In addition to just hanging with family I haven’t seen in three years one of the joys going back east on vacation was seeing which games my nephew David had acquired and wanted to play.

On this trip he introduced me to Viticulture: The Essential Edition a game of growing grapes and making wine. Okay so it principally an economic game about a subject that I have low interest in, after all even before my no-alcohol medications I was a very spare drinker. The game mechanic is ‘worker placement’ so there’s no dice rolling in this game, only card draws for randomness, and very little direct action against the other players. All in all this sounded like a game that would have at most just a passing interest for me.

At my urging we played it nearly every single day I was there.

I still can’t break it down logically why this game worked so well for me, but it truly sang with fun. Perhaps it was the mechanic, ‘worker placement.’ I look at my collection and I see that I have no game that use that mechanism as their core play. Perhaps it was the simplicity of the game play without degrading the game’s reply value. Whatever the reason I really enjoyed Viticulture and I am thinking about introducing it to my friends, though I suspect except for one it is really not their gaming style.

It has also gotten me more interested in the whole ‘worker placement’ game mechanic. I shall have to look up more games with this and give them a try. Perhaps last month I discovered a whole new world.