Wine Cellar

Wine Cellar is a very pretty game. It is about collecting bottles of wine. Throughout the game you will collect a stack of 8 bottles, and at the end of the game you score points to see who wins. 

You start the game with a hand of 8 cards. You use them for simultaneous bidding, and the number in the top left corner is the strength of your card. Every round there will be a number of cards at the centre of the table equal to the number of players, and everyone will get to claim one. The order in which you claim these cards is determined by blind bidding. Everyone plays a card from hand at the same time. Whoever has the highest number goes first. After all the cards from the current round are claimed, those cards played from hand become the cards for the next round. 

As you collect bottles of wine, you must place them horizontally and stack them like this. A new bottle can be added at the top of the stack or at the bottom, but never inserted in the middle. When the game ends, you score every bottle based on those numbers on the bottle label. For the first bottle at the top, you score the first number. In this example above, only 1 point. For the second bottle, you score the second number (in this example, an 8), and so on. If you look at this photo above, I score the full 8 points for every bottle except for the first and third. Theme-wise this means I have a pretty good collection of wine and if I drink these in this order, they would have aged almost perfectly by the time I get to each bottle. 

During game setup you draw two client cards and must pick one. They give you bonus points based on wine type and origin country. These are additional factors to consider when you pick wine. 

If you look at those labels, these are all real wines.

Even the card back is very nice.

The core mechanism is simple. Every round you analyse which cards are most helpful to you. If any is particularly important, you need to consider playing a high card to try to secure it. At the same time you should also watch which kind of wines your opponents are trying to collect. If the one you want is not attractive to any of them, you might not need to play a high card. If you happen to hold in hand a wine which is very good for you, you can deliberately plan to play it one round, then win it the next. When stacking your bottles, my gut feel is it is better to start in the middle, so that you can add bottles to either the top or the bottom throughout the game. This gives you a bit more flexibility. I might be making the game sound rather complex, with so many aspects to consider, but this really is a simple game. It works pretty well whether you go to these lengths to do your analysis. You can definitely play it in a relaxed manner. That was what I did. This works very well as a casual game. You can easily teach non-gamers to play. For gamers this is a decent filler.