Viticulture: Bordeaux Review: Adding a New Vintage?

Welcome to this week’s review! This week I’m taking a look at the latest expansion to a popular wine-making game. So, without further ado, let’s jump into it.

Disclosure: A review copy of this game was provided to The Meeple Digest in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.

Viticulture: Bordeaux is the latest expansion to Viticulture, which is a worker placement game themed around running a vineyard in Tuscany. Viticulture is among my favorite games of all-time and is also one of my wife’s favorite games. So naturally, I was curious to find out what changes the Bordeaux expansion brings.

The primary new addition in this expansion is an alternative board. This board follows the same four-season structure of the Tuscany board, while making a few tweaks to help balance strategies. First up, there is now a two-card display for the vine and wine order decks. Previously, one of the frustrating parts of Viticulture was blindly drawing from those decks in the hopes of drawing the exact cards you were looking for. Now, by having a display of cards, it’s easier to plan your strategies around what cards are available. While there is no display of summer or winter visitor cards, I’m personally not bothered by having those still be drawn randomly from the decks since you’re less likely to be hunting a specific card like the vine or order cards.

Arguably the next biggest change with the board is the addition of expert bonuses. There is a new action in spring that lets you hire an expert, which involves placing one of your player cubes below one of the actions on the board. These experts are restricted to just a single player, and whenever that player takes the associated action, they receive the associated benefit. For example, the expert bonus on the Train a Worker action in Winter allows the player to place the trained worker on a spring or summer action space immediately. These expert bonuses provide another layer of strategy to plan around. The one caveat I have with the expert bonuses is that not all of the them feel entirely equal. For example, the expert bonus for the Give a Tour action is to gain one coin for each worker at that action. This bonus feels stronger at higher player counts than others. In addition, some of the expert bonuses feel more situational than others.

Another change is the star map from Tuscany has now been replaced by a trade chart. One complaint with trades in Tuscany was that players could spam certain trades repeatedly, which led to some strategies that may have not been intended by the game’s designers. Now, each unique trade can only be performed once throughout the game without removing tokens from the trade chart. I was never that fond of the area-majority map from Tuscany, so I prefer the trade chart quite a bit more.

While relatively minor, it’s nice to now have leftover money, grapes, and wine convert to victory points at the end of the game. Previously, leftover money served as the tiebreaker, but now all leftover grapes and wine covert into money, and every ten money is worth a point at the end of the game. This also allows strategies focused around gaining a lot of money to be more viable.

Finally, there are a few tweaks to actions and bonuses. For example, there is a new action in fall that allows the player to spend a coin to take any action on the board. This helps alleviate some of the competition over key actions like training workers and making wine. Also, this expansion is compatible with all other Viticulture expansions, except the cooperative Viticulture World.

Bordeaux also makes a few tweaks to player setup in the goal of speeding up the early section of the game. Previously, the dominant strategy was to sell at least one of your player fields for an early injection of cash. Now, players only start with a single purchased field, and in-exchange, players receive a little extra starting money, one grape, one wine, and a residual value of one. These changes help speed up the early part of the game and cut down a bit on the length of the game, particularly at higher player counts.

The one complaint I have with the Bordeaux expansion is that I wish there was an included rules reference like those in base Viticulture and the Tuscany expansion. The only player aids included are just reference cards that just list each of the different expert bonuses. Since these are already printed on the board, I didn’t really see the need for these reference cards, and I would have preferred an icon reference aid instead.

Overall, while Bordeaux primarily just adds an alternative board, I enjoyed the display of vine and order cards, tweaks to setup that speed up the early game, and some action-balancing. While I’m not convinced that all of the expert bonuses are entirely balanced, they do provide another layer of strategy. Going forward, I will likely prefer to play with the new Bordeaux board over the Tuscany board. I’m not sure I’d consider this expansion essential, especially if you already own the Tuscany expansion. But if you’re looking to get into Viticulture for the first time or just own the base game, I might recommend this expansion over Tuscany, since without the Tuscany board, you’re really only missing the structure cards and special workers from the essential edition. In general, albeit more of a refinement rather than something brand new, Viticulture Bordeaux is an excellent expansion.  

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s review! If you’ve played Viticulture or any of the expansions, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the game in the comments below. Happy gaming!

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