Wine Cellar
We played a fine “vintage game” on Saturday, a gift from Dirk’s parents. Wine Cellar is a drinking game, basically an adult version of Candyland combined with Trivial Pursuit about wine. It was created in 1971 by the California Wine Advisory board, in the era before California wines had won any major tastings, and the whole concept of wine-making in California really needed some advertizing and support.
Our edition is well-used, I might add - D's parents lived in California in the early 70's and were happy to get this kind of education, but they feel that it's our turn to learn about Wine. Wine is a living beverage, you know. It comes with a booklet (with an introduction by Vincent Price) with all kinds of information... Wine is a natural beverage because it makes itself! The winemaker's job is to guide the process by which wine, a living thing, matures. My default trivia answer all night was "because wine is a living thing!!"
In my search for images I found a couple of copies of “Wine Cellar” for sale on eBay, both used and sealed, but there was no indication that anyone on the internet has actually played this game, to provide any feedback, so here you have my drunken-biased review.
The game:
First, open 2-4 bottles of wine. Then, you roll a die and take steps along a windy track covering a map of California, landing on a space with one of four markings: a dot (blank), some wine ("take a sip from your glass"), some grapes (answer a trivia question) or a church (an action/challenge card), on your way to particular "wine regions", or special track spaces marked by a barrel and a name ("Napa", "Sonoma", ... ). From each region, collect a token symbolizing a bottle of that local varietal for your cellar, which is a card listing 15 bottles to be collected. Fill up your card, and win.
We found it to be lacking in some key mechanics - the kind of things that today’s board game nerd desperately needs to know weren’t mentioned at all in the rules… for example, when exactly does one take a bottle of Napa wine for your cellar - when you roll the dice just right to exactly land on the space with the barrel labeled “Napa”? Or you just roll higher, and collect when you cross over the barrel labeled “Napa”? Or maybe you can roll higher but you're supposed to end your turn sitting on the "Napa" barrel?
Also, although the trivia aspect of the game was entertaining, it lacked consequences. What happens if you guess your question wrong? You “take a sip” of your wine. What do you get if you get your question right? Um. You get to, well, not drink wine - congratulations! Wasn’t that fun? I think Trivial pursuit had it right, in that you had to answer questions right to collect your tokens. Or at least roll again if you got your question right.
We were playing with six people instead of the designed setup for four, so it’s not entirely surprising that we cycled all the way through the stack of trivia cards and all the way through the stack of action cards by about halfway through the game. We didn’t loop again, but that was primarily because we turbo-charged it. We realized about 1/3 of the way through (in terms of point acquisition) that we’d been playing for a long time, and weren’t getting very far very fast. ~170-spot track, some loops of which must be done twice, with a single d6, means the game takes 50-60 turns; we upgraded to 2-d6 so as to get on with it, but then, given our interpretation that you collect a bottle just passing over the barrel indicating the region, meant that one could collect up to three bottles on one turn if the winds were right. That was a bit much, too.
I’d say a large part of our good experience hinged on having chosen a good “Vintner” (the person in charge of applying the rules) who didn’t let the game mechanics get us down, and declared “socials” as necessary to keep the wine flowing. We tended to be board game nerds, so it’s a good thing our Vintner was treating it like a drinking game.
In short, we enjoyed the game, we’d play it again (sometime after we recover) but we’d have a modified rule system.
Anyway, if you want to come over and help us test-drive the new rules, give a shout!
Our edition is well-used, I might add - D's parents lived in California in the early 70's and were happy to get this kind of education, but they feel that it's our turn to learn about Wine. Wine is a living beverage, you know. It comes with a booklet (with an introduction by Vincent Price) with all kinds of information... Wine is a natural beverage because it makes itself! The winemaker's job is to guide the process by which wine, a living thing, matures. My default trivia answer all night was "because wine is a living thing!!"
In my search for images I found a couple of copies of “Wine Cellar” for sale on eBay, both used and sealed, but there was no indication that anyone on the internet has actually played this game, to provide any feedback, so here you have my drunken-biased review.
The game:
First, open 2-4 bottles of wine. Then, you roll a die and take steps along a windy track covering a map of California, landing on a space with one of four markings: a dot (blank), some wine ("take a sip from your glass"), some grapes (answer a trivia question) or a church (an action/challenge card), on your way to particular "wine regions", or special track spaces marked by a barrel and a name ("Napa", "Sonoma", ... ). From each region, collect a token symbolizing a bottle of that local varietal for your cellar, which is a card listing 15 bottles to be collected. Fill up your card, and win.
We found it to be lacking in some key mechanics - the kind of things that today’s board game nerd desperately needs to know weren’t mentioned at all in the rules… for example, when exactly does one take a bottle of Napa wine for your cellar - when you roll the dice just right to exactly land on the space with the barrel labeled “Napa”? Or you just roll higher, and collect when you cross over the barrel labeled “Napa”? Or maybe you can roll higher but you're supposed to end your turn sitting on the "Napa" barrel?
Also, although the trivia aspect of the game was entertaining, it lacked consequences. What happens if you guess your question wrong? You “take a sip” of your wine. What do you get if you get your question right? Um. You get to, well, not drink wine - congratulations! Wasn’t that fun? I think Trivial pursuit had it right, in that you had to answer questions right to collect your tokens. Or at least roll again if you got your question right.
We were playing with six people instead of the designed setup for four, so it’s not entirely surprising that we cycled all the way through the stack of trivia cards and all the way through the stack of action cards by about halfway through the game. We didn’t loop again, but that was primarily because we turbo-charged it. We realized about 1/3 of the way through (in terms of point acquisition) that we’d been playing for a long time, and weren’t getting very far very fast. ~170-spot track, some loops of which must be done twice, with a single d6, means the game takes 50-60 turns; we upgraded to 2-d6 so as to get on with it, but then, given our interpretation that you collect a bottle just passing over the barrel indicating the region, meant that one could collect up to three bottles on one turn if the winds were right. That was a bit much, too.
I’d say a large part of our good experience hinged on having chosen a good “Vintner” (the person in charge of applying the rules) who didn’t let the game mechanics get us down, and declared “socials” as necessary to keep the wine flowing. We tended to be board game nerds, so it’s a good thing our Vintner was treating it like a drinking game.
In short, we enjoyed the game, we’d play it again (sometime after we recover) but we’d have a modified rule system.
- Using 2 dice seemed almost essential, though maybe I'd reconsider that (see below).
- Roll doubles? Drink.
- Answer the question wrong? Drink. Drink a sip of the wine found to be the dud of the selection?
- Answer the question right? Roll again. (maybe, we didn’t try this, and this might negate the 2-dice thing) Drink? Finish your glass?
- To collect a bottle, you have to stop at the winery, you can’t just pass over and keep going... there's a little virtual wine-tasting going on at that barrel where your little game piece is savoring samples before he buys a bottle, you should stop.
- Should you have to answer a question to get your bottle? If so, would you then roll again?
- Would those “roll agains” mean we should scale back to the single-die version?
- In the current rules, you can’t collect two successive bottles from the same winery, i.e. get one bottle from Napa, and you have to go someplace else before you return for your second Napa bottle. I think we’d keep that constraint.
- If we did this extra questioning, we’d have to add some more question cards, because we were running low.
- I’d also want to add some more challenge cards. I could totally write better challenges than those schmoes. But we are so keeping the “compose a short poem about grapes” challenge.
- The actual “wine tasting” portion of the game was totally not prescribed - you had a glass of wine, and you took sips of it. A couple of the challenge cards involved comparing or identifying wines, but again, there was not a reward for performing your challenges well, and maybe there should be. But what?
Anyway, if you want to come over and help us test-drive the new rules, give a shout!