Thoughts on… Viticulture
Can you imagine a more relaxing life than wine making? Sitting out on your veranda on a warm summer’s evening, looking out over your sweeping lines of carefully tended vines, grapes even now growing more plump and juicy. Soon it will be time to harvest them, crush them and set the pre-wine juices aside to mature into wine. Fine wines, like the one you’re sipping right now. Breathe that fresh, clean air.
When you first lay out the boards for Viticulture you’ll be transported to your very own veranda. The tranquil, subdued artwork giving a birds eye view over the local village, as if seen from the Tuscan hills. Your own player board, a farm filled with possibilities. Virgin fields waiting vines and the foundations for new, better buildings to make your vineyard the envy of your neighbours. It’s not compulsory to be sipping from a large glass of good wine when playing Viticulture, but it is strongly advised.
From your veranda, you will be ordering your workers down to the village to build up your reputation as the best vineyard in the region. This, naturally, involves growing and harvesting grapes, turning them into wine and fulfilling contracts to sell that wine to buyers, near and far. But you’ll also want to attract visitors to your vineyard, train new workers and build structures on your vineyard that allow you to do more stuff, or to gain various bonuses. Owning a vineyard isn’t a holiday, especially not when everyone else will be trying to get in your way.
Viticulture is, in classic Euro-game style, a worker placement game, which means it’s tight and it’s tense. Each action has only a limited number of spaces available that, once filled with your colourful wooden workers, prevent other players from taking that action. You are forced to prioritise where you visit each turn. The other limitation is the tragically small group of workers you have available, meaning that each in-game year you can only visit a small subset of locations. Of course, you actually want to do everything, immediately.
Worker placement games are two-a-penny in the board game industry now a days (you can read our review of a classic introductory worker placement game, Lords of Waterdeep, here and our first impressions of Lancaster, here) but Viticulture mixes up that gameplay in a couple of interesting ways. Firstly, it features multiple spaces for each action, which scales with the number of players in a simple and elegant way. In a 2-player game only one of the three are available, 3-4 players have two spots to fight over, while in a 5-6 player game all three spots are available. This allows the game to feel similarly tight and interesting at all player counts (for the most part). The second tweak is the addition of bonus spots at each location; these reward the first player to take that action, maybe making that building a little bit cheaper or letting you take two cards from a deck instead of one. It’s a nice addition that makes the first decisions in a turn that little bit harder: do you take the less important action for the bonus, or the essential action now while there is still space? It encourages you to think through what your opponents are likely to be doing.
To take some of the pressure off, however, there are the grande meeples. Big burly wooden workers that you wouldn’t want to get into a bar fight with. They let you take an action even if all the spaces are filled, ensuring that one action you desperately need to perform is available to you once per round. However, there is always a multitude of things you need to do and even with this lovable giant, the game is going to get frustratingly tight.
This would normally be a good thing but has an unexpected consequence. Viticulture re-implements the Fresco “get your workers out of bed” mechanism for determining turn order. It’s a good mechanism; the later you get up the better the bonus reward you get, but the later in turn order you go. Unfortunately the shear importance of hitting your key action spots means that most of the time you’ll be launching your workers out of bed at the earliest opportunity, effectively removing much of that phase’s decision making.
The final and most important change to the worker-placement formula is how the action spaces are split into seasons, specifically summer and winter. The summer spaces are focussed on planting new vines, building new constructions and giving tours of your vineyard for cash. Winter is harvest time, crushing your grapes to make wine, and selling wine to complete contracts, which is your main source of victory points. Each year you are forced to decide how much to commit to each season, because a worker used in the summer cannot be used again in the winter. These lazy workers need a whole year to recover!
In the early rounds of the game, the summer spots are in high demand as everyone tries to get their vineyards into functional shape, while in the late game everyone is battling to produce wine and complete contracts so the winter spaces become the focus. The game balances on a fine edge between these two different halves and deciding when to tip over from summer into winter is the most important decision of the game.
This is also tied to the resources you need to manage. In the early rounds you’ll be desperately fighting over money in order to train new workers and build stuff in your vineyard (those cellars don’t come cheap you know!), but in the later rounds money is no longer an issue and wine is the most important commodity. Get to the final phases with a surplus and you’ll be laughing (not just because you can drink that surplus), but it is all too easy to get trapped in a cycle of selling the wine you produced that year, an unsustainable practice when those spots get tightly fought over. Fine tuning this engine is the core of the game and is hugely rewarding when you get it right.
Fortunately, selling wine is not the only way of improving your reputation. While you are unlikely to win without at least fulfilling one delivery, clever use of the suspicious looking visitor cards you can collect, using the reputation garnering bonus spaces or throwing up a windmill or a tasting room to earn reputation points each turn can be very effective ways of gaining a lead while avoiding the late game scrum down on the docks or at the crush pad.
Frustratingly though, the clever use of visitor cards can sometimes come down to good draws. On the one hand I love that you never know how useful a visitor is going to be until they turn up, it’s thematic. But on the other, drawing a visitor who’s only going to provide cash at the end of the game leaves players feeling cheated. Likewise, contract cards can be fantastically useful or a hopeless waste depending on what vine cards you drew earlier in the game. It is quite plausible for a player to not draw any grapes of a particular colour if they are unlucky. I personally feel the game tests your ability to adapt and forces you to expend effort in collecting as many cards as you can to mitigate the bad draws, but it’s going to be an issue for some players.
I really love Viticulture. It may have some rough edges but it is a joy to play whenever I get it to the table. The theme is magnificently captured by the mechanics of the game, and it imbues an evening with a pleasant relaxed feeling, with the welcome exception of the last mad dash to garner reputation. It’s a great introduction to the world of worker placement games, so long as you watch out for the convoluted, bead-juggling, winemaking rules. Games that require players to jump through multiple hoops to earn victory points are often characteristic of heavier, more challenging, games, yet here the strong thematic elements really help new players to understand what they need to do. An exceptional achievement, and to top it all off the production quality of this game is second to none!
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