Unboxing Thursdays: La Vina & Via Nebula

Unboxing Thursdays we open, learn, and play games as we add them to our library.

This Thursday we are playing and learning La Vina & Via Nebula.

La Vina: 7.0 The grape pickers are fighting to inherit a magnificent but nearly abandoned vineyard. Whoever is able to harvest the best grape yield from the vines will become the owner of this precious land.

In La Viña, the players advance along the board, collecting cards with the most interesting grapes. To collect the cards you advance along a track that represents the rows of a vineyard. Each track has a series of different grape cards on either side, and you are allowed to choose the cards next to the space you are on, or next to the space you move to. Each turn you can choose a card and advance or advance and choose a card.

At the end of the track, there are different wineries (each preferring a different kind of grape variety). Get the best reward for your harvest from the local wineries by matching your hand of grapes with their needs. If the players go quickly, they may get the best cards but risk not having enough grapes. If they go too slow, the competition can beat them to the best vines!

Selling your grapes to the wineries gets the player prestige points, and each player has a limited amount of deliveries. The end game triggers when a player makes their last grape delivery. The other players can finish moving through their tracks. Then, everyone counts their prestige points gained through their previous deliveries, and the player with the most points wins!

Via Nebula: 7.0

Crafters, builders, and carriers — your help is needed to dispel the mists of Nebula! The people of the valley will reward you handsomely if you harvest and exploit our many resources, open paths through the mists, and help our settlers build new structures. Cooperate temporarily with other builders in order to create paths and share goods, but do not forget your own objectives. Will you have a statue erected in your honor on the Nebula City plaza?

A game of Via Nebula starts with a board showing a hexagonal grid, some production sites with a few available resources on them (wood, stone, wheat, and pigs), building sites in various areas scattered over the whole board, and a lot of mist.

Turn after turn, players have two actions at their disposal from these options: They may clear the mist of a hex to create new paths of transportation, open new production sites, open a building site in a city, carry resources from any production site to their own building sites, and, of course, achieve a construction. Resources and paths through the mist may be used by all the players. This initially induces a kind of cooperation, but eventually, other players will take advantage of your actions!

To achieve a construction, you fulfill a contract on one of your cards. You start the game with two contracts, and four more contracts are available for all players to see and use on a first-come, first-served basis — and that's where the cooperation abruptly stops. Additionally, most contracts have special powers that are triggered on completion.

The game ends when a player finishes a fifth building. Opponents each take two final actions, then players score based on the number of cleared hexes and opened production sites and the point value of their contracts, with a bonus for the player who ended the game.

Join us Thursday, June 15th at 6:00 pm for our Unboxing Thursday Event. See ya soon!

*This event requires a 1 - Day Membership, credit will be applied back for qualifying purchases. Current Members are always free for this event.*