Windmill Valley is a strategy game of growing tulips and placing windmills in the Netherlands. Players will build and enhance their windmills, look for new tulip bulbs on foreign trades or among local vendors to buy and plant, and try to get an edge with hired help and lucrative contracts. The heart of the game revolves around each player’s two interlocking action gears. The large gear has six action spots and the smaller gear has five action spots. Arrows point to one action spot on each gear every turn as they are rotated. A player will select one of these two actions to take or, in some cases, take both actions. Each time a player’s large action gear completes a full rotation, they move forward on the Calendar track. Game end is triggered when a player has reached the end of the Calendar track. – – 1 to 4 players – – 45 to 90 minutes
There are four steps in a player’s turn. The first step is to adjust the floodgate which determines how far a player rotates their action gears. The second step adjusts the water level which will determine how many points and/or money is earned on a later turn. The third step is to rotate the action gears as many steps as indicated by the floodgate setting. The fourth step is to select one of the two available gear actions and execute that action.
There are seven basic actions. One is to lower the water level for points and/or money. At the start of the game all five actions on the smaller gear are to lower the water level. The six basic actions on the larger gear are: 1) enhance a gear’s action spot with a new action tile, 2) gain a farm enhancement of either a helper for action enhancements or a contract for game end points, 3) build a windmill on the main board to gain actions from adjacent fields and to setup game end scoring, 4) visit the market to obtain and/or plant tulips, 5) plant tulips into your field of 4 rows and 7 columns, and 6) conduct foreign trade by giving up a tulip to activate two actions on a card that was randomly selected at the start of the game, or choosing to take any tulips already on the card without taking the two actions.
Game end is triggered when the first player whose large gear has completed its fourth full rotation. Every player will get to finish the round plus one more round before final scoring takes place. Players score each contract card they have up to three contracts. Empty windmills spaces on your player board scores points based its corresponding tulip color and the number of that tulip in your field. Additionally, each completed row of seven tulips scores points with more points if a row is all one color. And each completed column of tulips scores positive points if it is all of different colors. There are negative points scored for any tulip column, complete or uncomplete, that has more than one of a same color. The player with the most points wins.
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