Viticulture: Complete Collector's Edition

EvEvanstar7,2

This game is a great worker placement game, but a lot of the expansion materials are a must have for the game to sing. The goal of the game is to use your workers on the central board, to plant vines, harvest grapes, make wines and then sell those wines for points. There are many upgrade paths on your player board, allowing you to enhance certain actions or create action spaces that only you can take. Each action has a limited number of worker spots, but each player has one larger worker, who can take any action even if it's full. In addition to that, each game everyone has the option of hiring two different workers who each have their own special ability. One of the fascinating elements of the game is that rounds are resolved in four seasons. In season one, you can only place into the first region of action spots. In season 2, only the second region, and so on. However, workers only return to you at the end of the year, so you have to plan your moves carefully, keeping in mind the turn order for that round. The player who is first to pass in winter, gets to pick their next turn order first. The game has a ton of smoothly integrated extra elements including two types of action cards, asymmetrical starts and a simple area majority sideboard for extra endgame points and immediate secondary benefits. Gameplay is smooth with interesting choices, but not a lot of analysis paralysis. It only suffers a little in terms of the different levels of usefulness in cards from the same deck. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★★☆☆ Raw enjoyment