Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Disclosure: Meeple Mountain was provided a pre-production copy of the game. It is this copy of the game that this review is based upon. As such, this review is not necessarily representative of the final product. All photographs, components, and rules described herein are subject to change.
From the rules:
“You are a winemaker in the heart of Bordeaux, guiding your vineyard from grape to glass. Every good winemaker knows time itself is an ingredient, and patience is as vital as ambition.
This philosophy shapes every decision you make in Bordeaux. Over 13 years (turns), you will assign Workers to Make Wine or Gain Resources, choosing a duration of 1, 2, or 3 years. Longer commitments mean more powerful actions, but it will take longer for that worker to be ready again.
As your wines mature, you chart a curated wine tour, connecting estates and guiding bottles into restaurants and shops where patrons can taste your craft.
When the final year has passed, your legacy is uncorked. Score points for your wines and resources, and discover which winemaker’s careful timing has produced the most celebrated vintage.”
Bordeaux defies easy categorization. There’s no card flipping, no dice rolling, no bag drawing. There’s just you, your available workers, the thing the game allows you to do, and the thing you or your opponents have decided you’ll have the ability to do. If you’re well-positioned, you may be able to do both. But chances are you’ll have to choose between one or the other. Everything you do is in the pursuit of victory points and, after 13 turns, the person who’s managed to score the most points wins the game.
Of course, this is a gross oversimplification. If you’re already familiar with the game and just want to know what I think, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. For everyone else, let’s talk about how the game is played. But, before we do, a brief aside:
Bordeaux isn’t packaged like your typical board game. There is no box. Instead, Bordeaux is a book measuring roughly the size of a standard 8.5 x 11 composition notebook. Contained within this book are a little over 100 double-sided player sheets, each featuring a vineyard with a unique layout and a variable set of starting resources and end game goals.
Setup
During setup, each player is given a sheet, a writing utensil, and a starting player is determined. This player circles Year 1. Then, in a clockwise direction, each successive player circles the next year. So, player 2 will circle Year 2. Player 3 will circle Year 3, and so forth. Then, after the last player has circled their year, they circle the next year, and this process is carried out in reverse turn order. This snake draft process is repeated until every year has been circled by one of the players. In some games, it is possible that not all players will have the same number of years circled, and that’s fine.
Your Player Sheet
Each sheet is divided into five sections. Across the top of the sheet is a planning strip. Here is where you’ll see the options you have available to you in your current year. There are two sections: Region and Resource. We’ll get into more granular detail about how all these areas of the player sheet work together later.
Beneath this is the worker strip. There are three workers in total. Each has a series of boxes you’ll be filling in with letters representing whichever actions you’ve assigned the workers to perform. Workers can be assigned to perform any action for a total of 1, 2, or 3 turns (‘years’ in game terminology) in a row. So, as an example, if you wanted your worker to construct three casks, you would fill in the box for the current year and the next two with the letter ‘C’. In general, the longer a worker is assigned to an action, the more beneficial that action will be (similar to the way things worked in this game’s spiritual successors, Fromage and Formaggio).
Beneath this, and taking up most of the sheet, is Bordeaux (your vineyards). Bordeaux is divided into three regions: Left bank, Right bank, and Entre-Deux-Mers. Each region is separated from the others via the image of a river cutting between them.
Beneath this is the ‘Gain Resources’ area of the sheet. There are three sections here: casks (used to connect routes together in the Bordeaux area of your sheet), trellises (which unlock end-of-game scoring conditions), and vines (which unlock free wines, used for connecting routes).
Finally, running along the bottom of the sheet is the end-of-game scoring. Players will earn points for each path they’ve created, for having the longest continuous path, for each cask they’ve used, for having used the most casks, points for unlocked trellises, and bonus points if they had fewer years as leader than other players.
How the Wine Gets Made
At the beginning of each year, the active player for that year will choose a single action that they and the other players may perform. Then, they and the players write the letter for that action in the empty box for that year on their planning strip. In addition to the letter they’ve written, there is a second pre-printed letter. Each player may only assign two workers per year. So, if they have three workers available, only two of them will be able to take any actions, but never the same action. One worker can perform the pre-printed action, and one can perform the other. However, if the player only has a single worker available, then they must choose which of the actions they would like to perform, forgoing the other. With that in mind, here are the actions, their associated letters, and what the actions actually do.
Left bank (L), Right bank (R), and Entre-Deux-Mers (E): In each of these regions are displayed images of wine glasses in different colors (red, pink, or yellow) with different combinations of letters on them. The letters correspond to the region in which the wine glass resides and appear as a single letter, two copies of the same letter, or three copies of the same letter. In order to circle a wine glass, a worker must be used in the region for a number of turns corresponding to the number of letters. So, if there is a wine glass with LLL on it, then a worker must be used in the Left bank for a total of three turns in a row.
Each wine glass is connected to other wine glasses by a series of paths. Some paths have letters printed on them that correspond to other actions. If a player is able to connect the wine glasses at either end of the path, then they get to cross off the letter and immediately take that bonus action. Since connected paths factor into end-of-game scoring, it is beneficial for players to focus on connecting wine glasses together instead of just circling random wine glasses.
Casks (C): The player sheet features a total of twelve casks. When a player sends a worker to perform the casks action, they circle a number of casks equal to the length of time the worker is spending performing the action (one, two, or three casks). In addition to their letter requirements, some of the wine glasses also have cask requirements that must be paid before the wine glass can be circled. To use a cask for this, the player crosses out the casks they’ve circled. If they don’t have enough unused casks to meet the requirement, the wine glass cannot be circled.
Unused casks do not score points at the end of the game. So, it behooves players to use any casks they have unlocked before the game ends.
Vines (V): The vines area appears as a single, dotted wavy line on the player sheet (like a series of U’s connected together). At the bottom of several of the waves are images of wine glasses in different colors with a varying number of stars printed on them. If a player sends a worker to the Vines action, they can fill in one of the U shapes for each year the worker has been assigned to the action. If the dip in the U points at a wine glass, the player may immediately circle a wine glass of the matching color with a number of letters on it equal to the number of stars (paying the cask cost if there is one). So, a yellow wine glass with *** displayed on it would allow the player to circle any yellow wine glass with three letters on it (a yellow EEE wine glass, for example).
Trellis (T): Each player sheet features a total of three trellises. As mentioned previously, each of these, when completed, unlocks some kind of end-of-game scoring condition (1 point for every circled red wine, for example). Trellises appear as a series of dotted T’s connected together in a line. When a player sends a worker to the Trellis action, they can fill in a number of T’s equal to the number of years the worker has been assigned to the action. Trellises that are not completely filled in by the end of the game do not count towards scoring.
Thoughts
When I first volunteered to review Bordeaux, I really didn’t know what to expect. I reviewed both Fromage and Formaggio, and I liked them both, so, I was excited to see what a roll and write version of those games might look like. When the package finally arrived, I was confused. Where was the box? Where were the cards and/or dice? After removing the book from the envelope, I held the envelope upside down and gave it a good shake, expecting something to fall out, but nothing did. Maybe, I thought, there were cards tucked away between the pages of the book, but there were no such things. But, before I began to panic, believing something was missing, I decided to open the book and read the inside cover. Needless to say, after reading through the rules, I realized I was holding in my hands that rarest of treasures: a boardgame that was doing something new and never seen before. How very clever!
But that cleverness comes at a cost. The necessity of ripping pages out of the book has taken its toll. The block of pages in the prototype I received has become completely detached from the binding. Every time you pick up the game, if you’re not careful, you’re left holding an empty book cover in your hand with the actual game falling out onto the floor. Hopefully, this will be addressed in the final version of the game using something like perforated sheets that detach from an inner core as opposed to sheets that are directly connected to the binding itself. It isn’t a huge deal, but I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention it. Another minor irritation is that even though each region has its own color scheme,it can be difficult to discern the colors under direct lighting as the gradations are very slight and the similarities in the coloring of the details (trees and such) cause things to bleed together somewhat.
Those things aside, I have nothing but praise for the game itself. Nothing feels worse than having your carefully constructed plans ruined by the whims of fate—a bad card draw or a bad dice roll—and that’s an issue that most games of the “x and write” variety have to contend with. Not so with Bordeaux. By eliminating the “x” from “x and write”, the designers have also eliminated the role that luck plays, turning the game from one of reaction to a game of skill and careful planning.
The attempt to emulate the passage of time isn’t as successful here as it is in Fromage or Formaggio (those games involve components that physically move further away from you the longer you have to wait to use them again), but that pressure is still there. Extend yourself too far and you may find yourself without any workers to use on your turn. Play it too safe and you may find yourself unable to expand when you have the opportunity to do so. There’s an element of carefully toeing an invisible line, trying to balance big moves with much smaller ones, and that invisible line is razor thin. It’s a game where your decisions matter. I really like that—and I like that the game can be played in under half an hour.
With its quick play time, strategic depth, and the fact that the game is self-contained (the book is all you need), I have no qualms about recommending Bordeaux.
