State of Play: USA aligns with Russia?

It's now day 1103 of the Russia's two day special operation in Ukraine. While the battle rages on there it seems Russia is making some gains outside that theater, seemingly with the help of relatively newly re-elected USA president Donald Trump. In just around two months of his second time in office the USA has held "Peace Talks" with Russia without Ukrainian participation and decided to halt aid going to Ukraine after President Trump publicly clashed with Ukrainian president Zelenskyy at the Oval Office.

On top of this his high tariffs on Canada, Mexico (he also renamed their gulf) and China as well as sanctions relief for Russia some speculate he's building "the bridge" to trade primarily with the Russians in the future. This has sparked more than a few interesting comments of "Trump is a Russian agent" and "Congrats to Russia on winning the cold war". I suppose we will see if and how this changes the battle field but one thing's for sure: Putin must be pretty happy right now.

Viticulture World: Cooperative Expansion

An amazing game about making wines!

Prelude: The base game of Viticulture is a competitive one which we didn't play but is required to play this cooperative expansion. Made by the same people who created Wingspan, Viticulture World is a worker placement game with differing actions per season, across a time limit of 6 years (and differing "world" event cards change the flow drastically). By then each player must be at 25 victory points (or more) and the influence token must also have reached the "full" end of its track.

I won't lie, this was a bit complicated to get started with and the rule book could have used a full cheat sheet of symbols somewhere so expect your first game to be a really long one (especially if like us, you haven't played the base game) but once you've got it it's actually pretty simple! Simplified per season its just:

Spring: As a team you place your rooster on the "time" clock which determines what bonus you get right now (might be a card, money, extra worker or 1 VP) and what order you will be placing workers down for this year.

Summer: Place workers to get seeds, plant them, give tours, construct buildings, develop new tech (important if you want to win), and use summer visitors.

Fall: Move your roosters to the inner part of the time clock and either gain a card, money or age a grape.

Winter: Harvest grapes, turn grapes into wine (very cool), use winter visitors and fill wine orders to gain VP!

In addition to the main board each player gets their own player mat to keep track of their buildings, fields and most importantly grapes and wines, both of which get older each year to a max of 9, and turning grapes into wine makes retains their age (eg 3 year old grapes make 3 year old wine, unless you don't have a "3" slot which makes it reduce to a "2" slot etc).

Orders usually ask for a combo of wines at around 4 or just one of the 7-9 rank ones and having a discard down to 5 cards rule at the end of each year makes it important for you to trade with your friends to make the most of each turn. There's way more to it than what I've written but that's the gist of it.

Now buying the base game AND this expansion is a bit pricey, but if your cooperative group likes tough games with not necessarily a lot of combat (like the cooperative mode of Wingspan) then this is a good investment for you. If your group isn't cooperative then just the base Viticulture should do, but I can't comment on how good or not good that is. :P