Had the original edition sitting on my shelf for a couple of years before this one showed up on my porch in what I can only describe as an oversized, faintly ridiculous coffin of a box. I want to be honest about why I hadn’t played it much before: the old components were beige in the least charming sense of the word, and it kept getting passed over for prettier games even though I knew, on paper, the design underneath was excellent. The special edition fixes exactly that problem. Acrylic hex tiles, genuinely lovely landscape art, little castle miniatures, and it’s astonishing how much more I want to actually sit down and play a game I already respected once it stopped being unpleasant to look at.

Mechanically this is still the same tight, dice-driven tile-placement engine it’s always been: roll two dice, use them to claim tiles from a central display or place tiles you already own onto your matching duchy board, and the entire design trick is that there’s basically always a productive move available no matter what you roll. That’s rarer than it sounds in dice games and it’s why this has stayed a hobby staple for over a decade. The new solo mode plays close enough to the multiplayer experience that it doesn’t feel like a bolted on afterthought, which wasn’t true of the old version’s automa.

The Vineyards module, new to this edition, is worth seeking out specifically, it adds a wine production thread that was a genuine gap in the original theme, since it’s hard to picture Burgundy without it. One caveat I’d pass along from other players and my own experience both: this shines brightest as a two player game on the same shared board, where the tile-claiming competition actually bites. At higher counts, or with everyone on separate boards, it drifts closer to a solo puzzle everyone happens to be doing at the same table. Still five stars. It just took new packaging to get me to notice what was underneath the whole time.