I originally came up with the idea of a wine-creation game back in November 2011. I had seen a lot of games run successful Kickstarter campaigns, and I thought it might be high time to make my lifelong dream of publishing a board game come to life. So I got to work.
Why wine? A few reasons. First, wine is highly romanticized. I bet everyone knows at least one person who has said, “I’d love to have my own vineyard someday.” I don’t even drink wine (I love the idea of wine, but it gives me migraines), and yet I love the idea of having a vineyard!
Second, as open as I am to medieval fantasy games with knights and castles and magic, not everyone is. I wanted to create a game for gamers and non-gamers alike. I think Settlers of Catan has done wonders as a gateway game, opening people up to the possibility of strategy games instead of just poker, Monopoly, and social games like Cranium. All of which have their place. But I’d rather play a Euro game any day of the week, and I wanted to let people realize that thinking a little bit on game night can actually be a good thing.
Thus I wanted to create a game with very little luck. I thought I’d do this by making all choices equally accessible to all players. Everything’s right out there on the table. Although the final version of the game has some of that, these early versions took it to the extreme.
Originally the game used tiles instead of cards for the grapes. But I soon realized that tiles, even prototype tiles, are really hard to shuffle. So I eventually replaced them with cards. I also didn’t want there to be a common game board. That eventually changed too when I realized that some common conflict is good.
There are lots of little nuances about this version of the game (it’s actually version 2–I forgot to take photos of version 1), but the one cool thing I’ll point out are the wine orders. In every version of the game there is this concept of “wine orders.” You get points for supplying merchants with wine–in this case, different types of whites and reds.
Well, in this early version of the game, the merchants ordering the wine were countries. Players sold wine to Spain, to France, to the US, etc. Each country was represented by the blue/white cards on the left. When a country no longer needed white or red wine based on their demand, you could no longer sell to that country.
This was a good concept in principle, but in reality it frustrated players to no end, partially because of my execution. Players had to reach certain levels of winemaking expertise to sell to some of the pickier countries, so all too often players were stuck with no country to whom to sell their wine. It was too unpredictable and too frustrating, so I changed the concept to something you’ll see in future versions of this series.
Last, I learned that some randomness is good, as it adds to the replayability of the game. But randomness needs to be controlled by individual players. For example, if you have a deck of cards from which players draw, let the players have control (through their tactical choices) over how many cards they draw. In this early version of the game, I had random grapes being sold by a vendor that everyone had access to, but individual players had no control over how many grapes were made available. They were at the whim of the shuffler, and so the first player to act each round had a huge advantage over the rest.
Lessons learned. :)
3 Comments on “The Conception of Viticulture: November-December 2011”
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I’m going to age myself ever so slightly here, Jamey, but sounds like the idea for/conception of Viticulture came right around the height of Gary Vee’s WineLibraryTV video efforts.
Quick Google search; looks like he did his 1st episode on 17MAY2006 and his 1,000th episode on 14MAR2011–the same year/just prior to your conception of Viticulture.
Kuddos to you for executing on this idea! Considering what you had mentioned in your post, combined with Gary Vee’s direct, no-nonsense, charismatic, approach to wine essentially normalizing/popularizing it, it seems a perfect and ideal time was conditioned, totally ripe for the introduction of a game themed like this!
By the way, just picked up your Red Rising game on Amazon! I didn’t see the ‘Collector’s Version/Edition’ one there, so got the retail version, for now—will likely get the ‘Collector’s’ one later, down the road.
I absolutely love the Red Rising saga books, and the card character artwork looks absolutely stunning!
Was going to have ‘My Little Scythe’ be my 1st SM game purchase—on account of wanting to play it with my (3) x young kiddos—but I heard that Red Rising can be played with just one-person/solo. Admittedly, I am completely unfamiliar with that form/approach to gameplay, but thought I would give it a go for my first game play of the New Year!
Reading these posts of yours is really starting to give me a board game design bug/itch…for me 2021-2022 have been/will continue to be inventing and product development years. Designing/developing a tabletop board game, while not necessarily the ‘same’, doesn’t seem like such a far stretch from my current experience.
…one question I did have for you, as it relates to Viticulture specifically, have you received any emails/reports from game players who—in their enthusiasm during game play—somehow knocked over/spilled their wine on their game?
(I recall seeing where you offer replacement parts/components when damaged…so was thinking that might be a plausible scenario to happen, especially when playing a game about wine…)
Wow, it is really neat to see the early concept of this game through your pictures after having played the finished product.
[…] next four iterations of Viticulture (3-6) simplified a lot of the concepts from the previous versions. Although we would return to the concept later, at the time I eliminated the worker cards that were […]