Wine making Virtuoso? Lord of the grapes? Crushing it at the vineyard? Viticulture World is the new cooperative expansion for worker placement classic Viticulture from Stonemaier Games that challenges you to synchronise your efforts with fellow vintners across the unique challenges of each continent.
Viticulture World casts one to six players as owners of individual vineyards in the same region. Rather than competing to reach the winning number of points first, players must instead coordinate actions to ensure each player reaches twenty five victory points before the end of six game years (rounds) as well as collectively raising the groups influence in the region to ten. Each game year a new event card for the continent in play is drawn adding a unique condition or opportunity to keep players on their toes.
The core game is essential to play, while Viticulture World introduces a new game board together with the continent scenario cards it makes use of all the cards, player boards and components in the standard game though it does include new mamas and papas cards which add some welcome diversity. It’s also compatible with all previous modules and expansions for Viticulture leading to a highly customisable experience for players.
Much of the core gameplay remains the same but there are of course some new additions. With the exception of the grande worker and the ever popular grey temporary worker workers are now seasonal as denoted by charming little yellow or blue hats meaning they can only be placed on actions in their associated season. Rather than gaining new workers, workers are now trained and their hats are ceremonially removed allowing them to be placed in all seasons bringing much needed flexibility. Placing the grande worker on an already occupied spot now allows players to trade, you might give a fellow player a coin or two so they can build that much needed cellar and in exchange they might offer you a white grape so you can finally get that lucrative champagne order filled.
The new board features many familiar action spaces such as planting and harvesting fields, making wine and building new structures for your vineyard. Unlike in the core game there are no placement spots with bonuses. Viticulture World also offers some new actions such as the powerful innovate action. Innovating allows you to place innovation tiles to overlay and upgrade actions on the board, for example the harvest action might be upgraded from harvesting a single field to harvesting all your fields or you may be able to play two visitor cards at once rather than a single one. There are also oval innovation tiles which upgrade the action slot themselves to include a bonus and unlimited capacity for workers, however the bonus can only be claimed by hatless trained workers. There are four innovation tiles available each game year, however due to the expense of the action players can likely only afford one or two tiles so careful consideration is essential.
Viticulture is one of my favourite worker placement games and it often involves competing for the best worker placement spots and as a consequence locking others out. Viticulture World breathes new life into a much loved game by flipping things to cooperative play, rather than racing for the best spots players now need to pause and discuss who really needs that plant action slot the most this year, who plans to make wine from grapes this year, how do we get enough money together to climb the influence track? It’s an absolute masterstroke and creates a completely fresh experience from familiar elements.
Viticulture World is challenging to say the least-it took us two attempts to best the introductory scenario based on Greengully from Charterstone (great legacy game check it out). The continents are categorised into easy, medium and hard challenges. So far we’ve only managed to succeed in the introductory challenge and the “easy” Asia scenario. The level of difficulty is very welcome, cooperative games that are too easy quickly lose their charm. Keeping that challenge level high ensures the hard won victory is sweet and rewarding.
I really enjoyed the innovate action, upgrading the actions gives a nice feeling of progress especially when you pair them with a good placement spot upgrade which can really accelerate things. Choosing which actions to upgrade and which to leave be is the key to victory in Viticulture World, the most useful spots need to be upgraded to accommodate multiple workers if there’s to be any hope of everyone hitting the required twenty five victory points.
I loved my time with Viticulture World and it’s going to remain my go to cooperative game for some time to come. It was refreshing to play an expansion which was genuinely new rather than just adding further variability to an established experience. I highly recommend it to all the winemakers and worker placement fans out there.
You can find Viticulture World on Amazon.
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