South Okanagan board game puts players in the driver seat of a wine tour
A visitor to Naramata was so charmed by the village he decided to create a board game about going on tours of the community’s wineries and vineyards.
Chris Dias, who lives in Prince George, didn’t get into wine until the ripe age of 39. Shortly after he did in 2016, he decided to visit the Okanagan and bask in its wine tourism.
Dias and his now-wife visited 60 wineries in eight days. They returned to their home in Prince George with around 180 bottles of wine stuffed into their small car.
"Drinking that much wine is probably not healthy, I'm told you shouldn’t do it," he said. "But I was thinking, ‘this is fantastic’ and we’ve done wine tours every year since."
Dias has years of experience as a game designer and he was pondering his next project. While brainstorming with his friend who’s also a wine enthusiast he had his Eureka moment.
“Why am I not doing a game about wine?” he thought to himself.
While there are other wine-related games on the market – some of which he recognizes as very successful – he felt like wine tourism in the Okanagan could be successfully applied to the format of a modern strategy game.
So he designed Naramata: A Game of Wine and Tourism.
And although his game hasn’t hit the shelves yet, it has demonstrated strong support through the 206 people who donated a total of $27,542 to fund its production.
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The game is played by taking on the role of a wine tour operator. Over the course of four days in the game, each person loads up their vehicle with tourists who have different priorities. Their needs vary between things like taking photos, enjoying fancy tastings and trying specialty cheeses.
Drivers are racing against the clock, the day starts in Penticton and all the wineries close at 5 p.m. While trying to provide the guests with a tour that satisfies all of their unique needs, every task consumes times.
“There are penalties for not satisfying them by the end of the day,” he said. “You want to select the right tourists and satisfy them the right way to maximize points.”
Whoever has the most points after the four days are up is the winner.
"I wasn't just going to make some sort of Naramata-nopoly."
The tourists are based on real people, as many of the profiles are based upon donors to the game’s Kickstarter. It was a good way to help the fundraiser but there was one issue – those donors were all white people.
“So I had to reach out to a bunch of industry friends of mine,” he said, and an addition was made in order to diversify the tourists in the game.
The board game accurately represents the layout of Naramata and its wineries, Dias said, but for simplicity sake not everything is 100% accurate.
The game has just recently been manufactured at a factory in China after long delays due to COVID-19 and a global shipping crisis.
“I started making this game at the worst possible time,” Dias said.
But all it has to do now is travel from the other side of the globe and it will be ready to play. If everything goes well, he expects them to be ready for sale in March. Dias and his wife will be distributing the games themselves.
If Naramata: A Game of Wine and Tourism is a success, Dias may create expansions for the wine communities in Kelowna and the South Okanagan. It can be pre-ordered on his site.
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