quick ranking of the 30 tabletop games i played in-person in 2023

15. Viticulture (and optional Tuscany expansion)
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/183394/viticulture-essential-edition

1 play in 2023 with 6 players

Viticulture has you running a winery - planting and harvesting grapes, aging them, brewing them into wines, and selling those wines as contracts. The actions are filtered through a worker placement system and you'll need to build structures such as wine cellar upgrades and trellises in order to plant the grape vines. The biggest twists on the worker placement formula are a unique turn-order track, which links turn order with rewards, and the ability for the first player to take an action each round to get a powerful bonus.

I actually addresed my thoughts in a fair bit of depth in NBIceman's topic: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/80607833

But, I'll post it again here quickly.

pros
- the production is wonderful
- the theme makes a ton of sense in many regards and is linked closely with mechanics
- it's accessible because you only have to read the cards you actually draw instead of evaluating a marketplace
- the grande worker also makes the worker placement less punishing
- the extra bonuses when you play with more than 2 players are great
- the wakeup track is really neat
- seasons are a good idea

cons
- in the 2p game it sucks not having the extra-action spaces
- turn order is doubly important due to having two seasons
- not having a card marketplace makes the game very luck-based
- other than the bonus powers, the worker placement is fairly uninspired
- the game is not very "tightly" designed - the way the money economy works in particular is kind of shoddy (super-important early; later in the game you have almost nothing to spend it on)

Overall I feel it has a lot of great ideas and makes them super-accessible. I kind of resent its popularity because i think the execution and tightness of the design are sacrificed in some ways for that overhead ease (e.g. no mitigation of the swingy cards).

Tuscany (just the board) adds complexity which is nice and gives some more options on actions you can do when you've otherwise run out of useful stuff to do, which is also nice. I like thematically that there are four seasons. But it amplifies one of the bigger annoyances of VC, which is the importance of being first - now you're first in all four seasons.

It's also just more complex than "base" viticulture and isn't available online, so I've just played base a lot more than Tuscany. Not sure the game needs that sort of complexity. I played this game over the table just once in 2023, with the Tuscany expansion. But I played it a few dozen times with my partner on BGA. The 2p game is lovely for its speed (6p probably requires a much faster group than mine on that play), but it unfortunately does lose one of the best parts of the game in the extra-powerful actions .