Wine Cellar Is a Well-Balanced Board Game with a Short Finish

By Keith Law | August 13, 2025 | 1:27pm

Tabletop Reviews board games

Wine Cellar Is a Well-Balanced Board Game with a Short Finish

Games that play more than five people comfortably are hard to find, outside of party games and some very scalable roll- or flip-and-writes like Welcome To. It’s difficult to design a game that will play as well with three as it will with seven or eight, but that makes this an underserved niche in the tabletop market.

Wine Cellar is the first commercial release of a game that was originally published online in 2021 as the one- or two-player game Wine Cellar’d, and now plays up to eight people, scaling easily by player count just by cutting the size of the deck. It’s also an extremely easy game to teach, as each turn involves a simple auction and there are only three ways to score at game-end.

In Wine Cellar, players are sommeliers trying to select eight bottles of wine to please their clients and score the most points. Wine bottle cards show a series of eight numbers, one through eight, in different orders, representing how many points that bottle is worth based on the round when it’s purchased—so the same bottle could be worth eight points in round round, five points in round eight, but only one point in round four. Each bottle also has a wine type shown at the top of the bottle and a country of origin, as well as a number at the top left that is unique in the deck and serves as the card’s bid value in the auction.

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Players begin with hands of eight cards that represent all of the bidding cards they’ll get in the game. They also start by choosing one of two client cards, which shows which countries of origin their client favors and which two wine types they prefer. Any bottle matching the desired countries is worth three extra points; the values for wine types vary, with some worth as much as six points per bottle and others just one point. (The Kickstarter version included nine additional client cards, some of which offered unusual scoring combinations, such as a card with no wine type preferences but six point bonuses for favored countries.)

Wine Cellar board game

At the start of the first round, the bottles up for auction, one per player, will be laid out in the center of the table. Each player places one hand card face down in front of them, representing their bid. All players reveal their bids at the same time, and whoever plays the highest-numbered card gets first choice of the prize bottles on display. Selection continues in descending bid order until the last player gets the final prize bottle. All bid cards then become the prize cards for the next round. Play continues for eight rounds, after which the final bid cards are tossed and players score.

The printed values on the cards allow you to line them up by laying the wine bottle images on their sides and then adding up the values from top left to bottom right for your round scores. You then score your client’s preferred wine types and the points for countries of origin, and that’s everything. I’ve seen winning scores in the low 70s, and it’s hard to score less than 50 points; I ended up with 64 points in a game where I happened to draw a starting hand of almost all low bid values.

The game flies once everyone understands the rules, since bids are simultaneous and players will typically know what card they want when their turn to select comes up. I’ve played with as many as six players and it hasn’t taken more than 20 minutes for a full game, excluding the few minutes of explanation at the start of the first play.

This is about as good as a basic auction game gets—there’s no fussing with money, no extended auction phases, nothing to slow the game down. The scoring is super simple, and it’s easy to tell how well you’re scoring as the game goes along. You could probably try to infer what other players want by their selections, although by the time you have enough data for that, the game will be almost over, and I found I was busy enough worrying about my own obnoxious client, who definitely does not pay me enough to put up with his demands. It’s a great family game, perfect for the holidays when you’ve got gamers and non-gamers, kids and older folks, and don’t want to spend a lot of time teaching or hearing complaints about how complicated it is. It might be a little more fun if all the adults had a fun beverage, but I enjoyed it quite a bit as a game for everyone that, when I played with family members aged nine to 79, everyone wanted to play it again.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.