In 2013 Stonemaier games exploded onto the scene with their debut game Viticulture. Based in the world of Italian wine making, Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone presented a worker placement experience that saw you grow grapes, make wine and fulfill contracts as you strived to become the best winery in Tuscany. Counted in many top ten lists, Viticulture has become a modern classic and a must have for any euro game lover. The theme is still pretty unique in the board game world and allows you, if like me, to take advantage of it and demand wine and a cheese board every time you play!

Home Is Where The Wine Is

The basic concept of the game is you are left a winery by a family member, most likely parents, and you are to take over the business. This is represented by red and blues cards. Each card represents one side of the couple who once ran the vineyard. Originally these were called “mamma” and “papa” cards but recently, Jamey Stegmairer released a mix of masculine presenting and feminine presenting characters into both decks in order to escape the previous heteronormative couplings. A real fresh and important move that a lot more publishers need to get on board with! The new cards also showcase much more diversity in the appearance of the characters than in the original. Once you have your cards they will dictate your starting resources. Some might offer a choice whereas others will give you specific things. This very basic asymmetric start means that there is a focus for you at the top of the game. One might mean you start the windmill which rewards you for planting grapes so you might focus on getting as much planted as possible to get those tasty points. And points are everything in Viticulture. The first player to 20 will trigger the last round and so building that point engine quickly will put you in a great position later in the game. So what does building the most successful winery in all of Tuscany look like? Each player will have their own board which will monitor everything they have from vines planted in your fields, to grapes in the crush pads through to your wine cellar. You also have the opportunity to build buildings on your board offering you bonuses. As you get more and more wine in stock you will also need to upgrade your cellar to be able to hold those all important bottles.

Wine Improves With Meeples

This is a worker placement game at its heart. You will hire your team of workers and send them out into the fields to harvest your liquid gold but what makes this game so fascinating is balancing your pieces between seasons. Each round or year is spread over the four seasons. Spring and autumn offer a small boon, usually card related, but winter and summer hold the main chunk of the gameplay. But here’s the rub. Workers that are placed in summer will not return until the end of the year. This means you have the tension of having enough workers to achieve your goals across both seasons. The other neat twist which has since been replicated in many games is the ‘grande’ worker. Action spaces are tight as only one worker can be at each space. However, the grande worker can go anywhere. Knowing when to use the grande is a big part of the game as you only get to use them once a round. This powerful move can make or break a round quite easily. So you plod along placing your workers on a multitude of spaces in order to get vine cards, plant said cards, harvest grapes and then crush them in order to make wine. All in order to fulfill contracts for money and those important reputation points.

Another key mechanism is the use of visitor cards. There are two types of visitor, one that comes in summer and the other in winter. Collecting and playing these cards can offer big payoffs as well as allow you to take key actions without having to spend a meeple to do so.

Life’s Too Short To Play Bad Wine Games

Viticulture deserves its placement on the vast amount of ‘best of’ lists on which it still resides. It is crunchy but intuitive and offers so many interesting choices whilst also being accessible. The theme hasn’t really been explored far behind this and Vital Lacerda’s Vinhos but it is such a great theme to play in. And if you enjoy the base game then the Tuscany expansion is an absolute must and will offer a series of modules to really at that vital replayability to the game. And if you want to try it in a co-op fashion where you work together on the expansion of your wine empire then the newest edition to the collection, Viticulture World is a brilliant spin on the game.

So what are you waiting for, pour yourself a tall cool glass of pinot grigio, crack out the cheese board and live your best Italian life!

Click here to read more about Viticulture

This blog was posted by Dan Street Phillips

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