Beer & Bread / Wine & Cheese
Along with Deep Print Games, Pegasus Spiele have developed a distinctive line of meaty two-player games in relatively compact boxes. Most are published in the US by Capstone Games. The range includes Rival Cities and Tricky Traders. Wine & Cheese is the latest addition to the range. It's designed by Scott Almes, and to accompany the game Pegasus Spiele have reprinted Beer & Bread, which was originally published in 2022. Tho' both are standalone two-player games, and their mechanics are very different, Wine & Cheese feels like a thematic sequel to Beer & Bread. In both games, the players are rival farmers, each creating two products. In both games players need to avoid over specialising because they only score for the lower of their two produce.
Beer & Bread is a card-driven game, played over six rounds representing three 'fruitful' and three 'dry' years. In the fruitful years, players draft a card from those they are dealt and then pass the hand to their opponent. The opportunity is there for 'hate drafting' (taking a card mainly to avoid your opponent getting it rather than because you want it yourself) but otherwise this is a game where players can focus on their own agri-engine.
The cards in Beer & Bread are multi-function. You can play them to harvest the resources they generate, giving you wheat, barley, rye, hops and/or water. The resources are all represented with wooden tokens, and, apart from water, their supply is limited - moreso, of course, in 'dry' years. You are also constrained as to how many resources you can store. When you have the requisite resources in your store, you can play cards for their recipe section. The card then is placed face down on the board as beer or bread (obviously depending on the recipe). You can ordinarily have only one completed beer and one bread recipe on your board. Cards, however, can alternatively be played to upgrade one of your actions, and when you play a card as an upgrade it clears the completed recipe cards from your board, creating space for you to complete more recipes.
Wine & Cheese is played over two game years with actions that are specific to the seasons. There are no discrete resource tokens; the resource markers in this game are multipurpose. Instead there are meeples representing villagers who are recruited as agricultural workers to go into the fields to return with red or green grapes, milk, milk cultures, sugar, salt and yeast. Workers bring back produce from the field in which you place them as well as in fields in the same row or column, depending on the card at that worker's location. Just as you can affect your opponent's choices through card drafting in Beer & Bread, so in Wine & Cheese your choice of worker dictates which worker your opponent must play on their next turn. Later in the 'year' you go through a similar process recalling workers from the fields. Knowing which worker your opponent has to play next means there are tactics over where you choose to position your worker; you can often do so in such a way that it disadvantages the other player. If your plays are anything like ours at Board's Eye View tho' you might need to reach for a chess clock if you or your opponent are dithering for too long working out their optimal choices, forced choices and placements.
The cards in Wine & Cheese represent recipes. They are worth points that are increased if the completed wine or cheese is 'aged'. Many of the wines and cheese can be 'paired', generating additional points. Others give you extra actions when completed. Aging involves taking two ingredient tokens off the card on which you placed them to make your wine or cheese. It's made more fiddly tho' by a rule that means if you have only one token left on a card, it 'over-ages' and has to be immediately sold for a lower price. That, and trying to synchronise 'paired' wines and cheeses means you need to invest resources in speeding up or slowing down the aging process.
There's a lot going on in both these games, especially with the need in both to balance your success with each of the two products you are creating. There's a lot for players to grok but these are both very satisfying games to play once you've assimilated all the rules. We'd class both as medium-weight eurogames; both benefit from having clearly structured turns but you and/or your opponent are more likely to succumb to AP (Analysis Paralysis) working out the optimal worker placements and recall interaction in Wine & Cheese than over your multifunction card choices in Beer & Bread. At Board's Eye View, our plays of Beer & Bread have mostly come in at around 40 minutes but Wine & Cheese has usually run to a playing time that's twice as long. Both tho' are very good games.
