our review
wunderful wine color theory and wheather changes
Viticulture Essential Edition
Do we want worker placement yet again?
Vienna and wine; a combination, known, proved and tested for centuries; on the subject of board games and wine the first title that comes to mind is „Vino“ at Goldsieber 1999; in the following years, there were only two games and they even hat the same name, „Die Weinhändler“, published by Piatnik in 2000 and Amigo in 2004. After quite a log void, the games autumn of 2010 gave us a total of four economics game on the subject of wine making and vine growing: „Grand Cru“ at eggertspiele, „King´s Vineyard“ at Mayday Games, „Toscana“ at Aqua Games und „Vinhos“ at What’s Your Game / Huch & friends, scheduled for this year in a deluxe edition; “Vintage” was published in the following year. “Viticulture” has been around since 2013 as a successful Kickstarter project, and was now given a somewhat changed and improved new edition at Feuerland, which already comes with elements from the so-called “Tuscany” expansion.
Topic is, once again, wine making in ubiquitous Tuscany: The game is preceded by the reputation to be especially outstanding in its specific thematic correlations. Well, this may be as it is, but in the game, you plant the vines in summer and harvest grapes in winter instead of in autumn – is this meant to be a tribute to the climatic changes already? And the making of Rosé wines is done rather inventively, too, by mixing the must of red and white grapes. But to town-bred children who believe that milk is produced by purple cows you probably can tell anything anyway. This is, I assume, also the origin of the unintentionally comic advice that is given three times in the rules: Vine cards stay in the region after the harvest. Vintners leave the vines in the ground, when grapes are harvested! You only pluck the grapes from the vines. The making of sparkling wine, too, comes across as rather idiosyncratic. At long last, the fact that, in the game, harvested grapes become steadily more valuable when being stored longer, can only be justified by necessities of game play and mechanisms.
But enough complaints, at least for the time being; the components need not be beautified by a deep glance into a wine glass. One the one hand, the very details little wooden game pieces are enchanting; there are roosters for the turn order sequence of a round, a classic grapes shape for the starting player, wine bottles are used for marking the income and there are various cute buildings – even the two wine cellars per player are shaped differently. And on the other hand, there are 76 visitor cards with completely different, individual illustrations with equally unique names; these cards work similar to the Occupations in Agricola.
A game is set up rather quickly; in the set-up, each player begins with somewhat different starting conditions and parameters; enchantingly represent by a „Mama“ and „Papa“ card, who you inherit your starting capital from, so to say. Always in play are two small workers and one tall worker; you can hire more workers over the course of the game. Workers are of course, as is standard in such games, placed on the familiar, time-proven action cases on the game board to give their owner an immediate and hopefully useful advantage. Each case only be used for an action once per round; but you can use the tall worker to acquire the effect of such an action case in the aftermath. A good, and even new, idea is the partition of the action cases in a summer and winter area, but, inconceivably, not in a spring and autumn area:
Workers, that is, may not be placed on all sectors of the board immediately; you must place them first in „summer“; only when all players have passed on placement in this phase, it is time for „winter“. So, besides the permanent dilemma to decide where do I need to place a worker immediately, where can I maybe play for time, I need to consider how many workers I must or want to save for the action cases in winter. Not new, but very nice, too, is a bonus that is usually accrued by the first worker in an action area; this again renders the repeated decision-making, about location and timing of placing workers, challenging and dodgy. The selection of a wished-for bonus, insofar as it might still be available for an individual player, also plays a big part at the start of round, when players put their respective roosters on the track for turn order; player earlier in the round means that you are assigned a weaker bonus than your fellow players who want to be woken up later by the crowing of their roosters.
What makes Viticulture stand out from other worker placement games is the option of using so-called „visitor cards“. Those cards give the player who plays them a once-only and unique advantage, albeit with sometimes a condition having to be met or something having to be handed in or discarded to be able enjoy the advantage. The incentive of achieving optimum combinations be chronologically suitable playing of those visitor cards results in a very high allure of the game. This is emphasized by the fact that you cannot play the cards as you like, but only after the placement of a worker on the respective case – the first one there is even allowed to make use of two cards. Connected to this is a certain element of chance when drawing those card, especially as their effects seem sometimes unbalanced or to be of varying power. But this is probably due to tact that the seemingly strong or weak effect of the respective ability relates very intensity to the current general and personal game status. So, the art is in the ability to create a situation in which the effect of the card is especially efficient.
The other two types of cards, however, also provide challenges, and with them pleasure or frustration, and intensify the element of chance in the game: There are, on the one hand, the vine cards: When you have drawn them randomly and later planted on your own personal board, you can harvest red and/ore white grapes from them. How nice, when you draw a white type of vine as a supplement for you red vines that you already planted; less nice when I only always draw red vines. How nice, when I draw a type of vine that fits in nicely with the buildings that I have already constructed (there is are the features of Trellis and Irrigation) and it is a lot less nice when I have to construct another building especially for the the new type of vine that I have just drawn. But all the same, the allure is here, too, to either create general preconditions to fit all future purposes or the make the best of the cards just drawn this moment.
On the other hand, those considerations are also valid for the ordering of wine; those orders relate to order cards with which you receive victory points and income from red wine and/or white wine and/or Rosé wine and/or sparkling wine. How nice, if you draw a card that demands two wines that I have already stored in my own cellars. Less nice, if you receive an order for wines, for which you need some sparkling wine that must be very laboriously produced, although you had planned to restrict your production rather to the cheap mass-produced wine, because that would have saved me the trouble of expensively upgrading my cellars. However, some of the visitor cards give victory points as well, very often they result in more victory points then your fellow players would expect, which causes them to be surprised often.
„Viticulture“ plays equally well with each number of players, but the more players there are the longer a game takes. For three or more players, you use two cases per action for placement; for five and six players, you use three cases, which is an elegant and uncomplicated adaptation of the mechanism to the number of players. The game even provides a solo variant with a playing time of about half an hour: The variant simulates a game for two players, in which randomly drawn “Automa” cards determine which action cases - between zero and three – are already occupied by “the other player” and thus blocked for the player; a campaign mode and five levels of difficulty are also on offer for a single player. Hand in hand with this, once again, comes however the familiar deficiency that we know from so many other worker placement games: For the most part, all players sort of play in parallel to each other. Of course, there is interaction from the “grabbing” of action cases, but this is usually a random consequence of the chosen way to play than an intended one. At least, some of the visitor cards that you play yourself do have an influence on other players. But if you prefer worker placement games with lots of interaction, will be better pleased with Keyflower (WIN 448, February 2013) or Spyrium (WIN 462, February 2014).
Finally, there remains something that must be critically noted about the fundamentally grandiose game components: On the one hand, there exaggeratedly small texts on the visitor cards. On the other hand, the chose of colors – blue and purple – causes some misunderstandings now and then, the wooden pieces for „Cottage“ and „Cellar“ and their corresponding graphic design on the “Papa” cards provide potential for mix-ups, too. The buildings are crafted in great detail, but for a game in this price range I would expect somewhat bigger pieces. And as the board and the player boards have been done in two languages already, it might have been appropriate to include the English versions of the 76 visitor cards, too. And finally, let me moan one more time about the really nonsensical and – as regards to the topic objectionable and distracting – division of the action cases in a summer and winter sector instead of a spring and autumn sector.
Harald Schatzl
Players: 1-6
Age: 12+
Time: 90+
Designer: Jamey Stegmaier & Alan Stone +Morten Monrad Pedersen
Artist: Christine Santana
Price: ca. 60 Euro
Publisher: Feuerland Spiele 2016
Genre: Worker placement
Users: For experts
Special: 1 player
Version: de
Rules: de
In-game text: yes
Comments:
Nice and atmospheric graphic design
High quality components
Variable number of rounds and playing time
Place will with two players, solo variant
Suitable for casual players when playing with experienced players
Compares to:
Agricola, Lewis & Clark
Other editions:
Viticulture, Stonemaier Games
My rating: 6
Harald Schatzl:
Viticulture captures you immediately after opening the box with its shining components, even when after some airing you find a somewhat awkward choice of colors with potential likelihood of confusion, even in a still sober state of mind. The first sip tastes, due to the classic, earthy game mechanisms, rather neutrally, but then the emphasis on the playful note dominates the palate. The long-lasting finish must be emphasized, produced by a plethora of different cards and the chance to try various ways to play, accompanied by a mellow and mature but unexaggerated complexity. All in all, a very satisfying abundance of tastes with a nearly perfect harmony and balance of standard mechanisms and the nicely implemented topic, winning through in details with rounded-out elegance.
Chance (pink): 2
Tactic (turquoise): 3
Strategy (blue): 2
Creativity (dark blue): 0
Knowledge (yellow): 0
Memory (orange): 0
Communication (red): 0
Interaction (brown): 1
Dexterity (green): 0
Action (dark green): 0