Viticulture Essential Edition (2015)

Overview
How to Play
Videos
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Awards & Honor
Ratings & Comments

About the Game

Released in 2015, Viticulture Essential Edition is a compilation, an upgrade from the Viticulture game – which has been on the shelves since 2013. With this edition, the famous “growing grapes, making wine” game promises to give players the essence of the original game with new components, providing a more complete experience for players.

In Viticulture, the players find themselves in the roles of people in rustic, pre-modern Tuscany who have inherited meager vineyards. They have a few plots of land, an old crushpad, a tiny cellar, and three workers. They each have a dream of being the first to call their winery a true success.

The players are in the position of determining how they want to allocate their workers throughout the year. Every season is different on a vineyard, so the workers have different tasks they can take care of in the summer and winter. There’s competition over those tasks, and often the first worker to get to the job has an advantage over subsequent workers.

Fortunately for the vineyard owners, people love to visit wineries. And it just so happens that many of those visitors are willing to help out around the vineyard when they visit as long as you assign a worker to take care of them. Their visits (in the form of cards) are brief but can be very helpful.

Using those workers and visitors, the vineyard owners can expand their vineyards by building structures, planting vines, and filling wine orders, working towards the goal of running the most successful winery in Tuscany.

Viticulture Essential Edition includes the base game of Viticulture and a few of the most popular modules from the original Tuscany expansion, including Mamas & Papas, Fields (previously known as Properties), expanded and revised Visitors, and Automa cards for a solo variant, along with a few minor rule changes.

Viticulture Essential Edition board game | Source: gamecows.com

How to Play Viticulture Essential Edition

Setup the Game

Place the main game board on the table and give each player a vineyard map with the workers, wake up token and structure tokens of their player color. Place the residual payment token (wine bottle) of each player on the center space of the residual track in the bottom right of the mainboard and the victory point token (corks) on the Start/Zero spot of the track along the bottom. Give each player the three field cards for their player board, one marked with a 5, one with 6 and one with 7.

Shuffle each of the four decks of cards: green vine cards; yellow summer visitors; purple wine cards; and blue winter visitors. Place the shuffled decks facedown on the indicated spot on the board. Place the glass grape and wine tokens within reach of everyone, along with the lira tokens. Choose a first player by drawing one of the rooster tokens at random. Then give that player the bunch of grapes first player token.

Finally, each player draws a Mama and Papa card from the shuffled decks. These cards provide you with unique starting benefits, including your workers, money, cards and potential structures. For an advanced variant, you can draw two Mama and Papa cards and choose whichever you prefer. Once all players have chosen, each player claims their starting resources and the game is ready to begin.

Viticulture Essential Edition setup example

Gameplay

Viticulture Essential Edition is played over an unspecified number of rounds, known as years. Throughout each year, players will take action in the four seasons. Place workers into different spots in summer and winter, and make choices in spring and autumn. The number of spots available in each summer and winter action is dependent on the player count, with three spaces under each action.

Whenever you place a worker, you must complete the action. You cannot place the worker to block an opponent and not take the action.

Viticulture Essential Edition Official Rulebook

Spring

Starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, players place their roosters on the wake-up chart in the bottom left of the game board. It determines the actual order in which the rest of the year is played. Taking the very first one guarantees you’ll be the first to place your workers, but the rest have increasing rewards as you go down the ladder.

Summer

During summer, yellow actions on the game board become available. One worker is placed per turn and immediately performs the action. Players can choose to pass, and save their workers for the winter.

Fall

Just like spring, fall is a minor season where players draw either a summer or winter visitor and add them to their hand.

Winter

Winter works exactly the same as summer, with winter actions becoming available. The only difference is that players have to spend all of their workers.

End of the Year

The end of the year is the time to reset the board, with players returning their workers, collecting residual payments, removing roosters from the wake-up chart, and passing the first player token counter-clockwise. Wine and grapes are aged by 1 point, if possible.

How to Win Viticulture Essential Edition

The end of the game is triggered when a player has gained 20 or more victory points. The current year is finished and the player with the highest victory point total wins. Tie-breakers, if there is a tie, the player with the most lira wins. If there’s still a tie, the highest total of wine value in the cellar wins. Another tie? The highest value of grapes on the crush pad wins. If there’s STILL a tie, spin a bottle or share the victory. Or just play again! It’s up to you.

Viticulture Essential Edition Review

"Something to consider. Some players find the random element of the cards as a potential hindrance because there’s very little control over the way your game can play out. If that’s something that causes some issues for you, here’s a handy little house rule. Whenever you draw a card, be it an order card or a visitor card, draw one more and choose which one to keep. It won’t change the Viticulture gameplay, but it will change the experience and that is just as significant."

Luke Pickles, board-game.co.uk

"To me, this is the perfect introduction to worker placement or euro games. It has a confidence of presentation and design that makes it welcoming, and thematically sound mechanisms that just make sense, so you can teach the game with the language of the theme instead of the language of board games.

The process of playing the game in and of itself feels rewarding regardless of how well you do. It’s short enough that trying out alternative strategies doesn’t feel like a waste of time, and that final round where multiple people are trying to barely edge out each other on the victory point track is exciting."

thethoughtfulgamer.com

"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."

enjoy-things.com

The content of this article is originally from Board Game Geek, board-game.co.uk and gamecows.com. For more information and a better understanding of the game, you can watch the videos below.