I have been searching the entire web to find interesting and engaging wine games. It could be a wine tasting experience, a murder mystery party, a trivia or quiz and some fun drinking games adaptation.
It has been pretty difficult, as the category seems to be non-existent. The range is limited to some popular games spin-offs like ‘Wine-Opoly‘, to simple trivia card games. The latter are simply to test whether you are a wine encyclopaedia or not. Such fun.
My recent post about wine games brought just a few responses from you guys that trivia card games were on top of mind and that is it.
The Little Game of Wine is exactly that – you get 60 question cards (with examples of ‘What colour is the wine of Chablis?’ and ‘Which of the following fortified wines is produced on an island?’) and 40 activity cards (with two activities to memorise the image on the card, or place the letters right to get the correct words). Each card is like a bottle in your cellar, so when the player reaches a goal box (there is a small board as well), one with the most amount of bottles wins.
101 Drinking Games is not specifically a wine game, but a generic collection of loud and rivolous drinking games. Some of them are indeed quite wild (i.e. an action game called ‘slip, sip, or strip’), whereas there is a selection of word games, dice games, and drawing games. You can adjust some of them to your particular theme and even make it entirely wine-related. They are very basic, but you get a full box of props and an instruction booklet with it.
Finally, a more robust wine entertainment is contained in a game with a very creative, but self-explanatory name – ‘Wine Game‘. It promises fun to the last drop, and offers players to compete to create their wine cellar out of the cards. The difference from the first game is that it also suggests to do wine tasting and record your wine evaluation onto the wine protocol pads, but also more typical games (yes, again trivia cards), and additional mechanics like an facts, Intermezzo (favourable and unfavourable events), explaining wine terms, and like in the first game – memo and sparkling letters. The instruction contains tasting tips (just an abstract), but the whole tasting experience makes this game just slightly more exciting!
Do you agree with me that this is a very limited choice. If you consider how much fun and also learning can be done whilst enjoying your time with family and friends, wine games can do all that and more: instead of reading massive and sometimes unnecessarily pretentious wine book, you could be mastering the world of wine by playing.
Whilst I am on it to develop a few prototypes, please let me know if this is something you would enjoy: any suggestions are welcome!
P.S. If you are a game designer, also please get in touch!
