Viticulture Essential Edition

Components

A worker-placement game for 1–6 players ages 14 and up, playing in 45–90 minutes. The goal is to be the first to reach 20 victory points, representing your reputation as a vineyard owner.

Setup

1. 1Each player takes a vineyard mat and 3 field cards (max values 5, 6, and 7), placing them side by side with the field side up.
2. 2Shuffle the vine (green), wine order (purple), summer visitor (yellow), and winter visitor (blue) decks and place them in their spots on the board.
3. 3Randomly choose a first player, then deal everyone one red card and one blue card. The red card grants 2 workers and starting cards (1 vine, 1 summer visitor, 1 wine order); the blue card grants 1 grande worker plus a choice between lira or extra worker, or a structure.
4. 4After all starting resources are collected, discard the red and blue cards — they are used only for setup.
5. 5Each player places their rooster token on the wake-up chart, their cork token on the 0 space of the victory point track, and their wine bottle token in the middle of the residual payment tracker.

The year — four seasons of worker placement

1. 1Each worker may be used only once per year. A worker placed in summer cannot be used again that winter.
2. 2On your turn, place 1 worker on an open action space for that season and you must take that action. You cannot take only the bonus without the action.
3. 3The number of open action spaces depends on player count — 2 players use only the left space, 3–4 players use the left and middle spaces, and 5–6 players use all three. You may claim them in any order.
4. 4If you have no more workers to place in summer or winter, or want to save them, you pass. Once you pass, you may place no more workers that season.
5. 5Fall has no worker placement. In wake-up order, everyone simply draws 1 summer or winter visitor card.

Spring — the wake-up chart

Starting with whoever holds the first-player token and proceeding clockwise, each player places their rooster on an open row (1–7) of the wake-up chart. That row number becomes this year's turn order (1 acts first), and it also grants an immediate bonus.

Planting, harvesting, and winemaking

1. 1With the summer 'plant a vine' action, play a vine card from your hand onto a field — an empty one, or on top of a card already planted there.
2. 2The combined value of all vines planted on a field may never exceed that field's maximum (5, 6, or 7). Some varieties also require a trellis or irrigation before they can be planted.
3. 3With the winter 'harvest one field' action, choose a field and total all red pips on its vine cards into 1 red grape token, and all white pips into 1 white grape token, both placed on the crush pad. The vine cards remain on the field.
4. 4A field can be harvested only once per year. If a token's value slot is already occupied, the new token moves down to the nearest open lower-value slot.
5. 5With the winter 'make up to two wine tokens' action, convert crush-pad grape tokens into cellar wine tokens. One red grape token becomes one red wine token of the same value, and likewise for white — you may not combine two same-color grape tokens into one.
6. 6Blush wine combines 1 red and 1 white token, summing their values (requires a medium cellar); sparkling wine combines 2 red and 1 white token, summing their values (requires a large cellar).

Structures and the grande worker

The grande worker acts just like a regular worker, except it may be placed on an action space even if other workers already fill it. Stacking it this way still takes the action, but gives no bonus from that space. Placed normally on an open bonus space, it grants the bonus just like a regular worker.

Filling wine orders and residual payments

1. 1With the winter 'fill 1 wine order' action, reveal a wine order card from your hand. It lists the wine types and minimum values required.
2. 2Discard cellar wine tokens that exactly match those requirements — a higher value than required is fine.
3. 3Once filled, gain the card's listed victory points, move your wine bottle token on the residual payment tracker forward by the card's lira value, then discard the card.
4. 4The residual tracker position never resets and accumulates; at each year's end you gain lira equal to that position (maximum £5).

Ending the game and winning

1. 1During year-end steps, every grape and wine token ages by +1, all workers return to their owners, players collect lira equal to their residual tracker position for each filled order, and the first-player token rotates one seat counter-clockwise.
2. 2When any player reaches 20 or more victory points, the game does not end immediately — it finishes after that year's remaining seasons (summer through winter) and the year-end steps are completed.
3. 3The player with the most victory points wins. Ties are broken, in order, by ① most lira, ② total value of wine in the cellar, ③ total value of grapes on the crush pad.

Early strategy

• Early wake-up slots (1–3) let you claim the action space you want first; late slots (5–7) grant cards, lira, or victory points. Read your opponents' vineyards to judge which matters more each spring.
• Medium and large cellars cost lira to build, but without them you cannot store wine above value 3 or 6 at all — which blocks high-value wine orders entirely. Investing early buys more aging time.
• Varieties that need a trellis or irrigation (Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and others) carry high values that translate well into points, but you must plan the build order before you can plant them.
• The grande worker is the only way to follow an opponent onto a popular action space they already claimed. It is worth giving up the bonus when the action itself is urgent.

Player-count scaling and the solo mode

A friendly variant restricts placing a worker on a bonus action space unless you can fully use that bonus (such as playing a second visitor card) or no other space remains open, reducing pure blocking plays.

The Essential Edition includes an official single-player Automa, designed by Morten Monrad Pedersen. Automa cards automatically fill action spaces each season to simulate an opponent, and you win if your victory points exceed the Automa's after 7 years. Five difficulty levels run from Very Easy to Very Hard, and a campaign mode links 8 challenges in sequence.

This guide covers the Essential Edition (2015). It layers the Grande Worker, the red/blue starting cards (Mamas and Papas), and the individual Fields cards — modules hand-picked from the Kickstarter-funded Tuscany expansion by designer Uwe Rosenberg — onto 2nd-edition Viticulture rules, rather than including the full Tuscany expansion (its seasonal board extension, extra visitors, and more).

Frequently confused rules

History and editions

Viticulture was designed by Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone and first released via Kickstarter in 2013. The Tuscany expansion was also Kickstarter-funded, and the 2015 Essential Edition combines 2nd-edition rules with select Tuscany modules in a single box. English Wikipedia notes that by 2018 the game ranked in the top 25 of all games on BoardGameGeek.

The official solo Automa was designed by Morten Monrad Pedersen and is printed as a dedicated ruleset at the back of the Essential Edition rulebook. As of 2026-10-11 the catalog lists a BGG average weight of 2.9 and an overall BGG rank of 44.

Namuwiki's Korea Boardgames article lists 'Viticulture' only within that distributor's alphabetical catalog, suggesting the title reached Korea at some point, but no dedicated Korean rulebook or retail product page was confirmed during this research. A search for a dedicated Namuwiki article also found none (2026-10-11).