Viticulture: Visit from the Rhine Valley

This is a wonderful addition to the game! It offers an alternative set of visitor cards and they eliminate any extra points and focuses on modifying your wine production. What this leads to is a much more strategy focused game. Once you have played a bunch of Viticulture this is a great way to try a new take on the game. It is surprising how this little change makes the game feel very different. This is best for experienced players and I would stay with the original set of visitors for newbies. If you're a Viticulture fanatic, this is a no brainier!

I love the Viticulture game and expansions, but it has always been hard for me to reconcile the fact that I could run my winery as a tourist stop, and win. I've lost many games where my opponents simply would use the visitor cards to generate their VPs, while I focus on production and completion of Order cards. All of that said... I love this expansion, as it replaces the Summer and Winter Visitor cards with new visitors that force the focus back to wine production and Order cards as your primary means of winning. It fits my personal play style a little better, as I really enjoy that engine building mechanic in Viticulture.

These cards replace the summer and winter visitors cards that come with the game. These new cards focus players’ efforts on wine production rather than point salad. A great improvement that elevates Viticulture from an 8 to a 10!

If you play the base game long enough, this expansion is well worth it. It changes your strategy enough that you have to learn to play different and not rely on the extra victory points that the standard visitors give you! If you want a wild time, shuffle them in together for a swingy game with huge piles of cards!

I have always found Viticulture a bit frustrating of a game - the multiple decks of cards are one of my least favorite parts of it. I want to be making crunchy worker-placement decisions, but most games devolve into a random draw card game. This expansion fixes that *a bit* by making the cards less broken and random. But cardplay still feels overpowered and out of place in the game.

This has become the standard cards we use (they are designed to replace, not augment, the visitor cards that come in the game). The effects are more interesting and seem to make for more thoughtful choices than the originals or the others from expansions.

One of my major "gripes" about the game used to be the VP surges that would occur from the luck-of-the-draw with the Summer/Winter Visitors. While any victory is satisfying, a victory by "cards" just feels cheap and not the overall intent of this game... is it? In just the first game my wife and I played using these new cards I could FEEL the difference! We stayed relatively close to each other in VP, which made sense since we developed our engines at about the same pace. Previous games, WITHOUT this expansion, there would always be a visible difference in VP early to mid-game … as someone who got 2+ lucky draws from the visitor decks had surged ahead by 6-10+ VP!! Couple that with observing them having no vines in their field, no grapes on their pad and no wines in their cellar and you have to wonder... what IS the point of the game if someone can win without ever really putting in any effort to build up a wine making process? I LOVE THIS EXPANSION!

These are intended to be used in place of the cards in the base game to add some variety. Then you can switch back and forth for added replay-ability.