VITICULTURE: ESSENTIAL EDITION

★★★★

_REVIEW.   it’s about _TABLETOP.   words _KYLE PEDLEY.
publisher _STONEMAIER GAMES.   designer _JAMEY STEGMAIER, ALAN STONE, MORTEN MONRAD PEDERSON.  players _1-6.   playtime _45-90 MINS.

July 25, 2022

box art © Stonemaier Games, photos © Things We Enjoy.

The worker placement genre is a (fittingly) busying world. Whether reaching quite literally upward with the treetops and expansionism of Starling GamesEverdell, or plucking at Hollywood IP with the deck building and placement hybrid of Dune: Imperium, it’s an ilk of board gaming that has stayed the course, and continues to evolve at a rapid pace.

Whilst this review lands just as a brand new expansion – the co-operative Viticulture World – releases, it still makes Stonemaier Games‘ core Viticulture game, at just shy of a decade, almost a relic in board gaming terms. The original release, back in 2013, which sees players competing to build the most successful and productive Italian Vineyard, garnered praise for its gorgeous styling and simple-yet-versatile mechanics. Reprints and expansions inevitably followed, which added extra options, wrinkles to the formula, and additional components, but at its core, Viticulture remained refined but relatively untouched; a taut, accessible yet compelling worker placement puzzle.

In 2015, Stonemaier released what is now the definitive (and only available) version of the core Viticulture boxed set – Viticulture: Essential Edition. Most notably, this Essential release bore a small handful of quality of life improvements (for instance, merging the alternating versions of the game and player boards in to singular, perfectly honed compromises), as well as improved card decks and a handful of extra refinements and add-ons from the popular Tuscany expansion, in particular.

And yet, as mentioned, the board gaming world continues its international explosion, only fuelled by the pandemic boon, and seven years, let alone nine, can prove an eternity in game development.

So, does Viticulture remain an Essential addition to a gaming collection?

For the most part, it’s a resounding yes. The core Viticulture experience remains a polished, fairly easy to learn/difficult to master gaming challenge, buttressed by gorgeous artwork and, typical of Stonemaier, faultlessly-executed theming.

 Extra Essential – The Tuscany expansion for Viticulture featured a number of improvements and extra components for the main game, some of which – such as the ‘Mamas’ and ‘Papas’ starting mechanic – were carried over into this Essential Edition. The expansion still, nonetheless, includes extra modes and add-ons that weren’t incorporated, meaning it, too, has an ‘Essential’ release (pictured above), for those wanting to boost or diversify their wine-making adventures.

Players compete to be the first to acquire 20 XP, which they gain through a variety of tasks as they build up their Vineyard empire. One of Viticulture’s best and most unique ideas is how each round consists of a ‘year’, split up into the four seasons. The first, Spring, sees players bid for what position they wish to spend the rest of the ‘year’ starting in. Bid lower, and you risk going late or even last in every phase, yet the compensation for doing so can be bonus XP or even a free extra worker for the year. ‘Spring’ is one of the best mechanics in Viticulture, introducing strategic risk-reward considerations from the off.

Skipping ahead, Autumn gets players a free card or two, but the real gameplay lands in the worker placement of Summer and Winter. Anyone familiar with the likes of Lords of Waterdeep or many worker placement games will be in recognisable territory here, as your finite number of workers can be sent out to fulfil an impressive diversity of tasks – from gaining currency, drawing or playing cards, constructing vital buildings, and, of course, the multi-step process of making your precious wines.

“Wine-making is a fun, addictive and multi-faceted mini-game in and of itself.”

Wine-making is a fun, addictive and multi-faceted mini-game in and of itself. In Summer, you can draw and discover the best vines, juggle the process of planting them in fields where you grow them (each field having a maximum value that you cannot plant above), and then, in Winter, go through the process of harvesting your grapes and then crushing them into wine. Naturally, at the end of each year, all of your wines and grapes age, making them more valuable, but you’d best hope you’ve constructed the improved wine cellars as you progress through the game, or risk losing some of their ageing progress.

 Extra Essential – The Tuscany expansion for Viticulture featured a number of improvements and extra components for the main game, some of which – such as the ‘Mamas’ and ‘Papas’ starting mechanic – were carried over into this Essential Edition. The expansion still, nonetheless, includes extra modes and add-ons that weren’t incorporated, meaning it, too, has an ‘Essential’ release (pictured above), for those wanting to boost or diversify their wine-making adventures.

If it sounds at all impenetrable, it really isn’t. At first glance, the difference between planting, harvesting and wine-making may seem a little complicated and obtuse, but it’s remarkably intuitive and easy to pick up, with a palpable sense of pride and joy as you watch a lowly Pinot harvested and ripen, before merging it to create, say, a hugely valuable blush or sparkling wine.

One of Viticulture’s best ploys is how it forces players to strategise between Summer and Winter. Your pool of workers – which, inevitably, you can add to over the course of the game – are for the entire year. Of course, half of the essential mechanics are split fairly evenly between the two seasons, so it remains a perpetual balancing act on how many you wish to conserve for later in the round.

Complimenting this is the relative variety of ways you can go about charting victory. The main, and often most lucrative, method is to complete Wine Orders, where you are required to cultivate specific values of red, white, blush and/or sparkling wine, and then use one of your workers in Winter to fulfil this order. You lose the respective wine, but often garner big XP in return, as well as ongoing, residual end-of-year income.

“One of Viticulture’s best ploys is how it forces players to strategise between Summer and Winter… a perpetual balancing act.”

Outside of these orders, though, which in and of themselves often help direct your strategies, there’s a wealth of additional ways to accrue XP. Many of the optional buildings you can construct will yield annual XP bonuses. For example – build yourself a Tasting Room and you get an XP every time you ‘give a tour’, itself already a popular placement action as it yields you 2 – 3 currency. The Windmill, likewise, is a powerful early go-to, giving you, as it does, bonus XP for the core action of planting vines. Many of these are limited to a maximum bonus of 1 XP per round/year, but even so, funnelling them together with the myriad of Summer and Winter cards (each season having its own deck) that can give circumstantial XP, can easily chart a player on a steady course to victory. In one of the games played for this review, I comfortably won whilst fulfilling only a single wine order, so lucrative were all the side hustles and XP card plays that I managed to pull off.

On the subject of decks, Essential Edition features improved seasonal decks, which mean that the vast majority of cards you will draw will have some utility, even if not immediately. One of the major criticisms of the original Viticulture was that the visitor decks (i.e. Summer and Winter) were stacked with highly circumstantial conditions and effects that would rarely prove useful. Now, in Essential Edition, spending two valuable workers to pick up and then play a card is almost always valuable, and can even occasionally prove game-changing.

Much like its contemporary Waterdeep, Viticulture: Essential Edition is showing hints of its age in places, but is still a thoroughly pleasant and immensely repayable offering, and certainly more immediately accessible for less hardcore gaming groups than the likes of, say, Scythe.

Perhaps its biggest potential ‘flaw’, reviewing seven years on in 2022, is that whilst it does what it does extremely well, and with superb presentation, it doesn’t really do a tremendous amount more. The aforementioned Everdell and Dune: Imperium layer tableau and deck building, respectively, on top of their worker placement mechanics, whilst other contemporaries such as Marco Polo and Hallertau throw dice and card play into the mix.

“Much like its contemporary Waterdeep, Viticulture: Essential Edition is showing hints of its age in places, but is still a thoroughly pleasant and immensely repayable offering…”

There’s also little by way of direct player interaction, too. Some of the seasonal cards can give you the chance to offer your opponents circumstantial ultimatums (i.e. ‘give me one of your coins or I will get a free card’), but these are relatively few and far between, and for the most part you’ll be far more focused on your own turn and strategy.

Similarly, the concept of ‘blocking’ your opponents feels a little too forgiving, namely owing to the inclusion of a special ‘Grande’ worker. For context, depending on the player count, there is always a limited number of spots available at each action space. Let’s say you want to draw a card, only you ended up bidding low in Spring so you are third or fourth in the turn order, meaning that by the time you get the chance to place one of your workers, the two ‘draw a card’ spaces are already taken by other players. You’d be forgiven for thinking this could lead to a wealth of tense moments where players strategically block one another or deprive a position out of spite or competitiveness, and yet every player has one special ‘Grande’ worker, who can take an action even if its spaces are blocked.

It’s a neat idea that prevents completely wasted turns or overt nastiness, and you do only get one Grande worker, so have to consider carefully when you will utilise him each year, but there’s no denying it’s a mechanic that does suck some of the tension and conflict out of proceedings, and can sadly undermine some of the consequential hustling of Spring in particular. In larger games, there are ‘bonus’ action spaces which give extra benefits to the player who places there first, and which Grande workers can’t benefit from, which does go some way in making games with players counts of three or more a trifle more competitive (the bonus spaces not being accessible at all in two-player games).

It means that, for the most part, Viticulture is a pleasant, mostly non-confrontational experience where, at worst, you may temporarily inconvenience an opponent, rather than stopping them dead in their tracks.

“…a gorgeously crafted board game, with fantastic, high-quality components and beautiful art direction that reaches into every nook and cranny of its execution.”

For some, all of this will be no bad thing, but for others, the lack of extra mechanics and relative lightness of player interaction may make Viticulture, even with the enhancements in this Essential Edition, perhaps a little too slight.

For everyone else though, the game remains, even in the bustling genre it helped define, an easy recommendation. Viticulture: Essential Edition is a gorgeously crafted board game, with fantastic, high-quality components and beautiful art direction that reaches into every nook and cranny of its execution.

It’s also, crucially, supremely playable, impressively polished, and a benchmark release in the worker placement crowd that, whilst perhaps missing some of the bells and whistles, extra heft and cutthroat interaction of many of its successors, brings enough charm, variety and thematic uniqueness to make it, for the most part, Essential indeed.

A gorgeously-realised, eminently replayable worker placement classic. Whilst it lacks some of the whizz and bang of its contemporaries, the refinements in this ‘essential’ edition help make it just that. A fine vintage, indeed.

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