| 👨👩👧👦 | Players: 2-6 |
| ⏳ | Time: 90 mins |
| 🎂 | Ages: 13+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Worker placement, race |
Ever miss out on a grape…oops I mean great… game only to discover it later on?
That’s us with Viticulture. It’s a worker placement game from way back in 2015 where you race against the other players to turn your modest little farm into the region’s best winery.
You’re trying to earn points by selling your wine, but first you have to make it. There are fields to plant and harvest, grapes to crush and lots of improvements to add to your farm.
You need cash to make this happen, but in good news there’s a constant stream of visitors knocking at your cellar door wanting to try your wares even before you manage to make any major sales.
We’ve known about Viticulture for years, but up until now had never played it. Neither of us is really into wine, and we already have a lot of worker placement games, so what does this offer that’s different?
Well, it’s tight. Super tight at times. At two players there’s usually only one worker per space, and if you don’t get there first it can really mess with your plans for the entire round. It’s not unusual for the victory to hinge on the final move, and that’s exciting.
We also loved the split between the seasons and actions. If you spend all your workers in summer then you sit out the entire winter, taking no turns, meaning you have to be incredibly careful how and when you use each worker.
Our favourite part is the guest cards. They are super powerful and can totally change your strategies, but you just don’t know which ones you’ll end up with. It makes for lots of pivoting of strategy throughout, and a nice brain tingle as you plot how to best take advantage of them.
We found this alike with Viticulture and the way both harvested grapes and wines increase in value as time goes on: sure, it might only be cheap plonk when first bottled, but as each round goes by it gets better and better.
A couple of cheap vines planted early on can pay off big at the end of the game, but there’s a problem too. They can only age as far as there’s cellar space, so if you can’t unlock that by the time it’s needed all that advanced planting can go to waste.
This concept works so well thematically, but we love how much it adds strategically as well. We’ve never played a game where resources get more valuable over time before, and would love to see it used more.
While we could wine about missing out on years of fun with Viticulture, let’s park the sour grapes and just be glad that we’ve discovered it now. Even though it’s a bit older we absolutely loved it, and it’s one we can see ourselves playing over and over.
You can see this post on Instagram here and if you are interested you can find out more about the game on the Stonemaier Games website!
The copy of Viticulture used for this review was provided to A Tale of Two Meeples by Stonemaier Games.
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