Viticulture 4+

Few little bugs keep cropping up. AI players seem to stall at times when it’s their turn. Shutting down the game, restarting and rejoining can sometimes rectify this. Pretty good implementation all the same. 👍🏼

Even as someone who knows the board game well, this game is hard to parse in action. You’ll ‘commit your turn’ several times each move, instead of, for example, ‘commit action’ and then ‘commit turn’ to finalise. Every selection has you press another button to confirm. You never know if you’re ending your move. When multiple actions occur on a placement or card, the app gives no clue that you’re making your first selection of two. Everything uses the same interstitial animations in succession, and it feels clumsy, it would be more friendly to aggregate more info on each transition, rather than using loads in rapid succession. Also, the AI updates pass by quickly, so you constantly have to watch closely and then interpret what they just did for yourself or go look at history, rather than the game summarising it for you. Worst for me are the AI wine and card displays, which layer over other panels and become unreadable for the short time they’re visible.
Lots of work to do, it’s playable but very clumsy at present.

Just played a my first games. Played once with the base game and once with the Tuscany expansion.

With the base game, I had the issue others reported with being unable to plant grapes that I did have the relevant buildings for. However, I was able to get around this by undoing my turn about 4 times.

The bug/flaw that I was unable to resolve was with the special workers introduced in Tuscany. The game seems to have no way to select them at the right time, meaning that I missed out on the bonuses and actively helped the opponent when I didn’t mean to.