Review of Viticulture Essential edition

Game review – Viticulture Essential edition

Mechanics: worker placement

Game difficulty: medium

Game duration: 90 min

Number of players: 1-6

Best number of players: 3-5

Language: a lot of text in a foreign language

During the winter camp of the Jelgava Board Games Club, the first Latvian Viticulture Championship was held, which was also supported by "Stonemaier games" with prizes. And quite unexpectedly, miraculously, I managed to beat it, so it's a shame and dishonor that I still haven't covered this great game.

Subject matter

"We will only play Viticulture at home, with Italian music in the background and a glass of good red wine," I remember being told when I repeatedly tried to ask my friends to play this world classic for the first time. The game is about the traditional wine making business in Tuscany. Players represent clans and thematically play through several years, during which they plant vines, build business buildings, and recruit people in the warm weather, while harvesting, ripening grapes, and brewing wine in the cooler weather. The game is fantastically themed, even despite the large amount of mechanics, they are all justified and humanly understandable. This is not one of the easiest games, but every action seems logical, so the game is not difficult to learn.

Components

The visual presentation of the game is okay. I wouldn't say it's one of the prettiest games I've ever seen, but it's certainly not ugly, except for the cardboard money, which is terrible. I really like the green shade of the peculiar dried grass in which the playing field is colored. The best components of the game are the small, fat workers, the various houses and the wooden roosters that determine the order of the players. Overall, the game components are very functional and help you learn the game better. A comment on the well-integrated round structure of the game, which is simply written on one side of the board without having to look through the rulebook.

Mechanics

At its core, this is a fairly classic worker placement game, where players take turns placing their worker pieces on free spaces and performing the corresponding actions. It's simple, but there are hundreds of games that work similarly. What makes viticulture outstanding are precisely the nuances:

• For example, each player has the usual small workers and one large "grandie" that can be placed on any square, even if all free squares are filled - this creates the possibility of blocking, but still, once a round, it is really possible to do what the players want.
• At the beginning of each round, players determine the sequence of actions by choosing one of the bonuses. The later the players act, the more valuable the bonus - it's a heartbreaking choice because the sequence is important in Viticulture, but the bonuses are also very good.
• The round is divided into two parts, which means that players must constantly think about which workers to use in the first part, and which to save for the second part. Decisions must be made whether this will be the time to plant wine or the time to brew it
• Players have a bunch of houses that can be powerful upgrades, but there is a critical lack of time to build them all, so choices must be made to develop the strategy each time.

Multiplayer

In the game, multiplayer is provided by the original guest card decks, which give different interesting and powerful additional options in each game. These can be opportunities to produce wines more efficiently, build houses or earn extra money. The cards are exciting, powerful and interesting, they make every game a little different and thus the multiplayer is very high. But here's my biggest criticism - not all cards are balanced, some are significantly better than others, and given how powerful they are, the game can lose focus a bit from winemaking to mastering cards, but that's not necessarily the winning strategy , I just think that cards can play too big a role.

Rating

In my opinion, apart from the Jelgava Board Games Club, Viticulture has not received enough love in Latvia so far, which is strange, especially considering that it is currently the 19th highest rated game in the world. In my opinion, it's a classic that every self-respecting board game enthusiast should play at least once. So get your hands on some friends who have this game, coax them over some red wine and I'm pretty sure you'll really love it. Rating 9 out of 10.

You can buy the game in Brain Games stores on the 1st floor of Rīga Plaza or K. Barona Street 55, or in the online store: Viticulture Essential edition

Board Game Geek rating: 8.1

Author: Kristaps Auzāns

Pictures from personal archive and Board Game Geek