Stonemaier Games: Viticulture Essential Edition (Base Game) by Jamey Stegmaier | Create The Most Prosperous Tuscan Vineyard | Strategy Board Game for Adults and Family | 1-6 Players, 90 Mins

It's a very nicely put-together worker placement game, with economic development at the heart of it. The mechanics are simple enough, clearly explained, for the most part, and with the bonus feature of a very good 2-page rules summary included. Physical components are of good, durable quality, with fair sized cards (in a tray that allows for the thickness of any sleeves to be used). The game 'scales' well, in that additional places for one's workers become available as player numbers increase. There is also an automaton (cards) to play against, should the need arise; I've yet to try that. I've only played with three, but I didn't feel that there would be an excessive downtime with 5/6, largely because one's own plans have to continuously be updated in the light of others' placements.There's a nice rhythm to the game, as it follows the flow of the seasons, with the actions available in each season making reasonable sense. I particularly liked the 'first player'mechanism (first player gets first choice at getting a reward in Spring, but the better rewards typically require placing one's workers later on in the subsequent seasons). The "Grande" worker mechanism (use an occupied space, once per year) is also a mercy, as it makes it hard to completely block someone, although there is sufficient interaction between players over available and 'bonus' spaces to keep the game interesting.I've yet to play it sufficiently to pretend to be able to comment on the skill versus luck factor. I am confident that the better player will win more games over a series, but any games that includes cards can be marred (or enhanced, depending on viewpoint) by just how those cards happen to fall. A very nice feature, so far, is that there seem to be a number of strategies available to seek to win: it even looks like it's possible to win without actually making any wine. It looks very positive that it's a game where the path to victory requires a flexibility in strategy and a level of knowing when to change objective in the light of the actions of others or the fortunes of the card drawn. There is player interaction, at least in terms of prioritising one's own.The game has the merit of being playable within the claimed 60-90 minute time frame, but is, of course, not dither-proof. I liked it nd 'm looking forward to getting my gamer friends to play it.

Viticulture is an excellent mid-weight euro game that sits firmly in the Worker Placement genre. I picked this up to play 2 player games with my wife and am happy to say that we are both very pleased with the game after 4 plays and will be playing it a lot more incorporating the Tuscany essential edition expansion.The components and presentation of the game is beautiful. The board depicts various building spaces to send your workers to obtain various resources (money, cards, points), with spots for the various card decks at the top and a point track at the bottom. The action spaces themselves are basically divided in half with summer actions (mostly for building up) and winter actions (scoring points and creating wine). Each player has an individual playerboard that represents their vineyard with an assortment of different building and worker meeples that they can use for upgrading their vineyard and executing actions.The game feels very well executed at the 2 player level. Each action only has 1 space available (more with more than 2 players) but each player has one "grande" (a bigger worker meeple) that can go to an action space thats occupied. The game involves the use of a lot of cards that represent either types of wine grapes / summer visitors / winter visitors and order cards. There is a flow to the game, where grapes must be planted, then harvested, then made into wine. At the end of each round, grapes and wine age, and you can plan ahead to fulfill an order when your grapes/wine have properly aged. Money is tight, and each player will not be able to do everything in a game.There is also a lot of variability added from the cards. Most visitor cards will offer up two options where players can capitalize by trading resources for points or money. We've noticed that its possible to take a card-focused strategy by building a cottage and then using cards as much as possible throughout the game. Turn order is also very well done in this game, where players can choose something they really need (an extra vine card, coin, point) and it will determine the order that they get to take their turn in. The last point is that the game does not have a set number of rounds, it is more a race to see who can get the first to 20 points which makes the game very exciting as it feels very neck and neck up to the end to see who can squeeze out the couple last points through efficiency.If you enjoy other worker placement games (Stone Age, Agricola, Lords of Waterdeep), Viticulture will likely be right up your alley. Neither my wife or I are wine connoisseurs, but that does not diminish our enjoyment of this game at all. In fact, we've concluded that this game will ultimately replace Agricola for us as there is not nearly as much stress involved during the course of the game. The game still has a good amount of scarcity for actions where one cannot do everything they want to, it is just not as pronounced.