Vineyard

• Designers: Roberta Taylor, Eduardo Baraf, Katherine Waddell 
• Publisher: Pencil First
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 13+
• Time: 60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4dmUrX2
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Welcome to wine country! Vineyard: A Winemaking Game is a 1-4 player game about making wine in a delightful, sun-washed valley. Move workers through the winemaking steps and choose your upgrades. Become a specialist, find the perfect moments to benefit from the activities around the vineyard, and enjoy a streamlined experience of crafting wine!

Set out on a winemaking journey to create sumptuous wine! Choose how to leave your impression by playing action cards, collectively moving workers to locations around the vineyard, and deciding your unique upgrade path. Will you push your luck to get more done, or focus on building up improvements?

• Shared Worker Placement allows all players to move every worker, setting up future actions and benefits to try to take at the best time.
• Quick, Engaging Turns keep gameplay moving for everyone with open information as you maximize your important role in the winemaking process.
• Unique Location Actions provide ways to gain advantages and leverage other 
• players’ decisions or use clever tactics to temporarily block workers.
• Ongoing Upgrade Choices give you ways to upgrade-as-you-go with unique specialties and improvements to build your own path to victory.

What is Shared Worker Placement? All players at the table are able to play action cards to move the workers around the vineyard. You do not play a specific character, but choose how to best guide all of the workers! There may be turns when you set up an excellent upcoming action… But will you be the first to take advantage of it? Keep an eye on your fellow players and find the best moment to showcase your winemaking expertise!

The board is placed on the table, and 3 barrels placed in the central area and the Cellar. A market of 4 Improved Action cards is set up, and four Level 1 Train cards placed near the top of the board. The grape tokens are mixed up in the bag, and then immature grapes are placed in the Field and one mature grape each in the three areas above the Crush bin, found just below the Field.  The four Friends are placed on the Paperwork space.  Each player gets a player board, a set of 7 Basic Action cards, and all the Hearts in one color.  Each player places one of those hearts on the barrel in the cellar.  Finally, get 2 or 3 coins to start the game (based on initial player order).

Each player board has a column for each of the four winemaking Friends.  During the game, you will be able to upgrade each of the Friends, giving them increased abilities when you use that particular friend.  All 12 special actions are found on each player board, but they are asymmetrical in how they are distributed amongst the friends.  Each player also starts with a deck of 7 basic action cards, but these cards can be upgraded with Improved Action cards – though you will always have exactly 7 cards in your deck.

A turn consists of four steps:  1) placing an action card, 2) moving the Friend, 3) Performing the Location action, 4) Cleanup.

1] Placing an Action card – choose an action card from your hand and place it underneath the column of one of the Friends on your board.  Every friend must have a card under it before you can place a second card on any Friend (unless you are playing Paperwork).  There must be space in the location specified by the action card for the Friend to move to.  The friend must move to a new location (unless you are playing Paperwork). 

2] Move the Friend – Move the Friend to the location indicated on the card you played. Large Circles at locations can hold any number of Friends while small circles can only hold a single Friend.

3] Perform the Location Action – Complete the action associated with the location, and you may also use any available abilities of the Friend doing the action.

• Cultivate – you can first optionally rearrange the field by removing a grape token, making up to 2 orthogonal swipes and then replacing the initial grape into the new empty space. Then you must cultivate the field by choosing any one row or column and flipping all immature grapes to the mature side. Then place one of your hearts on any 2 grape tokens in the row/column that you chose.
• Harvest – Choose one grape type in the field and then move all the grape tokens in an orthogonally connected blob of that type into a crush bin – remembering to include the wild grapes as being of the same type.  Keep all the hearts on their grape tokens. If you harvested 4 or more grape tokens, place 2 of your hearts in the crush bin, otherwise place just one heart.  Refill the field with random grape tokens, all on the immature side.
• Make Wine – Using grapes in a single crush bin, fill the recipe on one of the wine barrels, only using the needed grape tokens.  Move all the hearts from the used grape tokens onto the wine that you make.  Move one heart of each player color already on that crush bin onto the wine barrel and then place one more heart from your supply onto the wine.  The grapes used here are placed on the compost pile.  Move the barrel to the leftmost wine cellar and then collect the star value if any is shown on the barrel.
• Age Wine – Move all the barrels in the middle cellar to the rightmost cellar. Then move all the barrels in the leftmost cellar into the middle cellar.  If you moved 1-3 barrels, place one of your hearts on any barrel you moved. If you moved 4+ barrels, place an additional heart on any barrel that moved.
• Load – Move one barrel from the rightmost cellar onto the truck. Check to see if this fills the truck, and if it does, that truck immediately scores and you cannot load any more barrels.  For each barrel on the full truck, give 1 star to each player who has at least one heart on that barrel.  Then, follow the special scoring rule on the truck.  If the truck still has room, you may move one more barrel from the rightmost cellar onto the truck.  
• Greet – Greet any one train card by meeting its requirements. Follow the instruction on the card and take the benefits.  Passenger (blue) cars allow you to earn money. Freight (red) cars give you one-time special abilities.  If you ever greet the rightmost train car, you always get a bonus one coin for doing so.

• Paperwork – Return all your played cards to your hand, earning one coin for each card so moved. Then you can spend coins to buy improved action cards or upgrade your player board as many times as you can afford.   If you buy an Improved action card, you must discard a card from your hand that has a matching icon in the upper left so that you always have just 7 cards in hand. You can never discard Paperwork.  When you play Improved ability cards, you can choose how and when to use any bonuses on that card. If an Improved card gives you a bonus second action, remember that you do NOT to move the Friend to that second location, and thus, you do not need to check that space is available there.  If you upgrade your player board, you must do upgrades in any column from top to bottom.  Pay the cost next to the topmost available upgrade and then place a checkmark over that cost to show that it is unlocked; you can now use this bonus starting with your next turn anytime that you use that friend. 

4] Cleanup – Refresh the board so that there are 3 Barrels available. If you scored a truck, reveal a new truck card.  If you scored the third and final truck, the game end is triggered.  Refresh the train display and Barrel display, making sure that the levels of these things match the level of the current truck. Refresh the Improved Action card display, always making sure there are no identical cards available.

When the third truck is scored, the game ends immediately. Players now calculate their score.

• Stars collected during play
• 1 star per 3 hearts of your color on the board
• 1 star per 3 coins left over

The player with the most stars wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most hearts remaining on the board.

My thoughts on the game

Vineyard uses an interesting shared worker placement structure that is coupled with a bit of deck building and engine building facets.   As the wine is being made, aged and shipped – players will use the four characters to add their own influence to the final product.  To do this, you will leave your little wooden hearts all over the board and pieces to show your influence.

The action selection is a neat process, and players can modify both aspects of this.  In order to perform an action, you must play an action card from your hand to a specific character.  The game gives you a little bit of deck-building as you can buy upgraded cards to replace the basic ones you start with.  The upgraded cards are strictly better than the basic ones, so you’ll get more actions or better actions each time you play that card.   The four characters can also each be upgraded to give individualized benefits at a particular location.  Each player’s board is different, so different characters will have different possible locations where their special benefits will apply.

As players have to share the four characters, there are also some interesting spatial puzzles that need to be solved.  You have to be able to move a character into the location you want to take a particular action – and we often found that the limited locations often served as bottlenecks as players tried not to move a character off a space to free up that location for the next person to move into!

Each step of the winemaking process is important and necessary, and when you perform any of those first four steps (Cultivate, Harvest, Make Wine, Age), you’ll be able to add some of your hearts to the game and hopefully onto the final product.  It can feel a little fiddly at first because there are so many places to put hearts and move hearts, etc – but it does all become second nature after a few rounds.

Interestingly, loading is necessary for scoring, but it is the one step that doesn’t allow you to add hearts to the wine.  As such, there are times when no one is motivated to actually load the wine onto the truck.  Only once there is a reason (i.e. getting a barrel that scores you more points OR preventing someone’s good barrel from loading), then it makes sense to spend your turn loading wine onto the truck instead of doing something else more useful.   The only other time that I have really considered loading wine is when I need a turn to temporize as I wait for either a specific character to move to a different location or I need a specific location to be able to accept a new friend…

The board has somewhat helpful reminder banners under the label for each action, but I feel like a bit more info could have been given there – or maybe have a fuller explanation of each action be printed on the basic action cards at least.  

The game flows nicely, and players will add their hearts to the grapes, crush bins, and wine barrels quickly.  There are enough steps in the process that many of the wine barrels will end up with at least one heart from each player on them.   When such barrels are loaded onto the truck, this means that all the players will score the basic points for the barrel.  Thus, oftentimes the biggest differentiator in the score comes from the truck bonuses.  I do wish that these bonuses were a bit more interesting.

The artwork is cartoonish and colorful.  The overall feel of the art direction is for this to be an easygoing family game or possibly a gateway-style game.  However, the mechanics are a bit more complex than what those sorts of games would want (at least IMO).  It is actually a complicated series of events to turn those grapes into wine, and the decision tree can definitely widen out as you gain advanced action cards and asymmetrical character abilities.  Our games are taking about an hour right now, and there can be some significant downtime between turns near the end of the game as players have a lot to calculate to plan out their coming turns.

Pencil First has made a lot of family-level games in the past that I have liked.  I feel like Vineyard is a bit more complex than Floriferous or Sunset over Water.  It does add some advance gaming concepts onto what looks to be a simpler game, and it could be a good fit for someone looking for a stepping stone into the more complex range of boardgames.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.
• Neutral. Dale Y, John P
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4dmUrX2