Vineyard might have the strangest theme mismatch of any game I played in 2025. At first glance, it looks like a game where rival winemakers compete to export the best merlot or similar wine. But if you look closer, you find that all the players actually own the same vineyard. Even stranger, the vineyard isn’t owned by the players at all. It is owned by four non-player characters called friends. You all share control of these friends to do the work. The goal is to win acclaim for wine that everyone helped make together. Players can upgrade actions for different friends, making each friend better at certain tasks, but only when a specific player helps them.

I usually do not worry too much about how well a game’s theme fits its rules. However, Vineyard’s mechanics feel more like a game about the Cold War than a pleasant game about crushing grapes. This confused me every time I set it up. It was definitely not a good first impression. I have changed my mind about games with weird themes before, so I wondered if Vineyard could do the same.

Vineyard is a worker-movement game for 1 to 4 players. A game usually takes about 60 minutes to play.

Gameplay Overview

Vineyard is a game about making wine. On your turn, you play one card from your hand into an open column on your player board. Each column corresponds to one of the four friends working in the vineyard. You move the relevant friend to the action space shown on the card. Then you take that action.

Five of the seven actions in the game relate directly to making wine. These include harvesting and cultivating grapes, making and aging wine, and loading aged wine barrels onto a truck. Each time you take one of these actions, you place some of your heart tokens on the output of that action. As wine moves further along in the production process, more hearts accumulate. You finally score points when the wine is loaded onto a truck.

The other two actions are more administrative. The Greet action lets you take a visitor card and get its one-time benefits. The Paperwork action lets you pick up all your previously played cards for a reward. You can then spend your money on upgrades. The columns on your player board can be upgraded to make a specific action stronger when you use a specific friend. A random shop of action cards lets you swap out your initial cards for more powerful ones. These new cards might let you take multiple actions in a turn or gain extra benefits.

The game ends once three trucks have been fully loaded with wine. The player with the most points wins.

Game Experience

On paper, Vineyard has some good ideas. Chaining different action cards to different friends to make your actions efficient is a neat puzzle. There is also a semi-cooperative element that could add some spice. You can use the work of other players for your own benefit, but that player will also get some benefits when the wine is finally loaded. The action upgrades also push players into their own play styles, leading to more asymmetry as the game goes on. Unfortunately, Vineyard is a drag to actually play. None of its elements feel as interesting as they should. The overall experience is less than the sum of its already underwhelming parts.

The card play, for example, never leads to interesting decisions. You are occasionally stopped by the bad placement of a friend at a specific action, but you can almost always do what you want with only a minor inconvenience. It lacks the tension of a good worker placement game. It also does not provide the brain-teasing pleasure of a deep management game.

Your available actions are also bland. Every wine-making action provides similar amounts of points in the end. This makes each one feel indistinguishable from the others. Actions feel the same without the satisfaction of a clever play. This turns the whole procedure into a chore rather than a challenge. While players are theoretically helping each other by using grapes or wines in their actions, this feels less like cooperation and more like accidental arbitrage. I never helped another player unless I had no other option. Players never felt compelled to take actions that would encourage me to help them.

Despite moving along at a reasonable speed, Vineyard feels much longer than it is due to its lack of texture. Turns never feel particularly good or bad. The game does not change much due to its enforced three-part structure. After each truck is fully loaded, new wine barrels and visitor cards are drawn from a different deck. These have more stringent requirements and better rewards. The game gets harder as players get stronger, but it does not get much more complex. This makes the game feel stagnant.

Final Thoughts

My thoughts on Vineyard can be fully captured by a resigned shrug and the word “Meh.” Nothing about the game is broken or unbalanced. It certainly looks nice on the table. However, at no point did I ever feel excited, tense, or even angry. My friends and I simply sat at a table for an hour moving pieces. By the end, we were already forgetting this game existed.

Final Score: 2.5 Stars – A technically competent game that I do not ever see myself wanting to play.

Hits:
• Good production values
• Some theoretically interesting mechanisms

Misses:
• Actions are repetitive and uninteresting
• Game feels longer than it is
• No sense of tension or challenge
• Lack of replay value