LogFAQs > #934203480

35. Viticulture (2013)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Worker placement, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 60-90 minutes
Experience: 6-7 plays of Essential Edition over 6-7 sessions with 2, 4, 5 players (2019) incl 3 plays with Tuscany: EE
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player runs a winery. Via worker placement, grapes are planted, then harvested, aged, and made into wine. Structures need to be built to accommodate the wine or to grow grapes, and playable cards are drawn each round. Worker placement takes place across seasons; everyone must pass within a season before the first player of the year begins the next season. Turn order is determined via a form of bidding; you get to choose where in the turn order you want to play, and the lower in the turn order it is, the richer the bonus you get for choosing it. The game is played to a fixed number of VP.

Design - Among worker placement games, Viticulture is for the most part surprisingly forgiving. You don't need to feed your workers; you can build your own board to mamke it more resilient in the absence of other stuff to do; you've got visitor cards which can replicate a lot of the actions but more efficiently; and when all is lost, you've still got one bigger worker who lets you take an already blocked action.

That allows Viticulture to be pleasant, which is suitable for a game that's about making wine. It has excellent components, with a lovely agricultural big board for worker placement and a functional player mat for your own brewing process. The decision to use glass stones to indicate both grapes and wines is excellent, and they've got a bit of weight that makes them somewhat resilient to jolts. And mostly, it feels really good to make wine: Double-plant! Massive harvests! Fulfill big orders! Extra victory points on certain action spots! Watch that money come rolling in and watch those VP explode in the final rounds!

And it's a good thing the game feels good, because it compensates for Viticulture's lack of tightness in design - it doesn't have the leeway to be tight in actions or resources. There are myriad design decisions that feel like they could have been just tightened up a little bit.

Take money for example. Money is very useful at the beginning of the game, because it allows you to gain more workers and upgrade your structures to get your engine going. The flow of cash is tight-ish at first, though you can get an infusion by selling your fields. As you start selling wines, however, your income rises. Sell a few wines and suddenly you've got yourself a nice stream of money coming in each turn! The economy works! Except... if you sell a few wines, the game is ending that turn, or the next turn. the 20 VP threshold comes up relatively quickly, and fulfilling even a single wine order is the largest source of VP. As your cashflow increases later in the game, the utility of that money decreases: while Tuscany adds a better trade spot, there's nothing particularly useful to buy with money for the most part, once your engine is set.

Then there are the cards themselves, which feel... odd. Some clearly weren't desgined with scaling in mind, like the ones that have you collect either two coins or 1 VP from each opponent (obviously OP in a high-player-count-game, while being a weird sort of 1 VP move in a smaller game), and then of course the sequencing matters (a "plant vines" card is worthless in the late-game).

The game does provide non-wine strategies to winning as well. While this isn't a full-on criticism - the game definitely benefits a good wine-engine over anything else - VP seem available from odd sources. It's purely supplemental to wine-making, but you can get VP for actions like giving tours, selling your fields, going sixth in the turn order... which make it feel like a game about scurrying around the margins at times. These points can of course add up.

While the seasons give Viticulture a lot of its most distinct flavor, they actually prove a bit of an issue in the 2p game, in my opinion - and that's the seasons and turn order system. You lose the fun element of bonuses when you play with two, and there is only one spot for each action, making it more possible to be blocked - but Viticulture, as we examined above, isn't designed for this type of tightness in actions when it's so loose and unpolished in other areas. I love that there are different seasons, and I love the unique way to approaching the turn order track.

What I don't love is that turn order is so drastically important: because of the seasonal structure, the first player goes first in each season. There's only one space on the board to sell your wine in the final year. The final year, by the way, will very often have two or more players who have the ability to exceed the VP threshold. But with blocking, this could easiy mean that the final round is decided by turn order. I like jockeying for position, but this seems like not a great look for the game.

Experience - I tried out Viticulture at Origins 2019 and thought it was decent, one of the three-to-five best games I played that weekend. Gaming pal #1 was a fan, too, but it wasn't super-high on my radar until a meetup pal listed it together with its expansion (which I had yet to try) for $30. My bigger complaints only emerged later, the issues with turn-order and blocking, in the two-player game. While I'm not thrilled with it, though, it stays clean and enjoyable at counts above two, and even at two it's a little less punishing with automa rules added in, which opens up the space.

Future - Well, I own it, so I want it played more! I still have a special workers module I have yet to try out from the Tuscany expansion. It's not going to become a top-ten type of game, but as a pleasant middleweight euro with gentle WP, it's doing its job.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness