I love a good glass of wine and often think about the details that must go in to getting it from the grapevine to my table. Today we are going to preview a game that looks at that exact process as we explore the world of winemaking!
Vineyard: A Winemaking Game is the newest game from Pencil First Games coming to crowd funding on Kickstarter. It plays 1-4 players in approximately 60 mins.
Overview:
In Vineyard players help a group of friends who are trying to cultivate and harvest grapes to turn them into finely aged wines. Every action pours some love into the wine or helps you gain funding to run the Vineyard. The player who collects the most stars and hearts is the winner!
Gameplay:
Let’s take a look at how Vineyard plays. There is a main play area that sets up the gameboard, cards, tokens, barrels, train and bag of grape tokens. Each player is given a board, action cards, hearts and starting coins.
Play progresses clockwise as players take turns using an action card to move one of the friends around the board. As you move them to different locations, your hearts may be added to various stages of wine production along the journey from grapes to the final wines. By taking the right action at the right time, your hearts will earn you stars. Once the trucks have been loaded and everybody helps produce the wines that go out into the game, the game ends immediately. The player with the most stars wins.
There is a flow to the wine production process that will go from grapes that are cultivated that are then harvested. Those are used to make wine which is aged and then it’s loaded onto a truck. It’s through this process that the friends will follow taking different actions as you control them on your turn.
Each player starts with a hand of seven basic action cards, which represents the different locations on the board. You’ll always have 7 action cards in hand. Your player board has columns for each of the four friends, and you’ll be able to use coins to upgrade them and give them bonus abilities that you can use on your turn. When you place an action card to move a friend the upgraded abilities associated are used. All players have the same abilities but they are attributed to different friends on their boards.
When it’s your turn, you play 1 action card and move one of the friends from the location that they’re in that matches the action card you played. Here you’ll perform the action for the location, completing it with the available abilities that you have. Finally on your last step you clean up and this allows you to refill the main areas of the board to prepare for the next player’s turn.
The different actions allow you to do things that will help the vineyard in cultivating and moving towards the direction of making wine. First, there’s the cultivate space that allows you to tend grapes on the vines, grouping them together in order to grow better supplies to create better wines. During this time you can rearrange fields, cultivate the fields, and make the best grape tokens.
Up next is the harvest action. You can gather grapes and the vines and prepare them to make delicious wines. You choose a grape type from the field and collect all the tokens that are connected in adjacency non-diagonal patterns. Once you have them yourefill the field from the grape token drawbag for the next turn.
The make wine action allows you to use the crush bins to make wines from the specific grapes. You choose the grapes to complete the requirements on the barrel and move it into the cellar. The grape tokens with the right barrels often are a way to add love to the process of making wine for you as a player.
Using the age wine action space lets players slowly age and ferment their wine in the Cellars. Moving barrels to age them and bring them closer to bottling phase will help control the speed at which the trucks are loaded and is often the last chance to add love to the barrels that you are helping to make.
The final step in the winemaking Rocess is to load the barrels to the bottles and send them to their final destinations on the waiting trucks. The scoring condition for each truck indicates what is the most valuable to load onto that particular truck.
There’s also locations where you can greet and host tours of the vineyard for interested groups who will get off of a train to take a tour and you gain the benefit.
Finally, there’s the paperwork section. Here players will work behind the scenes in the office to earn money and make the vineyard run smoothly. You will returned your played action cards to your hand, gain some money and can spend coins to acquire improvements or upgrades to your characters.
Once a third truck is loaded and sent out the game ends immediately at the end of the current player’s turn. Now everybody calculates their score by adding their total star value from all the stars they have collected and gaining stars based on coins and hearts that they have remained on the board. The player with the most stars is the winner, and the player with the most hearts on the board is the winner in the case of a tie.
Impressions:
Winemaking as a game theme is underrepresented in board games in my opinion, and while there Are a few that stand out as big titles that have been around for a while, there’s still room for a title or two in this area. So I was happy to see if this theme on this game from a company that I love and appreciate the games they put out. 
I love the idea of shared worker placement in a board game. This is definitely a unique mechanism that I have not seen in many games and one that gives you a different feeling compared to standard worker placement. Shared worker placement means that we all have control of the characters on the board but as they move from locations they may not be exactly where you need them to be. Do you set up a great turn for yourself and risk someone messing it up on their turn? That’s the challenge of this style.
At times the game feels cooperative to a certain extent-it can feel like you are trying to do things together to get the right rhythm of the winemaking process but ultimately it’s not about working together in a truly cooperative game, it’s more about helping the game flow in such a way that everybody’s able to benefit on their turn. It does not benefit a player to play aggressive or try to throw somebody else’s game off in a defensive way. In that I feel this game has a really nice flow to it that most players will enjoy.
The art and design of Vineyard fits the style and feel I expect from Pencil First games. It’s cute, colorful and full of whimsy. I love the fun personalities of each of the characters and the way the game board is laid out. It just looks really nice on the table. I look forward to seeing the way this game is captured in people’s photographs and videos because I think the game lends itself to having a very photogenic presence. 
Overall it is another solid game from the fine team at Pencil First Games. Shared worker placement makes this a game we found challenging in fun and unique ways and one we can definitely see being popular on your next family game night. So check out the Kickstarter at the link below and see if a trip to the Vineyard is in your future!
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