Wine & Cheese BGG ↗

Personal Review

Both players are competing to be the best Wine & Cheese producer in Burgundy over 2 years of play. Knizia style scoring: wine and cheese score separately and the lower value is your score. The phases are separated into seasons and the whole year repeats once. It goes roughly like this: * Spring/Fall: Collect resources by sending workers to the fields or returning them from the fields * Spring/Fall: Use resources to produce cheese/wine & sell cheese/wine * Spring/Fall: stash a few resources, the rest go bad * Summer/Winter: Age cheese/wine * Repeat… But because there are some differences between the first and second half of the year… the manual is detailed. The interesting push pull is that there are 2 workers of each color, one for each player and they are initially placed randomly on the “houses” which tell you how each worker will collect resources: there are patterns on the house cards (which are from a small set and differ each game a little bit). Workers either collect resources when their pattern overlaps other workers on the fields or they collect resources by working alone and their pattern covers empty slots. Players take resource turns in a 1-2-2-2-1 alternating pattern. So the first player selects a worker. Then the second player must place their worker of the same color (they may be in a different house so have a different collection pattern) and then chooses another color to place, then the first player must place the worker of that color and so on until all workers are placed. This is repeated when workers return in the fall… To produce goods there are cards that have little resource icons on it and the resources need to be placed on them. In order to sell for gold (more points than silver), wine and cheese have to be aged properly, this happens naturally in summer and winter but it can also be sped up or slowed down by spending certain resources. There is some chaining with bonusses going on when producing or selling resources. Also resource cards come in two types: action cards have potential special bonusses associated with them while “Genuss” cards need to be aged in pairs of both a cheese and a wine for extra points. It’s quite intricate but one quickly gets the hang of it. Luckily it is a two player only game because I think this can get quite thinky. Maybe less so when you only have your own cards and resources to look at and are not trying to work both sides of the board. I hope the rules have good retention: while the manual is a wall of text, I think it is quite teachable. There is nothing overly complicated to teach, just a lot of little details. The shared worker space about the resources give some interaction, while the other phases are mostly “I am now doing my own thing”. The resource phases are about half the game. Game logistics are great: setup is fast, the box is very well organized with 4 little cardboard boxes containing everything but the board and serving as container for the resources during play. There is nothing fiddly with this game, there are some really well thought out ways to track certain things: spots for cards you sold for gold and silver are separated. The workers get little benches to wait on in the houses that turn into hats on the fields allowing you to track which pattern you are actually executing. The whole sequence with the worker colors is very neat I think and makes for some good decisions. The way resources are tracked just works really well. There is nothing super-new or innovative except maybe the resource gathering. At its heart the game is a resource conversion engine like so many other games out there. But it is one that seems very well thought out, and it is designed for a thinky 2 player experience that lasts for a while like good wine and cheese do… the theme is somewhat present I just think they might have gone the extra few steps of naming the wines and cheeses. Burgundy has such a wealth of famous products… why not add that? It would have brought home the theme so much more. Maybe I’ll write my own names on the cards… (someone probably wanted to avoid all in-game text. Meh)