Viticulture v38

★★★★★

Jon Hartley

Viticulture is a great game, the app is great, too.

★★★★

Shoitaan Choudhury

Updated 21/8/20: The game has had several quality of life patches that make the experience monumentally better. The bugs/crashes are non-existent and the game speed vs AI is great. The animations have been sped up a lot making the game a better experience overall. Looking forward to future updates and hopefully the eventual release of Tuscany.

★★★

Brian Smith

The AI is painfully slow, often taking longer than a human player would to complete a turn. It's particularly egregious the times it does it when there are no actions for it to take. Graphically it's a good representation of the board game, but there are a few non intuitive UI touches and occasions where it asks you to confirm something that you'd assume doesn't need confirming (this a criticism you can level at many board game apps). At this initial release, it feels like the first step towards a great app rather than blowing you away out the gate. It's not a hopeless case, just a little bit less than what the ideal Viticulture app would be. Update: The UI confirmation can be turned off in options. Also you can in theory make the AI play faster, but I haven't really seen that much difference in its play speed yet (i.e. fast is still too slow).

★★

Mike McCraith

I adore the board game, but I gotta say, I'm not a fan of the app. It needs a lot of improvement. There were times where I didn't know if I was looking at my board or the AI's. The UI gets in the way of making decisions. There are redundant animations (if you harvest a field with a red and white wine, it shows an animation for each with a fade out/in for each). It's disappointing as it's such a great game. But, also playing the Charterstone game on Steam, I'm finding similar UI issues--for instance the backspace key takes you back a screen instead of, you know, deleting a character. It appears that Stonemaier Games puts in a lot of effort to make sure the details of the board games really shine, but the same level of care is not matched in the apps. I was looking forward to getting Wingspan for the Switch later this year, but I hold off. Devs: If you wan screenshots and/or easier to do a video chat to demo some issues, let me know.

★

Gene Parish (Gene-Paul)

The app seems to be less well designed than one would expect. When choosing initial player options there is no text to highlight what each item gives you in exchange for turn order. When it won't let you do something, like planting vineyards you are left wandering if you are making a mistake or whether you have discovered a bug in the game. It's not at all clear or very friendly to a newbie to the game.