Description
In beautiful Burgundy, you and your opponent run neighbouring farms that produce wine and cheese. You share the vineyards, pastures and workers, but not the earnings. Wine & Cheese is a strategy game for two in which, over two years, you gather ingredients, fill your cellars, let wine and cheese age and sell them at the right moment.
How to play Wine & Cheese
The game lasts two years, each with spring, summer, autumn and winter. In spring you send workers out to the fields, in autumn you bring them back home, and both times you collect ingredients for wine (white and red grapes, yeast, sugar) and for cheese (milk, salt, lactic acid bacteria). Workers come in pairs of the same colour. When you pick a worker, your opponent must immediately take the worker of the same colour. The house card the worker comes from shows the pattern of fields that give you ingredients.
With the ingredients you play wine and cheese cards into your cellars. The cards then age: each ageing step removes tokens from them until the card is ready. You sell finished cards on their own or as a gourmet pair, where a wine and a cheese together make a dish. At the end you add up your earnings from cheese and from wine separately, and the lower of the two amounts is what counts.
Why you will like it
- Every worker you choose also decides your opponent's move, since they must immediately take the worker of the same colour.
- Some house cards reward fields where workers are already standing, others reward empty fields, so it matters where your opponent's workers are.
- You can speed up or slow down the ageing of each card so that it is ready exactly when you want to sell it.
- Because the lower of your two earnings counts, you have to take care of both products and cannot bet only on wine or only on cheese.
Who is Wine & Cheese for
Wine & Cheese is a game for two players only, suitable from age 12 up, and a game takes 45 to 75 minutes. It is a medium-weight strategy game. Its main mechanics are Worker Placement and Hand Management, so it will appeal to players who like to plan a few moves ahead. This is the English edition with English rules.
What you might not like
The game is for two only, so it is not for larger groups. Because you constantly have to keep wine and cheese in balance, it may not suit those who prefer games where you put everything into one strong strategy.
What's in the box
- 1 game board
- 24 wine cards
- 24 cheese cards
- 70 ingredient tokens
- 8 house cards
- 2 closed cellar cards
- 10 workers
- 10 benches or hats
- 2 wine markers and 2 cheese markers
- 2 turn order cards
- 1 calendar marker
- 1 score pad
