What Are We Backing? Tuscany!

With just over a day left of the Kickstarter (at the time of this post), Stonemaier Games' Tuscany Expansion Pack for Viticulture is knocking down stretch goals and providing an amazing value for an amazing game!

Tuscany: Expand the World of Viticulture

Why is this especially exciting for us?  Not only is Viticulture a great game, not only does the Tuscany expansion (over 12 in the Tuscany Expansion Pack) add so much variety and replay-ability to an already great game, and not only is this an excellent opportunity to grab both the base game and its expansion for a very good deal, but Justin had a hand in designing it!

The expanded board above has a Map of Tuscany in it's lower left corner.  This is the influence map, one of the expansions included in Tuscany.  Justin submitted the winning design last summer that led to this expansion.

Jamey Stegmaier posted an update to the kickstarter that included some insight into this:

The Expansion Contest

Back in July, we announced that we were going to host a design contest for a Viticulture expansion. We gave people some parameters to follow about about 3 months to fully develop and playtest an expansion, and then we judged the results.

Part of the winning entry made it into the final game in the form of the influence map. Justin Killam had a really creative, elegant idea that catered to something we were looking for in Tuscany: A different type of player interaction that would help players both early and late in the game.

Justin did some research about Tuscany and discovered that each region of Tuscany is known for different things, and he applied that to bonuses you get when you place an influence token on that region. In his version, these regions scored and were wiped clean every year, but in the final version, you score extra points if you have the most influence tokens of any player in a region at the end of the game.

I took a photo of Justin's original submission next to the final influence map so you can see how his design impacted Tuscany.

This has inspired us to consider working on some board game designs of our own.  Stay tuned to Sweethearts or Rivals for some playtesting opportunities!  And if you are looking for an amzing game to back on Kickstarter, look no further: go back Tuscany NOW!  ;)