Wine, Tricks, and Gigantic Dice

Welcome to this week’s gaming post! This week I’m discussing a medium-weight euro, a cooperative trick-taking game, and a beast of a roll-and-write. So without further ado, let’s jump into the recent highlights.

First, let’s discuss Viticulture with Tuscany. For clarification, this is for the Essential Edition of both, rather than the original versions. It had been awhile since I had gotten this one to the table, and I’m glad I was able to pull it out again. At its core, Viticulture is a worker-placement game about making wine and completing contracts; however, especially when you include Tuscany, there is so much more to this game, and it feels like there are countless different avenues to victory.

I recently played a game where I had drawn the Ristorante card early, which when built allows you to place a worker once per year to gain three money and three victory points by giving up one of any wine and one grape. Since the game is a race to 25 points with Tuscany, three points each year can really add up. So I decided to focus on low quality grapes and wine to send to my Ristorante, rather than high value wines for contracts. While I ultimately didn’t pull off the victory, it was probably one of the most unique games of Viticulture I’ve played, and it really speaks to the replayability of the game due to the many different types of cards.

Additionally, I really enjoy the Grande worker mechanism, which allows you to place your one Grande worker on action spaces that are already occupied (by you or another player). This creates an interesting tension where you have to decide when to play your Grande worker. Do I use it now because the player in front of me just took the action I wanted and hope I don’t need it later, or do I save it for the action later in the year that I really need? It’s also incredibly satisfying to fulfill contracts by giving up different types and wine, and players can quickly end a game with just a few of them.

With all the unique cards, it does create an element of luck, and I’ve played Viticulture with friends who didn’t like the game because of this reason. The cards require more tactical play rather than strategic planning because it’s not ideal or efficient to keep drawing cards from a deck until you get the one you’re looking for. However, at the same time, it can feel frustrating when another player draws into the perfect card for their situation.

While the game can be played with 1-6 players, the game really shines at 3-4 players because of the additional action spaces and bonuses, and I wouldn’t recommend the game with more than four players unless you are prepared for a long game and/or everyone is familiar with the game already.

Finally, it really feels necessary to play Viticulture with Tuscany, and if you interested in picking up the game, I’d recommend getting both Essential additions of Viticulture and Tuscany from the very beginning.

Overall, it’s a bit difficult for me to pin down exactly why I enjoy this game so much, but I almost always enjoy my plays of it. The theme of building out your own winery in the Tuscan countryside really shines, and while the cards can sometimes feel frustrating or unbalanced at times, I really enjoy the replayability they bring. My recent plays of Viticulture reminded me that it’s still one of my all-time favorites, and I look forward to getting it to the table again soon.

Speaking of all-time favorites, next up is The Crew. There are two editions of The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine and Mission Deep Sea. While I prefer the follow up, Mission Deep Sea, for the increased variety of objective cards, both are essentially the same game just with different themes.

If you’ve never heard of either edition, The Crew is a cooperative, trick-taking card game. I grew up playing trick-taking games (Hearts, Spades, etc.), so I really enjoy the cooperative spin on the genre. The catch with the cooperative mechanic is that players are not allowed to speak to each other during the game. The only communication players have is the ability to play one card, at any point during the game, from their hand face-up in front of them, provided it is the highest, lowest, or only card of that suit the player has. This creates incredible tense moments where everyone is looking at each other around the table, trying to read each other’s minds, to try to figure out what card to play in that moment. When everyone clicks together, the game creates incredible rewarding moments.

Games play out incredible quickly, with some games only taking a handful of minutes, so even when you collectively lose, victory is only a few more minutes away. I’ve used The Crew as a quick filler, at the end of a long board gaming session, or even as the main game where we play for a couple of hours. The game is surprisingly addicting, and I definitely get that “just one more” game feeling.

If players are familiar with other trick-taking games, then The Crew is very quick to teach, and they’ll likely pick this one up quickly. The only caveat I’ll mention is that if you have players that aren’t familiar with trick-taking, it can be a bit difficult for new players to pick up some of the nuances or strategies around when to play certain cards. However, if you and your friends are new to the trick-taking genre, this is a great first step.

Overall, if you count each game of the crew as separate plays, The Crew is easily my most played game of all-time and one of my all-time favorites. 

Finally, the last game I’ll be covering today is one of the heaviest roll-and-writes I know of – Twilight Inscription. I’ll preface with I’ve only played Twilight Imperium once, and I don’t own many roll-and-writes, so I didn’t have many preconceptions coming into the game. I’ll be honest, when I first heard that Fantasy Flight was publishing a roll-and-write based on Twilight Imperium, I was skeptical of the concept at best. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I tried the final product, and outside of the factions, Twilight Inscription does not share most of the elements from Twilight Imperium, which allows the game to stand on its own and be played in a much more manageable 1-2 hours.

First off, I appreciate how much variety there is in the base game. The game comes with 24 different factions, each with their own special abilities ranging in complexity, as well as 32 player sheets (eight different ones for each of the four types). This allows for a fair number of differences between plays. While Twilight Inscription is certainty heavy on the roll-and-write scale, the rules are relatively straightforward. I hadn’t played the game in a while, but I still found it relatively easy to jump back into after a quick refresher on the rules which is a welcome considering that Twilight Imperium has multiple rule books and even a wiki site. In addition, the simultaneous player turns makes the game play quickly and scale easily for different player counts.

The one downside of this is that outside of the war mechanic, a couple of agenda votes, and racing to meet objectives, there is not much player interaction in the game, which is a shame because the player interaction is what makes Twilight Imperium so engaging. Therefore, I usually opt to play the game solo because there are only a handful of differences between the multiplayer game, and the solo mode is very easy to pilot. The only real downside I had with the solo mode is that it’s mostly just beat your own score, which I’m generally not a fan of in solo modes.

Finally, while I haven’t played the game enough times to reach a conclusion, it does feel like the industry sheet feels the strongest of the four types. It almost feels necessary to focus on the industry sheet early to increase your production income of trade goods and votes and more importantly, unlock more of the focus dice. While I’ve mainly focused on some combination of the Industry, Navigation, and Expansion during my playthroughs, I’m interested in trying a heavy Warfare strategy to see how it compares.

Overall, while I don’t typically lean towards roll-and-writes, I’m glad that I have this one in the collection. Twilight Inscription provides another option when I’m looking for something mid-weight, but different than my usual euros, and I’m looking forward to trying out more of the factions and playing around with different player sheet strategies.    

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s gaming highlights! I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the games I’ve mentioned, future content, or format in the comments section below. Happy gaming!