Last updated on January 4th, 2026 at 09:32 pm
Viticulture – Board Game Review
Viticulture is a Board/Strategy/Entertainment game from Digidiced UG (haftungsbeschrankt) i.G., first launched in 8th June 2020.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 92+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Viticulture Stand Out
You find yourself in rustic, pre-modern Tuscany, where you’ve inherited a meager vineyard. You own a few plots of land, an old crush pad, a tiny cellar, 3 workers…and the dream of owning the best winery in Italy.
Your job is to allocate your workers and helpful visitors to complete various tasks throughout the year. Each season is different on a vineyard, so the workers have different tasks they can take care of in the summer and winter. There’s competition over those tasks, and often the first worker to arrive at each one has an advantage over the rest.
Using those workers and visitors, you can expand your vineyard by building structures, planting vines, and filling wine orders as you work towards the goal of owning the most successful winery in Tuscany.
Features:
• 1 to 6 players
• Family friendly – non violent theme
• Cross Platform
• Easy tutorial to learn the game from scratch.
• Single-player mode with 3 challenging levels of computer opponents.
• Multiplayer games against your friends in friendly games.
• Face players from all over the world in ranked multiplayer games online!
• Worlwide leaderboard
• Take your time in asynchronous game mode with push notifications and never miss a turn.
• Analyze your best games or learn tricks from the best with playback
• Uses the newest rules of the board game.
This Board game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Viticulture is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 10th September 2025
Recent improvements include:
- bugfixes
Download & Availability
Viticulture is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Having to set up our single player game from the main menu each time we play is a bad UI. There should be a replay button or at least remember our AI player selections. We also think that we should not have to constantly tap the fast forward button after every turn. Why isnt there a speed open ion for that in the settings. As for setting, the game exits to the main menu if you try to change setting during a game. Its not clear how to get back into the game. But aside from some crappy user interface decisions that the developer made, its still a fairly good game and the AI seems to play well enough to present a challenge.
Ill continue trying to play this because we love the physical board game that this is based on but right off the bat the UI feels really amateurish and not well organized. Its not even clear what the worker placement spots are, like which is which.
The devs recently made some good improvements to the game (fast forwarding). Interface isnt perfectly intuitive, but we havent run across any major bugs and once you do the tutorial its insanely addicting and fast to play. We love this digital version of the game.
It's good. Sometimes we need to restart the game cause it freezes, but overall all good. Now we need Tuscany.
Great graphics, but the by the time you have tapped the fast forward option you are ready to quit. Love the board game but the random AI makes this a pvp game only.
Small things like poor UI choices for actions, music playing when app starts even if Ive turned it off, and broken notifications (most of the time) hinder what could have been a good implementation of one of our favorite games. The biggest problem? Out of time game ending triggers for casual async play. As far as we can tell this is not configurable.
This is one of our favorite games, and porting it to a digital platform is something that we greatly anticipated. The execution of it is 100% loyal to the physical board game. If the Tuscany expansion is developed/released, we will buy it as soon as we are aware of its release. That said there are frequent complaints with the AI being slow (and setting the AI to "fast" does help with some of that), but we think the problem is deeper than that. When multiple human players are combined with at least one AI player it will hang up frequently. Occasionally, the AI can be nudged into action by each player force-quitting and restarting. But, we had one game that hung-up and sat for 36 hours(!), eventually causing the AI to forfeit. (This problem only seems to happen with a combination of multiple human players and AIs. It has not occurred with a single human player and multiple AIs.).
We are finding that the game is very pretty, and works pretty quickly on our iPad mini. But, there are a lot of problems with the cards not working as they should, and some of the options dont work as they should. Makes the game not very enjoyable.
We wish we could give this app a better review because Viticulture is one of our favorite board games. Unfortunately the developers seem to want this game to be as unintuitive as possible to play. We get it, there are a lot of complex decisions you need to make during the game, but the way information is presented is needlessly confusing while also managing to be redundant and super time consuming to play. The amount of times you have to tap and the number of screens you have to go through to take some of the actions in the game is ridiculous. Then on top of that, you have to sit and wait for all other players to take their needlessly long turns with almost no indication of if theyre thinking or fighting with the bad UI of if theyve already completed their turn and forgot to press the completely unnecessary our turn is over button (which if youve played the game, you know that once youve taken the action for a worker, there is usually nothing more you can do, so why we then have to confirm to this game, which knows Ive done everything possible on our turn, that yes, Ive done everything possible on our turn, is completely beyond us). We just played a 5-player game with friends and it took 3.5 hours! Thats insane! The fact that phases like choosing your Mama and Papa or discarding down to 7 cards at the end of a season are done in turn order rather than simultaneously (and you arent even able to look at your cards to think while others are making their decisions) means that even some of the quickest parts of the game take forever! There is no reason a digital version should take two or even three as long to play as a physical board game. The only reason is bad design. The games Ive played vs. One other person or against AI have faired a little better, time-wise, but you still have to sit through animations at the end of the each real or AI players turn showing what they did… A feature that would be helpful if these animations gave any context for what was happening, but ultimately end up just adding to the confusion (there also isnt, as far as we can tell, any way to see exactly what other players did on previous turnsthere is a board you can bring up that shows where workers have been placed, but not in what order or what they did/what cards they played/buildings they built/etc.) In the end, we cant give this only one star because the app does work and we can play a game if viticulture on it. The app has crashed on our numerous times, but our games were always saved so all we lost was a little time (okay, it seemed like a lot, because you have to watch all of the other players turn animations again before you can go). And we can play solo against AI playerswhich is about the only redeeming quality. If youre planning on playing this with more than one other person though, Id recommend saving your money.
Im surprised the same studio that did the amazing castles of burgundy app also put this out. Castles did a wonderful job of making the experience of playing seamless and intuitive. Viticulture just barely chugs along. Hopefully future updates will fix some of the issues but this was a waste of nine bucks.
Love the original boardgame, and this digital adaptation is impressive and fun. Im really enjoying being able to play a game anywhere and without having to set up all the pieces. Im really glad to see the Tuscany expansion implemented too, and the music is nice.
Paid for the app and the Tuscany expansion. Its not obvious how to get the Tuscany expansion running, and some of the controls are not great, but the game overall is really good.
Is the dlc have Chinese we cant see it.
Even the hardest AI is not difficult to beat.
If you are making a game and at some point the app crashes or times out and your game is not auto saved- why are you making games man?! We feel like every digidice title we try: A) terrible UI. No way it was blind tested and they cant even follow conventions. Its literally a UX law- make it like other apps so we dont have to think. You cant even make a proper CTA (hint: its not a custom icon thats green instead of white). Please just take a UX course or do some UX law flashcards. B) Buggy. We get bugs happen but you cant have people invest 30-60 minutes in a game and then they never get to finish it. It completely devalues everything your team has done. We feel like Digidice almost nails it everyone except these two problems. And they pick the best games to develop so we keep hoping they learned.
We encountered a bug that essentially destroyed our chance of competing in the game. You can have at most 5 workers and you need all 5 to have a chance. There are 2 special workers you can train, one of those is a Merchant. He has the power to take an action in a season that has already passed. With the latest update they curtailed his power a lot, but he is still very useful. We are in a game where we could not play our Merchant. We tried all the remedies in the in game help faqs and in the community help all to no avail. That puts us down one worker and puts us out of the game. So we filed a bug report and got no response. Meanwhile our opponents are complaining to us that we're not taking our turn. So we took an action which works in ever other game we have tried it with, and we have tried it with around 10-15 different games. We deleted and reinstalled the app. It came back and lost our game… Sort of. We are only in one game and the main screen can't find it but the menu on the side sees it. When we do the refresh selection, the main screen comes up with no games found but the menu on the right side pops up with a yellow one indicating that it found one game. So at least one programmer did his/her job correctly. We sent in another bug report but again we got no response. Sigh. Please fix this bug, it is a game killer.
This is a great app. We bought the game in December for our friends and we only played twice. Once we played the app we couldnt play the board game again. Luckily all our friends have IPads and we play on that whether we are together or not. We actually play mostly at our own homes. The Tuscany version is fun. We are addicted. We hope you guys add the Moors Visitors in the future.
This is one of our top board games of all time. And the app allows us to play it anytime. So thankful. We dont find the Aito be too slow. Theres an option to stores it up and its sufficiently quick quick enough. Dont listen to the moaners. Would love to see Tuscany expansion and would gladly pay for it. But happy with what there is. We cant stop playing our favorite board game. We cant thank you enough.
We think this would be hard to play if you didnt already know the game. The UI and turn setup could use some polish and there is a lot of unnecessary turn actions, such as swapping to a player to show the wine aging. Overall, a good start to one of our favorite games. Looking forward to some updates and hopefully, the Tuscany expansion.
We enjoyed this app quite a bit, but it definitely was a new experience. We have never had to deal with Analysis Paralysis from an AI opponent before. We would forget what we wanted to do on our next move by the time the computer got half way through its turn. Speed up the AI, And youve got your 5* review! Otherwise a great translation of a great board game. Just wondering why you didnt use the Tuscany board? We have always found it to be superior in every way.
A few bugs: AI is at times slow…sometimes very slow. AI got too many points for the Bottler card. When playing Mentor, the real player didnt gain the benefit from the AI taking the action of the card. When real player 1 played cards that gave choices to other players, real player 2 didnt get the chance. The card flashed up on the screen and immediately receded before the choice could be made. Im sure all will be fixed in time. Great game, and it will be a great app once these small issues are fixed. Hope the Tuscany expansion makes it to the app.
Viticulture is one of our very favorite board games, and we were incredibly psyched to see this app show up. It looks great, but the AI is way, way, way too slow. Even discounting the AI, the animations are too slow. Why do we need to watch the screen reset for each individual grape that we harvest off a field? Why do we need to press a button once to tell the compuer we want to draw a blue card, and then press another button to tell the computer that, yes, we wasnt kidding, we really do want a blue card? Too slow. Im taking a break for a while.
Ugly, game gets rules wrong constantly, buggy.
We were really excited to see that Viticulture had come to iOS. However, the implementation is underwhelming, especially as it relates to the AI. The AI takes forever to play its turns, and its impossible to figure out what its actually doing. Its usually just a bunch of sub menus popping up on screen, but its not clear what theyre trying to indicate. Theres potential here, and at least it didnt crash, but it needs a lot of polishing.
It looks great and if everything works well this would be a fabulous game. When playing in games against friends with Ai, the Ai sometimes take over five minutes to make one move. And this is after three updates so far. We must get out of the game fully (both iOS and Android) so the Ai play their turn. It gets frustrating. We have smaller issues with the game too but first let the developer fix this then Ill bring up the smaller issues.
Ive been playing and enjoying this game since it was released on iOS. We liked it so much we went out bought the boardgame. The game runs even faster now with this latest release.
This app is beautiful, and the music is great. Its viticulture on iOS. Whats wrong with it is that if you buy this to play board games with others, then AVOID this app! Unless you finish a whole game in a single sitting, it wont let you actually complete your turn. With this typically being a longer game, we specifically use the apps to be able to play at our own convenience but not with this app. Also the UI is very clunky and not organized well. Most things even on the Home Screen only have icons and no words. Overall the only good of this app comes from the game and the music. The music isnt needed, and the game is just viticulture. The app fails to provide any of the benefits a board game app usually provides.
Intuitive, good design and challenging AI. Should be interesting if we get a Tuscany expansion.
The UI is sufficient to play but definitely lacks polish. Certainly a good start, but we hope they add more incremental undo and do fewer jarring state resets as the game moves from phase to phase. But, casual multiplayer has a bunch of problems. Its fine for a synchronous game, but the timers are way too aggressive for casual, multi day games. Currently set to 24 hours with no reset per player, it will time someone out unless everyone is right in front of their devices waiting for their turn. Further, players dont get a notification pip on their badge, so if they swipe away or cant deal with a turn as soon as it comes up, they are likely to forget it is their turn. Network session connectivity for the games listing is spotty. Ive never opened the app and had it load successfully without restarting that listing. The app lacks polish in presentation of the listings. The font is small even on our spacious iPad, the games dont have a clear enough connection to the timer, player statuses are green for everyone who is waiting and red for the player the game is blocked on, and player avatars are shrunken in favor of a box that shows score for each player.
AIs make their moves pretty fast now, at least on our 3 year old iPads. Very rare to see a bug. Love the intricacies of various strategies available in the game. Tactics are important, but luck can occasionally be a big factor in who wins.
We dont know why 7/10 digital board game adaptions have horrendous UI, but it persists. Presumably, because it isnt always intuitive to transform a physical 3D interaction into a 2D one. Thats where developers need to invest time in creating their own elegant solutions to bring the game designers concept to life on a digital platform. We feel that DIGIDICED hit the mark better than many digital board game ports, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. It shouldnt take a veteran Viticulture player nearly as long as it does to intuit the game flow! Otherwise we love this.
The game is good (but missing the Tuscany expansion), but now its frustrating because youll miss turns and subsequently lose games online because the app no longer sends notifications. We like this game and Id like to give it 5 stars, but with the notifications missing now and an inability to adjust how long a player has to respond to a move, we cant give it more than 3.
This app is a collection of what not to do when porting a board game. First, the AI is painfully slow and obstreperous. Not only is it slow, it gets in the way. It would be one thing to wait on the AI (which, by the way, is brutally difficult, even on easy) while checking your own cards and your engine. But you are prevented from even seeing what card you just drew until every single AI opponent is done futzing about. The AI is incredibly difficult to beat, even on easy. It does this by hogging memory and therefore battery life on your phone. From a full charge, two games will completely deplete the battery on on iPhone 10. The AI also seems to also have a knack for drawing some opportune cards at just the right moment. The game does not let you pause or take a break. If you navigate away from the app and tale a call, send an email, etc, your game will be lost and you will have to start over. There are some weird, beat-style glitches the app has as well. Ive had it get stuck on the loading screen, gotten a blank tableau, or been cheated out of windmill points when taking a Summer action in the winter to plant vines. Ill also address an issue with the game mechanics as well: No one at Stonemaier has done anything about the Yoke. It is a useless building, taking two moves to make use of it, which is a waste of workers. The yoke should uproot and plant in one move. Even better, it should uproot, replant the old vine if needed, and plant a new vine, and maybe cost a bit more. We absolutely will not play a game where Im dealt the yoke. Another gameplay problem that the AI takes great advantage of is, you can win without filling wine orders. Instead of filling orders, the AI sells, buys, plants, sells, buys, plays cards, and gets up to 20 points without filling a single order. This is both a gameplay problem, and a problem with the AI using a cheap exploit. This is an ok game made far worse by some terrible programming. Wish we could get our $10 back.
We cant say enough about how wells this is priced together. The physical version of this game has a great amount of moving pieces, they nailed it. Just brilliant. The gameplay must be thought through, not sure what all the complaints are about; ai speed is adjustable but for new players like ourselves it is set to allow us to see how the computer plays through a turn. The game even comes with a higher difficulty setting, and allows players to take back a turn if they are not sure whether or not the right choice is being made. Jamie is a brilliant game designer, one of the top in the industry and these guys allowed all his brilliance to show through: so many app developers try to take over the game but this is done correctly.
It pains us to give this three stars because viticulture is SUCH an amazing game. But, you know whats ironic about this digital adaptation? For us, one of the high points of the physical game is that Stonemaier made it absolutely gorgeous: quality components, art – its seamless. This app is unfortunately pretty clunky. Everything from the font, the menu, the animations, the audio its all kind of clunky. So, we get thats not all going to change, but here is a couple ideas to improve what this app is built on: 1) Add slider controls for FX and sound separately 2) remove that drop down player turn prompt- why do we have to watch that ever single time? 3) move the AI speed to somewhere where people can find it easier- we cant believe how hard we had to search for this. The game is practically unplayable until this is sped up- it should be front and center for everyone 4) having to press the check mark to confirm we want to do the next action for EVERY SINGLE THING is so monotonous. Especially when doing actions like creating wines or filling orders. There has to be a more fluid way of getting these actions out. Thanks.
The latest update not only changed the look, which is better. However! There are way to many bugs that are severely impacting game play. Please fix! Love the game! Examples: – if we have 2 coins and the 1 discount space is available, the game will not allow us to play on the build spot (it is greyed out) even though we would be able to build an available 3 coin structure -Could not purchase 2 workers in one season (button greyed out) after 1st purchase. -Same visitor card showing up back to back (we play it, next player draws same card and plays it again) -Motivator visitor card does not allow all players an opportunity, if the 1st player declines it stops -Summer volunteer crew visitor card failed to function, even though thumbs up was selected it did not allow for the planting of a vine nor did it go on to other players. UPDATE: increased to 4 stars because of great response from developers.
We love the game and this new design is more compact for selecting action spots.
The layout was the best part it was nice and big especially on the iPad. Now the update shrunk everything down so we looks like a mobile game now. Another dumb thing, rules state first worker gets the bonus and you have to select it?! Ridiculous.
It was great, if somewhat slow. Now it just crashes. Two updates back to back, and we cant get past set up.
Zero stars. Having downloaded the game this evening, we were unable to even finish the tutorials because the game glitched and closed every 2 minutes. We thought perhaps it might just be the tutorial mode, so we tried playing a game, twice. It glitched and closed before we were even able to start. After 7 tries, Im annoyed and angry that this is so poorly programmed. An absolute waste of our evening.
Works very well despite the complicated rules and all the variations cards and player order introduce. Crisp graphics and the AI seems pretty good based on our first test games. Happy to see this in digital from so we can stop playing the automa version of the board game while our cats try to eat the pieces.
We love the board game and think this is a great rendition of it. We do wish it had the Tuscany board and rules but Ill take this for now. In regards to the complaints Ive read about the slow AI. There is an option in the settings to toggle its speed. The AIs speed is quick and there is no waiting on our part. Im playing on an iPhone 11; we dont think that would have any bearing, but just starting just in case. We also read that it was 2 separate purchases for iPhone and iPad. Not true. We purchased on our iPhone and the app is also on our iPad playable and we were only charged once. The Papa action/selection could be more intuitive but once you figure it out, youll be fine. We think this game and Raiders of the North Sea are super close to their original board game counter parts and theyre quicker because there is no setup or breakdown. Ive never tried Viticultures automa, and to be honest, with this app, we dont think we ever will. This game is an excellent port, and Im very happy with it. Makes us want to play the board game with our friends now because we feel like our strategy is getting better.
Viticulture is one of our favorite board games, and one of many that we love by Stonemaier Games. When we heard of the digital version, we were really excited to try it. And, its made by the same company that made the Terra Mystica digital port, so our expectations were high. We didnt experience any extended wait times for the AI. Ive only played on the medium difficulty with the AI, and we also tweaked the settings to make the game play more quickly. The Tuscany expansion isnt included here, which we know might be a turnoff for some. However, being able to play online and even with a full table with AI is a huge bonus. We know that we dont dust off our physical copy as often as Id like, so this helps scratch the Viticulture itch. This digital version can be a little clunky in terms of getting affirmation every single time you do something. And, for those of you that like to hammer the Undo button, youre in for a rude awakening. Just like the Terra Mystica port, Undo will only take you back to the beginning of your current decision tree. Overall, Im very happy with the app. Being able to play board games on the go is huge for us, and Viticulture checks all of the boxes for us. Start crushing those grapes.
Great game. We like the graphics. Keep em coming.
We didn't need the tutorial to understand how to play (we own the physical game) and that's always a good significant to us. We've completed 8 games so far, very easy to play.
To all complaining about slow AI, you can speed up the game in options. Smooth play. Come join.
Works great! Just like the board game. Wish they had Tuscany EE but otherwise its great.
Ive been waiting for this to come out for a while, and… Its good. Not great, but definitely good. Heres what would improve gameplay for us: 1) The option to display or hide the worker placement location titles is currently a tiny question mark in the left corner. It was not clear to us what that did. A clearer icon design/tutorial would help. OR just do what Agricola digital edition did, and create a temporary pop-up with relative info when users press and hold on a location. 2. AI gameplay speed is buried in the backend of the user interface. That and other options need to become part of a guided intro system when you open the app for the first time. 3. Not sure why there is a permanent card icon on the bottom of the screen that lets us look through the entire deck of available summer and winter cards. You cant just grab the decks of cards in the real game and browse through them for fun, so Im not sure why its in this digital edition. Could that spot be replaced with something more useful to gameplay? 4. Lastly, and for us, the game app icon itself could use a bit of a refresh. The current red/green design colors invoke more Christmas vibes than wine making. An idea: Keep the classic viticulture V, make it more of a deep red, then put some of the fields (creams and hunter greens) from the box art/game opening screen behind it and you should have something that clearly says, this is that game you know and love.
Thank you for porting this game! Overall, no complaints except to echo what others are saying – slow AI is a bummer! However, its a small nitpick and we think this port is so wonderful! Full of charm and style with a great tutorial and sleek UI, this game is a keeper! Would buy the Tuscany board for an additional $3.99 in a heartbeat.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 33
- Size: 321.73 MB
- iOS: 12.0 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE, IT, JA, KO, RU, ZH, ES
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Digidiced UG (haftungsbeschrankt) i.G.
Last updated: 10th September 2025 | Genre: Board, Strategy | Developer: Digidiced UG (haftungsbeschrankt) i.G.