Viticulture: Essential Ed

Fantastic Rulebook. Terms explained on back cover.These points are often overlooked but very important. Also: Art work beautiful. Solid game, scales well w/player count. You need to plan ahead and it really is a decent game, the best in years. This edition is the best, and it is finally a worker placement game that I actually like. I played the tuscany + essential and did not like that very much. It feels "finished", instead of others that feel incomplete and are shouting for expansions. Compared to other wine board games it is simpler than Vinhos and less cruel than grand cru. It actually teaches how wine is produced. For kids however it is not very spectacular, would play it with intelligent adults, that may or may not like wine. Oh and did I mention you can play it solo against the AI of the game?

Viticulture is an excellent mid-weight euro game that sits firmly in the Worker Placement genre. I picked this up to play 2 player games with my wife and am happy to say that we are both very pleased with the game after 4 plays and will be playing it a lot more incorporating the Tuscany essential edition expansion. The components and presentation of the game is beautiful. The board depicts various building spaces to send your workers to obtain various resources (money, cards, points), with spots for the various card decks at the top and a point track at the bottom. The action spaces themselves are basically divided in half with summer actions (mostly for building up) and winter actions (scoring points and creating wine). Each player has an individual playerboard that represents their vineyard with an assortment of different building and worker meeples that they can use for upgrading their vineyard and executing actions. The game feels very well executed at the 2 player level. Each action only has 1 space available (more with more than 2 players) but each player has one "grande" (a bigger worker meeple) that can go to an action space thats occupied. The game involves the use of a lot of cards that represent either types of wine grapes / summer visitors / winter visitors and order cards. There is a flow to the game, where grapes must be planted, then harvested, then made into wine. At the end of each round, grapes and wine age, and you can plan ahead to fulfill an order when your grapes/wine have properly aged. Money is tight, and each player will not be able to do everything in a game. There is also a lot of variability added from the cards. Most visitor cards will offer up two options where players can capitalize by trading resources for points or money. We've noticed that its possible to take a card-focused strategy by building a cottage and then using cards as much as possible throughout the game. Turn order is also very well done in this game, where players can choose something they really need (an extra vine card, coin, point) and it will determine the order that they get to take their turn in. The last point is that the game does not have a set number of rounds, it is more a race to see who can get the first to 20 points which makes the game very exciting as it feels very neck and neck up to the end to see who can squeeze out the couple last points through efficiency. If you enjoy other worker placement games (Stone Age, Agricola, Lords of Waterdeep), Viticulture will likely be right up your alley. Neither my wife or I are wine connoisseurs, but that does not diminish our enjoyment of this game at all. In fact, we've concluded that this game will ultimately replace Agricola for us as there is not nearly as much stress involved during the course of the game. The game still has a good amount of scarcity for actions where one cannot do everything they want to, it is just not as pronounced.

Lovely production, good worker placement mechanics and very accesible. Highly recommended for medium-lightweight game.

Love the game^^

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