Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Near the end of my first pass of the rules for the new Board&Dice strategy game Windmill Valley, something caught my eye: ”Expert Variant.”
The rules for this lighter-weight game were breezy up to this point, so I was surprised to see that there was a supposedly harder version available to spice things up a bit.
Windmill Valley normally wraps when someone triggers a series of final turns, tied to moving a player’s action wheel a certain number of revolutions. Players finish that round—to ensure everyone has had an equal number of turns—then do one more complete round to give everyone a turn while knowing that this is their final-final turn.
The Expert Variant? No “final-final” turn. Otherwise, no other changes.
I thought this spoke volumes to what I later found to be a very light time at the table. The game’s weight is tied primarily to the sheer number of choices available to a player on their turn, but nothing about each individual action was complex. I thought Windmill Valley could be taught to a core hobbyist gamer (essentially everyone I know) in about 10 minutes.
You can imagine my surprise, then, to find that for a game that plays in about 40 minutes with two players, the sponsored teach video was a whopping THIRTY-FOUR minutes. “You can teach this game in less than half that!” I yelped to an empty room when I saw the video online. But I still watched it, and combined with the “Expert Variant”, I now see what Board&Dice, as well as designer Dani Garcia (Barcelona, Daitoshi), were going for.
Windmill Valley is a gateway game, designed to embrace gamers looking for a very casual sandbox-style action selection experience. I’ve played 20+ Euros this year that are more interesting than this game, but I have to give credit where credit is due—Windmill Valley is more approachable and more inviting than most of its competition.
Spin the Wheel
Windmill Valley is a 1-4 player light-to-medium weight strategy game featuring a cute action selection mechanism baked into the physical representation of a windmill. Yes, a windmill. The game IS called Windmill Valley, after all!
Players take on the roles of tulip farmers who can do a mix of bulb planting and business operations by selling their plants to the foreign market to score points. It’s fair to call Windmill Valley a “point salad”—it feels like there are ways to score simply by starting your turn, right down to the possible choice to buy points on each and every one of your actions.
On a turn, players will select the number of spaces they want to move the wheels on their personal windmill to take actions, ranging from action tile upgrades to putting windmills on a map to buying goods at the marketplace. Windmill Valley is a sandbox game—once you move your wheels, almost any action you take will move your score in a positive direction. You can choose to focus on a very tight series of action areas or engage with every action in the game and still find ways to drive the game forward.
I would argue Windmill Valley is so loose that players will find it not worth their time to even bother with certain parts of the design. In our first four-player game, the winner didn’t take a single market action nor a single foreign trade action. He ignored a third of the action spaces and still outpaced the competition by about 10 points. I appreciate a game that allows a player to diversify, but flat-out ignore areas of the design? That felt weird, and it happened in each of my plays.
Windmill Valley has the elements of so many Euros I’ve seen this year. It’s a gorgeous production—Board&Dice fans who complained about the board aesthetic in games like Tiletum will have no grounds for issues with Windmill Valley, with its beautiful, well-spaced board with bright colors everywhere and a fantastic-looking city map full of wooden windmill tokens by the end of each game. There are public milestones, here in the form of the Queen’s Wish; you’ve got round bonuses that are earned when players spin their large windmill wheel around faster than other players.
The Euro game checklist abounds: personal contracts, player powers, and action efficiency opportunities are lurking everywhere. Of course you have combos—Board&Dice seems to know what turns gamers on as well as any publishers in the business right now—but in a nice twist, combo-rich turns in Windmill Valley don’t take as long as they do in other heavier games. This speaks to the weight of the entire affair. “Momma’s First Euro” was a line we spouted during multiplayer games of Windmill Valley, and I’m inclined to agree—this is in the large-and-growing category of easy-to-absorb, 60-to-90-minute efficiency puzzles that might help bring your muggle friends from neophyte to Lacerda junkie in a few quick leaps and bounds.
The ceiling here is low, which limited the joy I felt while finishing my review plays. (I did three plays for this review: a two-player game, a four-player game, and a solo run.) Even Board&Dice’s own Reef Project is a more enjoyable game for a core hobbyist…which is why it is so easy to recommend Windmill Valley if you know your audience.
At My House, It’s a Family Game
Here’s what I think of nowadays, when I think of Board&Dice:
- Nucleum—super heavy, so heavy that my brain hurts thinking about the setup
- Origins: First Builders—an underrated, medium-weight gold star
- Tiletum—the best combo-rich “dry Euro” of the last five years
- The traditional “T” games (Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun, Tabannusi: Builders of Ur, Teotihuacan: City of Gods)—dice-driven burners that absolutely scream “hard-core Daniele Tascini fans only”
Windmill Valley, then, is a nice pivot for the Board&Dice team. If you live in a household where CATAN, Ticket to Ride and other gateway classics have come and gone, Windmill Valley is a family-weight, family-friendly production that offers less tension and more accessibility across the board. For example, Windmill Valley has plenty of windmill building locations—there are enough windmill placement locations for all nine from each player, even in a four-player game—and a wide variety of ways to score points. It plays fast and doesn’t have much end-game scoring beyond one strangely complicated grid that must be scored for each player’s tulip patch.
“My wife would LOVE Windmill Valley,” one player said as we wrapped up the four-player game. All four of us are married, and all four of us agreed. Essentially nothing is scaled up or down for player count (there’s a little more action in the marketplace, to spike buying activity), so it would be a cinch to knock out a two-player game in under an hour even with a person who struggled to pick up the game’s concepts. There’s almost no “analysis paralysis” to speak of because of the way the game’s action selection works.
For players hunting for the next great Euro, Windmill Valley aspires for less. The game’s overall arc feels a bit too short. I know, I know—the best games wrap up just before the engine really starts to purr. But Windmill Valley could conceivably end after just eight turns, if a player moves their wheel three spaces ahead on their first turn and the table collectively takes big swings with their wheel. I found myself wanting another full round or two added to give a stronger sense of accomplishment.
At first, I figured Windmill Valley was a windmill game—getting all the windmills out was my goal in my first play. But I found value in doing almost anything, which strangely devalued the overall experience. I could just go hard on adding Farm Enhancement cards, which serve to either become Helpers (player powers) or Contracts (end-game scoring). That was a fun way to play. I could go hard on building windmills, getting the bonuses tied to the patches next to each new windmill.
I could plant a bunch of tulips. That might lead to a large array of end-game points too. I spent one game trying to max out the wheel upgrades to my personal windmill board, so it was fun to do that, which led to an array of bonus actions on each of my turns.
All of these felt like ways to score 100-125 points. But none of them led to many “wow” moments.
I recognize the accessibility as the chief reason to get this one to the table. I just don’t see Windmill Valley surpassing so many other great games from this specific publisher, let alone the number of better medium-ish Euros I’ve tried this year (gosh, just off the top of my head: Skymines, Beyond the Horizon, Shipyard, Speakeasy, Sand, Salton Sea, Pirates of Maracaibo, to name a few). Right now, if you put my feet to the fire, I would play Board&Dice’s other medium-weight Euro from spring, the very underrated Reef Project, over Windmill Valley for a game night outside of my family.
But that is also why I will keep Windmill Valley in my collection. For new tabletop enthusiasts and game nights with my family, Windmill Valley is a keeper. Give this a look if you’ve got the right audience!
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