooperatively” in that nobody rises prices ever as not to give benefits to other players – and the consequence of this are lower income obtained from sales and a distinctly longer time of play or even somebody being bankrupted by this.
A positive flair is created in the game due to the fact that possible action (besides the actions buying there are actions for harvest, rise of prices, selling and special actions based on function tiles) can be combined in any sequence of your choice so that literally no down-time should be generated – similar to the rondell games designed by Mac Gerdts (see WIN January 2011). In Grand Cru however, it is important, too, not only to use your money efficiently but also the actions in each round.
Besides a possible monotony in the last third of the game the game components did make a not too favorable impression: Wine cube is a beautiful creation as far as words are concerned, but the cubes themselves remind me more of the nameless cheap brands that you can buy in tetra-packs in the supermarket than of a good Claret, and, by the way, grapes are rounded, not square. And the rest of the components has been done in a “just working” way, not very caring. And in addition to this, some of the mechanisms do not really go well with the topic (for instant the ruinous interest rates for the micro loans, the underbidding of buying prices for vines, the harvesting of grapes in spring, the rather arbitrary price rises for sales. Some humor and the courage to stay ugly might have been better – the title could have been “Leprous Bottom Shelf Hooch” and we might have produced the cheapest possible wines for Tetra-Packs for the discount markets to have escaped or precarious monetary situation at the end of the game. And instead of the special edition in a wooden box the publisher could have offered a 5-litre tetra- pack.
More cubes are coming
Finally I have to mention the little expansion published by the Austrian Games Museum; with the tiles “Heuriger” and “Gemischter Satz” Viennese local flair comes into play; consaequently the wine cubes should then be renamed to Grüner Veltliner, Riesling, Zweigelt, Blauburgunder and “lila Pause”.
Spieler : 2 - 5
Alter : ages 12 and up
Dauer : ca. 90 +
Autor : Ulrich Blum
Grafik : Alexander Jung
Titel : ident
Preis : ca. € 35
Verlag : eggertspiele 2010
www.eggertspiele.de
Genre : Economics game
Zielgruppe : With friends
Mechanismen : buy and use tile, special actions with worker placement
Kommentar:
Variable number of rounds and actions, variable time of play
Inventive buying mechanism
Topic slightly off
Partly dissonant mechanisms
Components rather simple and uncared for
No summary of play
Vergleichbar:
Puerto Rico and Cuba for harvesting off tiles; all worker placement games for the „Wine Fesival“ special actions
Meine Bewertung: 5
Harald Schatzl:
The game mechanisms of Grand Cru impress with inventive elegance, some animating originality and peppery moments, but can leave at the finish a slightly uncomfortable bitter aftertaste as regards to the „feeling“ of the game; the somewhat inbalanced relation of price and components get more balanced with quantities of wine consumed.
Zufall 1
Taktik 3
Strategie__ 2
Kreativität
Wissen_
Gedächtnis 1
Kommunikation 2
Interaktion 3
Geschicklichkeit
Action