Viticulture World Cooperative Expansion Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Viticulture World, the new cooperative expansion published by Stonemaier Games. In Viticulture World, players must work together to overcome each of the game's seven different scenario goals.

For my money, Viticulture is the prototypical worker placement game in the board gaming hobby. (With its essential Tuscany expansion, of course.) No other game before or since has so simply laid out the “go somewhere to do something, but you might not have room if others go their first” concept. It remains one of the staples in my gaming library and is still played fairly frequently despite its age.

So when the new expansion arrived at Board Game Quest Headquarters, I was one of the first members of the staff to claim the assignment. (I did have to outduel several other writers to officially earn the job. However, most of them are lightweights, so it wasn’t a big deal.) The new release is called Viticulture World: Cooperative Expansion and, if that wasn’t explicit enough, it converts the standard game into a team-based endeavor where all the players work together to battle an evil wine sorcerer. (I’m pretty sure that’s the theme. I only skimmed the flavor text.)

Viticulture World: Cooperative Expansion is designed by Mihir Shah and Francesco Testini and plays in about 90 minutes for 1-6 winemakers.

While some of the components contained in Viticulture World can be used in the original game (the Mamas and Papas cards can be shuffled in and even offer some variety in terms of gender designation for the starting couples), the bulk of the components included are only compatible with the new cooperative aspect of the game. For those of you wondering how the original Viticulture plays I won’t be spending a whole lot of time