Viticulture: Tuscany Essentials Edition Review

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Viticulture: Tuscany Essentials Edition Review

The Cardboard-Based Characteristics

Essential?

Viticulture Essentials Edition is one of my favourite worker placement games. It’s tight, requires planning and every game feels different. From the upgrades you build to the vines you plant and the cards you draw to the lovely wines you produce, Viticulture is a stunning game in many ways. Everyone says that even though this game is fantastic, the Tuscany expansion elevates it to a whole new level. Let’s see shall we? Welcome to the Rapid Review for Viticulture: Tuscany Essentials Edition.

Essentially, haha, you get three add-on modules to the Viticulture base game. A whole new double-sided board with new mechanics, a specialised worker module and an improved structures module. Each adds new ways to play and improves on the base game exponentially.

The Setup

The setup for each of these modules is a breeze, there are a small amount of components in this box but what they offer in return is bigger than their actual physical size. To set up the expanded board you just replace the base board with the extended one, take a few extra tokens and take note of a few new rules. Easy peezy.

For the workers’ module, you just pick two of the special worker cards and place a grey special worker on each, very simple indeed. For the structures upgrade you add a small side-board to your personal game board, shuffle the new deck of structures and place them on the board. As I said above, each of these modules is easily added and simply set up. The perfect combo for an expansion if you ask me.

Gameplay

The new board offers many improvements over the base game board. Firstly, the year now has worker placement spaces in all four seasons, with new actions and a new area control mechanism with bonuses. You can now sell wine tokens without orders and even do trades to get extra cash, cards or wine tokens. This board not only gives you more options and variable strategies but remains tight and still has players duelling over sought-after spaces on the board.

The special workers module gives you the option, for an extra Lira to train a special worker. These workers, of which you set two up at the start, offer special abilities on top of being a normal worker. Things like taking the action twice as the Mafioso or the Oracle, which allows you to draw one extra card and discard one, giving you more choice and control over your card draws. These workers just add a little sprinkling of spice when widening your workforce.

The structure add-on gives you exciting structure cards that only you can build, really tailoring your vineyard to your tastes and opening up the decision space in return. They can be additional worker placement spaces, ongoing benefits or even residual resources. All interesting stuff.

Components

As with most Stonemaier games, the component quality is top-notch. Chunky wood pieces, linen finish cards and sturdy boards make this expansion not only feel quality but also match the base game perfectly. There is not much else to say really, the quality is great and that is what I expected to be honest.

In Conclusion

I have to agree with the masses here, Tuscany Essentials Edition is, well, essential. Everything slides into the game without hassle, is set up easily and all adds to the vast tapestry of this game. Each module can be played by itself or they can all be chucked in together.

I don’t think I will ever play without any of the modules, they all add something and need hardly any extra rules. I even think, as a first-time Viticulturer, you will have no issues with the slightly elevated ruleset. You just get so much more bang for your buck.

Tuscany is amazing, that is all. If you are a fan of Viticulture and I promise, this is the last time for this joke, it’s just essential. Have fun making wine gamers, see you next time.

5 out of 5

5

You can buy Viticulture: Tuscany Essentials Edition for the Stonemaier store here.