There are no pop-ups to explain why you can’t perform certain actions. There is a small question mark you can click to show what each building does, but that’s all. I don’t say “never” because there are others which had similarly lacking tutorials, but to compound the issue, Viticulture has almost no in-game help. I’ve rarely been so lost in my first game as I was here. I play a lot of digital board games and the majority of those are games I haven’t played in physical form. It is not an interactive tutorial, it is essentially an abbreviated rule book. It walks you through the game in four very brief tutorials which essentially spend a single block of text on each action and move on. I buy into why it is so highly rated, it’s an elegant worker placement game with a wide open decision space with enough randomness to make each game play out a bit different from the last.īluntly stated the tutorial in the game is the only way to learn and it falls woefully short of helping new players learn. Maybe you can win with a thousand (or twenty) small cuts rather than a few big ones? The pile of points for completing a big order are the most points you can get in one action (filling the order), but getting to that point is an extensive string of events that takes multiple turns to work through. The game is much more open than I thought at first glance. The decisions on whether to try to get the grapes you need to fill the orders you have or the other way around, or to quickly build a tasting room which can provide you a point per turn, or to chase the points your visitor card might provide. My first few plays of Viticulture after learning how to play (more on that below) it felt like “just another WP game.” As I started to put more and more plays under my belt, however, I found myself really enjoying the puzzle. I’m not entirely sure why other than there being other mechanics I prefer. I certainly don’t mind them, and actually quite enjoy a few of them, but it isn’t a genre I tend to actively seek out. Worker placement games don’t tend to be my favorite category. The main aspect I haven’t really touched on yet are the visitor cards which are powerful and cover a very wide range of abilities and are handed out, at the very least, at a rate of one per turn. This isn’t to say that orders are the only source of points, as many of the visitor cards provide point opportunities as do a couple of the buildings. Some orders can be worth five or more points and games are only played to 20, so it becomes a tight race to that goal. This build up is the meat of Viticulture, the game rewards careful, efficient planning over everything else. I even left out a slew of smaller details in which you have to build up certain aspects of your board/supply in order to carry out these larger achievements. Point being there is a lot that goes into fulfilling a single order and it will take you several turns to lay the groundwork to do so. This isn’t to mention the jockeying for limited action spaces on each turn, getting the order cards in the first place, and letting your wine and grapes age. In order to plant them you have to draw grape cards. In order to harvest grapes you have to plant them. In order to get grapes you must harvest them. In order to get larger cellars you need to pay to build them. In order to have wine you need to have the properly sized cellar and the right grapes. In order to fill an order you need to have wine. It’s simple at a high level but the devil is certainly in the details. Ties are broken, in order, by number of lira, value of wine left in the cellar, and highest grape total in the crush pads. The year in which that happens is the last of the game and the player with the highest point total after that year wins. The years continue until the first player reaches 20 points. Other winter actions include training new workers, drawing new order cards, and playing a winter visitor. The payoff also comes in winter when you can fill an order by playing a purple card from your hand and discarding the wine the card required. Winter is all about harvesting those grapes into the crush pad and then turning it into various styles of wine. Summer allows a host of other activities from giving tours to earn money, drawing new grape cards, playing a summer visitor card, building a structure, or selling some grapes or fields.įall simply has players deciding to draw a summer or winter visitor card and then winter begins. Summer is primarily for planting grapes which is achieved by playing a grape card from your hand into one of your three fields. Spring is simply where players select their turn order, with players going earlier receiving lesser, or no, bonus while players going later in the order receiving better bonuses such as a point or an extra worker for the turn. The game plays out over rounds which cover the four seasons.
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