What is Viticulture

Viticulture is a board game first published in 2013 by Stonemaier Games. The Essential Edition was released in 2015, but I played with the original. In it, you play as a wine grower, competing with other players to produce and sell the best wine in town. I played Viticulture for the first time very recently, introduced to it by some relatives who are pretty into board games. It was interesting enough that I thought I’d talk about the aspects of the design of the game that stood out to me. I am not experienced with these types of games, so I’ll probably be spending some time talking about mechanics and ideas that are staples of the genre, but I hope this is still interesting.

Viticulture, and this entire genre, are fundamentally games about resource management, so I’m going to break up the discussion into talking about the some of the resources that I thought Viticulture did something interesting with. I’m not going over the entirety of the rules, as that would be quite a few words wasted but if you are unfamiliar with them they’re here[link].

Turn Structure

In Viticulture, players decide turn order at the start of each turn by selecting from a position on a track. The earlier positions get to go first, while the later positions get more and more significant resources as rewards. Who gets to go first in the turn order turn order (:)) is chosen at random at the start of the game and rotates each turn. This system is pretty interesting, although it did lead to the least enjoyable moment in the game for me, when on the last turn I knew I would go last and lose because everyone understood priority was the only thing that mattered and I was last in the turn order turn order. Setting aside that specific case, when the end of the game is not in sight and the trade offs between resources and priority are more fuzzy, the turn order is an interesting minigame at the start of each turn.

Workers

Workers are your available actions in Viticulture. You start the game with 2 regular workers, and 1 grand worker, who I’ll discuss later. Each action you take in viticulture requires you to place a worker in a slot corresponding with that action on the board. Early in the game, by having access to only three workers, the amount of actions each player can take is limited, which makes the early turns less overwhelming. I learned most of how the game works by just playing the first few turns, because my available actions were limited. (The theming of the game also helped. I guessed that growing and harvesting grapes was a good plan based on the theme, and even though it probably wasn’t the best thing to be doing, taking any action at all let me figure out more about the game.) Workers are a type of resource that is always valuable, even as the game progresses and each player gets up to the maximum possible number of workers (6).

The only limit on workers is that there are a limited number of slots available for each action. [1] So, if those slots are filled, then players can no longer take that action, even if they have workers available. For example, if the players before you have filled up the slots for playing visitor cards or constructing buildings, you can no longer you’re out of luck. Interestingly, the grand worker can bypass this slot system, and can take any action you want. This feels like an extension of a system to solve player-feel-bad moments where players are completely locked out of taking the action they were planning around by giving them at least one resource that bypasses the whole system. It’s interesting largely because it’s so obviously designed to solve a player frustration issue, and extremely clear choices like that are rare.

Lira (money)

Lira is an interesting resource. It is a tremendous limit on your ability to do things in the early game. Buildings are required for many things in the game, from larger cellars for better wines, to trellis to plant specific types of grapes. All of these buildings cost lira to construct. Hiring new workers also costs lira, and workers, as outlined above, are always valuable. So early in the game your lira is tremendously strained, to the point where you might send workers to complete actions that only get you Lira and do not advance your game in any other way. However, each wine order that is completed (which is the primary way to earn victory points) also gives you at least 1 ‘residual’ lira, which is a recurring payout that is given at the end of each turn. As players buy the most necessary buildings and hire the maximum number of workers, there are fewer and fewer things relevant things to spend Lira on, and players will accumulate more and more of it. There is an attempted solution to this that I will discuss below, but Lira is largely valueless in the end game, while being the primary limiting factor in the early game. I do think evaluating when the transition point where you no longer care about money occurs is interesting, but it does feel a bit off-message[2].

Victory Points

Even I know that victory points are ubiquitous in board games these days. However, there were two details about the implementation of victory points as a win condition in viticulture that stood out to me. The first was that the victory points were only checked at the end of each turn. As someone who was about to try and win in summer, before the other players could get over the threshold, this came as a rude surprise, but I actually really like this. It prevents players from winning out of nowhere, as the winter phase should be assumed to get players a substantial number of victory points once the endgame is in sight just from fulfilling wine orders.

The second interesting idea I found in Viticulture’s implementation of victory points follows from only evaluating victory points at the end of the turn. What happens if two players are tied? Viticulture also caps the maximum number of victory points at 25, 5 over the winning threshold of 20, which means that in some games, especially ones where players don’t know what they’re doing (such as my first), multiple players can hit that cap, resulting in more tied games. To resolve this, Viticulture has a set of 3 tiebreakers, although in most games only the first will be relevant: Lira. This is what I was referring to when I was discussing an extra use for Lira past the midgame. It feels a bit like a bandaid solution for that issue, but it does at least stop Lira from being completely useless towards the end.

Conclusion

I did enjoy playing Viticulture, despite some rough points. I really enjoy when, as the end of the game approaches, the game goes from being about a more general accumulation of resources to trying to calculate an exact path to victory. These kinds of transitions, where what the game is about changes, are really interesting to me, and are one of the reasons I enjoy limited Magic. It’s also always interesting to explore a new space, and see solutions to existing problems like the grand worker combating against the feel-bad potential of action slots. I basically didn’t touch on any of the cards at all, largely because I didn’t have much that was interesting to say about them. I’ll try and explore the board game space more in the future, and maybe do a similar write up for more games as well.

Footnotes

[1]The number of slots available depends on the number of players. For 2 players, only one slot is available per action. For 3-4 players, there are 2 slots, and for 5-6 there are 3 slots.

[2]Making the game into a set number of turns, and having the score just be a Lira comparison would require a significant rework (many of the cards would no longer work), but would both make more sense in the theme and also remove this issue. However, that change would create a tension in spending your Lira on anything, which I can easily see frustrating new players.