Viticulture Bordeaux Expansion – Gold Medal Vintage
Viticulture Essential Edition (2015), Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone’s vineyard themed worker placement game with gorgeous illustrations by a pre-Wingspan Beth Sobel was my ‘gateway game’ into both modern boardgaming and solo boardgaming. By late 2019 I had accepted the reality that neither of my languishing copies of Settlers of Catan nor Game of Thrones: The Board Game were making it out of single digits in terms of playcount – the problem wasn’t me though, it was everyone around me! At some point I stumbled across a list of excellent games to play on your lonesome, likely the 2020 People’s Choice Top 200 Solo Games list put together by Kevine Erskine on BGG – and for whatever reason Viticulture Essential Edition jumped out, likely a combination of the art, availability and the consensus that the ‘automa’ system was one of the best things to happen to solo boardgaming in some time. Vitculture Essential Edition arrived on my doorstep in January of 2020, just in time for the birth of my second son four weeks later and the lengthy period of COVID-19 shutdowns which kicked off by the end of March, forcing many boardgamers around the world to resort to methods like ‘Automa decks’, ‘Beat Your Own Score’ or online implementations to get their tabletop fix.
I played Viticulture many times over those next six months, often with a theme-adjacent snifter of port as I learned what strategies were most reliable, what moves were almost scripted and that some of the best ways to win had very little to do with the business of making and selling wine. As my first modern euro game, it was that ‘a-ha’ moment many people who end up diving into the hobby remember – the moment when something clicks and you think “I didn’t know boardgames could be like this…”. Aside from the puzzle aspect, I loved how quickly the game played solo, how easy it was to setup and reset for another round. But by the end of August 2020, I’d stopped playing Viticulture. Like many budding boardgamers, my shelves quickly outgrew my ability to get games played and in 2024, years of gathering dust on a shelf suggested it was time to say goodbye to my first love. I sold off my entire Viticulture collection and presumed that was the end of that. And it was, until news of the Bordeaux expansion hit my inbox. I can’t imagine I’m the first person to feel like they’ve ‘outgrown’ a game, but Viticulture had never quite left my mind completely, so an offer to review this expansion meant I actually went out and repurchased the base game, alongside the two card expansion packs; Moor Visitors and Visit from the Rhine Valley.
Looking less like a wine crate and more like a bougie pizza box, Viticulture: Bordeaux is a glorified map expansion featuring a few cubes in player colours, a unique Automa deck and a double sided board, one side of which features the new Bordeaux action spaces and layout with art by Sylvain Leroy, while the reverse is a slightly adjusted map for the base Viticulture that adds some card spaces to mitigate concerns around card randomness. Keeping the base game board as part of Bordeaux also ensures the expansion can still fit in the box without issue, although the suggestion to recycle the original board is one I feel conflicted over, and not only because the colour on the new board isn’t quite as vivid as the OG.
One only need glance at my Ticket to Ride, Concordia or Nucleum collections to see how much of a sucker I am for alternate boards (if Rio Grande Games would like to hook me up with a complete Power Grid collection, DM me for the address!). Jamey Stegmaier, owner of Stonemaier Games designer of Viticulture, Scythe, Vantage and all-around publisher/nice guy lays out his intentions for Bordeaux on the reverse of the rulebook – namely to speed the early game up, mitigate the randomness of card draws, remove some of the popular scripted actions and realign winning gameplay to focus on making wine. If I had to guess, I’d say Jamey spent some time looking at many of the most commonly expressed concerns with the game and set about fixing them. After half a dozen games using variations of the Visitor decks (the base game including the Moor Visitors expansion and the standalone Rhine Valley expansion), I’ve come away thinking that Stegmaier has almost universally hit these goals and in doing so has turned Bordeaux into one of those rare ‘essential’ expansions.
A game of Viticulture Bordeaux takes place across several years in a vineyard, each divided into Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. Each season has unique action spaces which are claimed by placing a worker down on an empty space and taking the associated action, with many spaces featuring a bonus for those who arrive first or last in a high player count game, as the number of available spaces scales with player count; at 1-2 players, a single space is up for grabs, at 3-4 there are two and with 5-6, each action has three open spaces. Originated by Splotter Spellen’s Bus, the worker placement mechanism in Viticulture introduces a nice amount of tension – once an action space is occupied, another player either cannot take that action at all, or must take a less efficient version of it. The turn order tension this introduces is amped up by the ‘Wake-Up Chart’, which ties bonuses granted each Season to turn order, some of which are not only powerful but also benefit every player in the game. Cards also play a huge part in Viticulture, with critiques about the randomness of the games four decks (Vines, Orders, Summer Visitors, Winter Visitors) leading to many house rules like ‘draw two keep one’ now officially instituted on the Boardeaux board, at least for Vines and Orders – both types of Visitor cards are still top-deck city, but there are many more opportunities to draw cards on the Boardeaux board.
Certain worker placement games can feel suffocating, but Viticulture doesn’t turn the screws anywhere near as much as something like Agricola or Cooper Island. In fact, one of the first things that jumps out about Bordeaux is the way it manages to feel ‘looser’ than the base game due to the expanded number of actions available on the board. However, this is also in conjunction with the increased focus on winemaking as a method of gaining Victory Points – a chief complaint about Viticulture Essential Edition was all too often the winning player would barely make wine at all, a result of actions like ‘Give A Tour’ and many of the Summer and Winter Visitor cards rewarding VP for things that didn’t result in wine being delivered to thirsty customers. This thematic disconnect led to the Visit from the Rhine Valley card expansion, which completely replaced the base Visitor decks and made sure every card somehow pushed players towards making and selling wine. Stegmaier made steps to push wine production in Bordeaux and as a result, the base game cards and the Moor Visitors add-on cards feel even more out of place in play. While it’s a viable way to play Bordeaux, I found I vastly preferred my plays using the Rhine Valley expansion which synergises well with every other adjustment made to the game.
A more subtle and yet hugely impactful change on the Boardeaux board are the ‘Expert Spaces’, which make use of the newly included cubes. By taking the ‘Hire an Expert’ action, a cube can be placed underneath any action on the board which will improve that action, but only for the player who owns the cube. Let’s take a look at the ‘Hire a Worker’ action, which remains as mandatory as ever – by getting an Expert cube on this Winter action space, the player can immediately take the hired worker and put them on a space back in Spring or Summer, time-space continuum be damned. In a worker placement game, workers are actions, and having more of them is always going to put players ahead of others. With most games running between 6-7 years, the ‘Hire A Worker’ space can only be visited three times, but the trade-off of three extra actions when doing so that compounds each other year with another worker is powerful. Many of the ‘Expert Spaces’ seem obvious in utility, while others seem to be for specific strategies or an outright waste of time. Reinvigorating Viticulture with a sense of discovery is perhaps the biggest achievement Stegmaier has made with these adjustments, as part of my falling-out with the game stemmed from a feeling that I’d seen everything it had to offer. Bordeaux strips the scripted moves and obvious actions from the base, encouraging players to explore the game and its theme more authentically than the ludonarrative dissonance the base game was plagued by. In every game I’ve played, the winner had been the most effective at making and selling wine, not something that could often be said in the past. Even better, leftover wine and coins at the end of the game now count for something, which is yet another way a successful winemaker unable to get that final order card out can still pip some points.
I hadn’t been getting much to my solo table of late, but the new Bordeaux Automa deck reminded me why Viticulture got such frequent play in my early hobby days. It’s as easy as ever to setup and run, basically due to it blocking spaces more than doing much of anything else. This isn’t a David Turczi flowchart level of solo complexity but nor is it as competitive as one. Occasionally it will wipe card markets or suffocate the Trade/Expert spaces, but it’s both scalable in difficulty and often random – some games the Automa will barely interfere, others you would swear it’s cold and calculating, blocking the exact spaces you were hoping for to get your wine engine pumping out what’s needed to fill an order that round. Best of all, once a player is familiar with how the deck operates, a game can be completed in as little as 20 minutes, perfect for a quick winddown game before bed. A Campaign series of challenges like those that emerged for Viticulture and its Tuscany expansion are hopefully forthcoming as a great way to get some extra plays out of the system.
It’s been an exceedingly pleasant experience to revisit Viticulture by way of the Bordeaux expansion, which vastly improves the game experience and aligns it more closely to the theme. In fact, the Viticulture: Essential Edition now feels like a bit of a misnomer, because going forward Bordeaux is going to be considered an essential addition by this reviewer (suck it Tuscany!). I can foresee a future where Stegmaier folds Bordeaux into the base game and makes the Essential subtitle feel earned again, but that’s not best business practice now is it? Rarely does a designer revisit their earlier work in such a way without making it a full-blown reimplementation/repurchase, but it’s something I’d like to see happen more, especially for such popular titles. Designers, much like wine, improve and mature over time. What once seemed an insurmountable task – fixing the numerous problems both fans and detractors saw in Viticulture – has been achieved here. Bordeaux makes the 2026 vintage of Viticulture a title worth discovering and revisiting.
