Makes sense to have individual threads, yep.
Viticulture is at the top of my wishlist, so many reviewers seem to think it’s the best out there. Theme and type of game are both something I want, but if anyone has real experience with it and the hype isn’t entirely right, please let us know!
I think the regulars here knows of my strong distaste towards Stegmaier’s games (except for Scythe). Viticulture ranks very very low to me.
I still think that Quinns is bang on in his old written review - Keyflower and Rosenberg’s bucolic games are far better.
With 2 caveats listed below, I still think the best “contract-fulfillment worker-placement” game is Lords of Waterdeep
Caveat 1: theme? what theme? Oh, yeah, right, we’re “lords” and the board depicts “Waterdeep”. Cubes… cubes are adventurers
Caveat 2: oh man, do I have a shelf of opportunity that might turn up a better contract-fulfillment WP game
EDIT: strangely, it’s not as numerous a category as I expected
May I recommend Yokohama to you?
I’ve played Yokohama once. I’ll admit that I went into it like I go into nearly all euro-style games: looking for efficiencies. I found that in Yokohama, it’s less about efficiency and more about 4-dimensional thinking – finding the right timing to execute the 3 or 4 deep contingencies you’ve been building up. As a 2-player experience, I feel it would be a nice, tight, tactical puzzle. I played it at 3-players which meant the game state changed just a bit too much between my turns that it wasn’t satisfying.
As I sat there, playing Yokohama (not winning but not out of the game), I just thought about how much I’d prefer to play Istanbul instead. And I don’t know how much I would actually call Yokohama a “worker placement” game… it’s more of a worker-movement game, no?
That said: Yokohama is a fun time; I have Istanbul in my collection and I don’t feel I need to add Yokohama as well. If I didn’t have either, I would probably still buy Istanbul, but I am glad to have a friend who owns Yokohama so that I still have the chance to play it once in a while.
I think I’ve voiced my opinion before about this but I still think the theme for Waterdeep makes the most sense of almost any worker placement game. As a lord each worker you place is where you direct an agent to go and recruit someone or complete a task for your nefarious process. As it’s all in the shadows you can’t risk someone cottoning on so that’s why your agent can’t go there when someone else is. Makes sense why you don’t have an avatar and get to do multiple placements. I wonder if it’s seen as unthematic precisely because of the lack of in game avatar for the palyer 
I think the main reason the theme fails for me is the same reason the theme is 100% present: I see the adventurers are cubes and the cubes are just part of a resource conversion exercise. That is: they are pawns in my plans… and… well, that makes me feel 100% as though I’m a powerful figure manipulating things from afar… Still, it ends up being completely mechanical in practice, but I never feel like cackling with glee when my plans work out.
So I played a round on the Viticulture app tonight and can confirm it doesn’t suck but it is also far less exciting than so many other games I own. There is more mitigation for bad draws than I thought but it is entirely possible that someone who knows the decks very well can pull ahead easily.
As for Lords of Waterdeep, its been a long time since I played. In my particular circle of friends a lot more people would be put off by a fantasy theme than by wine making. in particular the less-gamers (I cannot call them non-gamers) would much rather be wine making than do odd jobs in a fantasy city.
My question just didn’t fit anywhere else in the other „permanent“ conversations and considering noone was posting about the game in question (Coimbra) elsewhere I thought this would be a thread for obscure and weird games that really weren’t worth a thread of their own. This really doesn’t have to be a catchall… I had kind of assumed this was the preferred structure in the old place. I cannot quite undo the posting of this at this point but it is very likely to vanish into obscurity anyway when those who prefer unique game dedicated threads make those instead.
Huh. I don’t know why I didn’t look at apps recently, but there is Viticulture and Indian Summer and Hive, and they’re a lot cheaper to try out than the board versions. Right…
Just a note of my having played apps for Cottage Garden and Indian Summer, I very much prefer Cottage Garden… but that may just be me having played Garden first. And yes apps are cheaper than paper games but can get expensive too… there are so many these days.
As far as threading goes, I would prefer a large catch-all thread. Usually when I visit the site, I’m checking in on the threads I’ve flagged as interesting to me, and I check for new threads only every once in a while.
With our reply and quote tools and modern searching, I can find everything I want that way. 
FWIW I find Viticulture inoffensively charming and the most tolerable of the Stegmeier games I’ve tried. I originally bought it because my friend who works in wine wanted to play some games and we tried and failed to play Vintage - not sure if it was the terrible rulebook, but it felt far too heavy for a corporate gift. So I thought Viticulture was a better entry level. It represents the theme nicely and feels like a good chilled Sunday Afternoon game rather than main feature of a gamesnight. When I just want to push things around a bit without thinking too much, I’ll pull out Viticulture (or Feast for Odin if we have more time). It’s on the ‘watching a garden grow’ end of the euro spectrum for me.
I’ve heard the extra card pack (the second one) drastically minimises the luck of the draw factor and concentrates on cards that enhance the mechanics rather than being massive game winning VP synergies in and of themselves… but I’m loathe to recommend a “buy the expansions and then it gets good” game. I have the pack, just waiting to be able to see friends again.
All in all, Viticulture is grand and all, but there’s no reason to buy it unless you love the theme. It’s just fine in a world of great games. It has a place in a large collection, but in a smaller collection where every game needs to pull it’s weight I wouldn’t bother.
I think both cottage garden and I think Indian summer apps might mitigate the problem I have with both of those games. Specifically I find making a “random” circle of polyominoes really annoying to do. I can never trust it’s properly random and the pieces are not nice to grab out of a bag.
Surely Uwe Rosenberg’s “At the gates of Loyang” counts, because it’s all about placing workers to get vegetables and fill contracts? I’ve always liked that slightly more than most of his other worker placement games.
I noticed Welcome to New Las Vegas on BGA yesterday. Has anyone played it? Having watched the video on the site, it seems very convoluted compared to the original Welcome To… which I love.
I haven’t played it but there was either mention in a SUSD video review or one of their podcasts earlier this year and I believe that they were split about it. I am not sure but I think one person was arguing this was too convoluted while the other said it was a new game and if you weren’t trying to wrap this into the original it was good.
However, just hearsay.
Addendum: I find the original game rulebook so convoluted it took me 2 attempts to figure out how it plays and same thing happened when I first taught it to my partner.
Thats odd - I thought it was very clear!
I have it, and have played it a few times solo. It’s a hard sell for others to give it a go because it’s soooo convoluted for a flip and write. It’s fine as a game, but it feels so cumbersome at times when the original was so streamlined and quick. I need to give it another go at some, but it doesn’t have the same pick up and play ease as your usual roll and writes have.
I’ll get out this old thread… so, I’ve been waffling about a couple of games.
Several online shops I frequent are doing Advent Calendars where each day another game is on offer. Most of these I am not interested in and some of the offers just aren’t all that good.
So Teotihuacan and Gugong for ~30€ each. (usual prices hover around 45-50€, one has to be a bit careful with offer prices because some games that get offered are at those low prices all the time, these two are genuinely cheaper than normal)
I played Gugong at Spiel a couple years back and we weren’t hugely impressed… but I guess it is a well-liked game and maybe I am overlooking something?
I have not played Teotihuacan but I’ve seen it mentioned here several times and I am wondering if the solo might be for me or if I already have similar games filling the same niche? How bad is setup time? Worry about setup is the major thing keeping me from buying it I admit…