Vinhos

The Game

Vinhos (which means "wines" in Portugese), is one of Vital Lacerda's earliest designs. He is a popular game designer from Portugal and he specialises in heavy Eurogames. The version of Vinhos I played was the 2010 first edition. In 2016 a deluxe edition was published and it was slightly different from the first edition. 

This is the main game board. You play business owners producing and selling wine. Your actions are all related to making wine, submitting them to fairs, and selling them to earn money and fame. 

Every player has a player board, with enough space for four estates. The three slots in the upper half of an estate are for vineyards and wineries, and the lower half is its storage yard. The storage yard initially only stores up to two years' worth of production. It can be upgraded to a cellar to store up to four years' worth of production. Having a proper cellar improves the wine quality too. 

These nine spaces at the centre of the board indicate the nine types of actions you get to perform. To perform an action, simply move your pawn to the corresponding space. Normally your pawn may only move 1 step (including diagonally). If you move further than that, you pay $1. If you go to space with other pawns, you pay $1 to each owner of these pawns. 

This chart is also a countdown timer. You only play 6 rounds. Notice there are six spaces with circles numbered 1 and 2. These indicate the two actions you get to perform every round. By default you only have 12 actions in the whole game. There is a way to perform additional actions. The wooden pawn is the progress marker. If your pawn lands in the same space as the wooden pawn, you pay $1 to the bank. 

This is a map of Portugal, with 8 regions. With 3 players, one region is out of play. You buy vineyards from the regions. Vineyards produce either red wine or white wine. You may only buy the topmost vineyard of a stack. Vineyards from each region come with a different special power. 

This section of the board is the bank. On the left you have your account balance. On the right is a status indicating whether you are taking a loan and need to pay interest every round, or you have a fixed deposit and will earn interest every round. When you sell wine, you don't receive cash. The money goes to your bank account first. You have to visit the bank to withdraw cash. In the 2016 deluxe version this mechanism is removed. Money is very tight in Vinhos. You must spend carefully. At game end, your account balance may give you victory points. See the numbers on the white shields. 

These three rows represent the three managers of the wine fair. The fair is held three times throughout the game. When you submit a wine for the fair, if it meets the criteria set by the managers, you get to place your barrels in the rows corresponding to the criteria you meet. Barrels here can be used in two ways. Firstly, you may spend wine to perform an extra action. Secondly, you may lock a barrel to score points. White shields mean points scored at game end, while red shields mean points scored immediately. 

The table on the left is for exporting wine. The numbers in the able specify the wine quality required. The numbers on the right are points you score immediately when you export. The numbers at the top are scored at game end, depending on who has the most barrels in the column. 

The four stacks of tiles on the right are the wine experts. They give you various special abilities, e.g. moving your pawn without needing to pay. They can also increase your fame level at fairs. 

My estate at the top left has one vineyard and two wineries, and both wineries are manned. I have also built a cellar, so I can store wine for as long as four rounds. My second estate at the top right is new. I only have one vineyard, and it is from a different region from the first estate. The border colour of the vineyard is different from that in the first estate. 

The Play

I did a 3-player game with Allen and Han. Han had played the deluxe version before, while Allen and I were new. 

One thing we felt throughout the game was the scarcity of actions. There were many things we could do and wanted to do, but we didn't have enough actions, and we didn't have enough money either. So we had to choose. We had to let go of some of our wishes. Every Euro was precious. We were reluctant to give even 1 Euro to another guy for moving our pawn to an occupied action space. We had to do forward planning, thinking a few steps ahead, because it helped control money spent on moving pawns. We tried to anticipate what others would do. We tried to plan the movement of our pawns to minimise skipping and running into other pawns. 

The fairs are designed to encourage competition, and all of us spent effort jostling for fame. The fame level is not reset between fairs, so if you grab an early lead, you may be able to maintain that lead for the rest of the game. Points to be gained at the fairs keep increasing, so the fairs are hard to resist. I didn't do very well at the fairs, and by the third one, I decided to give up. I didn't even submit a wine, because I saved my wines for other scoring opportunities and actions.  At the time I considered the victory point difference between first and last positioned players at the third fair. It was 10VP, not insignificant, but if it was going to take so many actions for me to try to catch up, it might not be worthwhile. 

What I decided to focus on instead was export. I produced high quality wines for export, which was a direct way of scoring points. This turned out to be a more efficient way of gaining points for me. Allen and Han later did come to compete, but they didn't invest as much effort. I was a little surprised at the final scoring to find that I won, because I had been struggling with the fairs throughout the game. I had thought I did poorly overall. The exports helped me tremendously. 

The three fairs in the game are held after Round 3, 5 and 6, which means you have less and less time to prepare for each subsequent fair. Now it was the end of Round 5, i.e. we were preparing for the second fair. The wooden pawn was in the second row, third column. 

This was Han's player board. He owned four estates! He produced a lot of wine. However he said his problem was they were mostly of low quality. 

This was Allen's player board. Both he and I owned fewer estates and didn't produce as much as Han. However we had spent more effort on increasing quality. Allen had cellars at both his estates. He also had two wineries at both. 

The Thoughts

Vinhos is a development game. It is satisfying to gradually build your own wine business. There is a strong feeling of scarcity in this game, in terms of both actions and money. So many things you want to do, but so little time. This is a good sign. There are difficult decisions to make - meaningful decisions. You really have to think carefully about how you spend every action and every cent. This is an open information game, so things can slow down sometimes due to analysis paralysis. Try not to take too long on your turn. Do your planning on other players' turns. Anyhow, you do need to plan a few turns ahead.