Windmill Valley

• Designer: Dani Garcia
• Publisher: Board & Dice
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 45-90 min

From the publisher: It’s the late 19th century, and more than 9000 windmills dot the landscape of the Netherlands, some of them purpose-built to dry the lowlands, called polders. In the polders between these windmills are fields filled with colorful tulips—the flower that once was a part of the turbulent history of the first financial bubble but is now simply a quintessential part of the Dutch landscape, especially on the famous Bloemen Route (or “Flower Route”).

In Windmill Valley , a game inspired by the Bloemen Route, you and up to three players take on the role of tulip farmers and entrepreneurs. You will build and enhance your windmills, look for new tulip bulbs in foreign trades or among local vendors to buy and plant, and try to get an edge with hired help and lucrative contracts. Let your blooming fields make your competitors green with envy! During their turn, players choose the action by rotating the wheels on their windmill board.  All in all, Windmill Valley is a lightweight game with quick turns, a smart action-selection mechanism, multiple options to build your engine, and a lovely setting. 

There are many bits that need to be set up.Place the board on the table and set up Wheel Enhancements, Farm Enhancements, Foreign Trade cards, and markers for the Floodgate & Water Levels.

Each player gets a Farm board, Windmill board, player aid, tool token, 9 Windmill tokens, and 5 player markers in their color. Starting Enhancements are drafted in reverse player order. Player markers go on the market area and the calendar track, and all players gain a starting Tulip Bulb and Guilder.,

Players take turns selecting actions by rotating wheels on their Windmill board, which is influenced by the water speed set by the Floodgate. You can optionally close the Floodgate, which costs nothing and slows the water down, or open the Floodgate, which costs money and speeds the water up as well as providing VP. You adjust the water level if applicable.

You then rotate the wheels. The large wheel moves 1-4 spaces clockwise, based on your Water Speed.  Once the large wheel has completed a full rotation you advance on the Calendar Track and gain relevant bonuses; game end will be triggered when a player reaches the end of the Calendar Track.

You then take one of the two actions available to you, as indicated but the red arrows on your wheel. You can:

• Enhance wheels or farm board to improve your engine.
• Plant tulips to score VPs at the end of the game; you can plant in any row in your field but must always use the leftmost available space.
• Build windmills on the main board to activate rewards from adjacent fields; your space must connect to the main market via occupied spaces, and all opponents on your traced path will score points.

• Hire workers, who provide bonuses for certain actions (limit 3); you score points for each space filled.
• Lower the  water level, gaining rewards based on the starting location of the water level .
• Get contracts for endgame scoring (limit 3).
• Visit the local market and/or conduct a foreign trade to gain bulbs or take other actions.

  Once a player hits the end of the calendar track  the current round is finished and all players get one more turn. Players then calculate their score.

• Victory Points for each fulfilled contract
• Victory Points for placed windmills
• Victory Points for empty spaces on your personal board.
• Victory Points for complete rows and columns of tulips, with bonus points for rows that are all the same color and columns that are all different colors.

The player with the most points wins. Ties are broken in favor of the player with the most tulips in their Patch. 

Tery’s thoughts on the game

 I enjoy the game. I am quickly becoming a fan of the designer, Dani Garcia and this game did not disappoint. The theme is well-done; every action I am taking feels thematic.  The rotating wheel, where you choose how slow or fast you want things to go, is an interesting twist on both action selection and game speed.  The actions themselves are the standard engine building type things – get resources to upgrade actions to get more resources to do more things – but I like engine builders, and I enjoyed the puzzle of how fast to move the wheel to optimize my development.

The game is not particularly fast, and it could bog down if you play with people who suffer from analysis paralysis; there was some downtime on other players’ turns, and while I could think about what I wanted to do there were times it dragged.

It’s a beautiful game; the components are of high quality and it is visually appealing laid out on the table. I had no issue with the graphics or any of the colors; everything was pretty clear right away.

The rules were also pretty good; there are a lot of them, but they were generally clear and we were able to learn the game from the rules. 

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Dale Yu: In the past few years, I’ve become a fan of Dani Garcia’s designs.  I have enjoyed this one as well as Barcelona.  I find that the asymmetrical dueling rondels here give you a lot of room for interesting decisions, and I like the way that each player can customize the wheel as they like.  Of course, you can’t spend too much time adding actions to the wheels as you’ll end up not doing enough of the other actions (which you need to do to score points!)

In our group, the games tend to move along fairly quickly.  Most turns don’t take very long, and we’ve usually done most of our planning in the time between turns – though, of course, with competition for board spaces, you sometimes simply have to wait for your turn in order to plan.

 Alison Brennan: Each player has an interlocking dual rondel mechanism of build-your-own actions that is a masterpiece of game design. Loved it. The core rondel’s six base actions do standard Euro-y stuff though – get resources, stock your warehouse for pts, build on the board to get stuff, buy better action powers, sell stuff for money, etc. Rondel games play much the same and this is no exception – plan ahead, focus on several rondel actions and max those up, skip the rest. Nice game but it’s standard fare, the main attraction being the shiny new rondel system.

Joe Huber (1 play): This is one of those unfortunate games that I wanted to like far more than I actually enjoyed it.  My biggest complaint with the game was that it felt far too long with four players – I would be willing to try the game again with three.

Doug Garrett (3 plays): I agree with Joe’s statement that I wanted to like the game far more than I actually enjoyed it. Shelley and I LOVED Barcelona, and this one did not live up to Garcia’s previous design. While I won’t put it down as “Not for me” or even “Neutral” – as I would play it again and liked the interlocking gear mechanism – it’s not a game I need to play again, and we have it on our to sell pile.

 Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Alison, Doug G., Tery N, Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me… JoeH