Old-world Tuscany awaits your winemaking skill and strategic cunning. You'll plant vines, harvest grapes, age wines, and fill merchant orders to create the greatest winery in Italy!
Viticulture is a worker-placement strategy game. The Essential Edition includes the second edition of Viticulture along with several elements from the original Tuscany expansion pack, hand-picked by famed designer Uwe Rosenberg.
Players allocate workers and play visitors to complete various tasks throughout the seasons (each worker is placed on one action each year). In the spring, players decide the schedule their workers will follow. An early rise gives the player the chance to act first; however, offering workers a later wake-up time gives you more valuable bonuses. In the summer, players place workers on action spaces to plant vines and build structures that help advance that player's vineyard. In the fall, players invite visitors to help their workers. In the winter, players place workers on action spaces to harvest grapes, make wine, and fill orders.
This is basically a more robust version of Viticulture without adding the complexity of some of the "heavier Tuscany expansions. Mamas & Papas gives players different starting resources. Field cards let you sell fields you're not using for an influx of money. A larger set of visitor cards offer a lot more variety, and we've selected only the most balanced cards so there's never a bad draw.
These are the expansions we always play with“they no longer feel like expansions. So they're now included in the core game of Viticulture.
