Wine tourism is a growing industry in the vineyard-rich Okanagan region and a Prince George man has found a way to become the ultimate tour guide to bring people to the grape-growers without having to leave the comforts of his home.
It’s all a game to Chris Dias, the designer of Naramata: A Game of Wine and Tourism, a new board game that features the wineries of the Naramata Bench, a fertile strip of land on the ridge which overlooks Okanagan Lake near Penticton.
Naramata: A Game of Wine and TourismIn Naramata, each game player is responsible for driving a vehicle to bring tourists to the wineries and will complete various actions, such as a wine-tasting session, to satisfy each tourist’s whims. With every task completed, the game player collects points. Whoever collects the most points at the completion of the wine tours wins the game.
Depending on which level is chosen, the tours last two, three or four days. A day of touring starts at 10 a.m. and ends at 5 p.m. and each simulated daily tour takes about 35 or 40 minutes of board play to complete. Up to five players at a time can play.
Dias and his wife Nicole are wine lovers and it was a natural progression to turn their hobby into an occupation.
“I’ve been trying to get into the tabletop board game scene with the new generation of adult-oriented games and was with my friends and we always drink wine because I visit Okanagan wine country every year, sometimes several times a year,” said Dias. “My wife and I have been to 165 wineries in B.C. and we went to 65 wineries in a week and 16 in one day, those are our three records.
“The first trip, we were driving a little Nissan Versa Note and we brought back 185 bottles, so we had to build a cellar and got racks made. Wine is in our blood and we love Naramata and every aspect of wine country and I wanted to figure out doing a wine-themed game.”
Dias has found about a dozen other games on the market built around the perspective of owning or operating a winery but none that were focused on the wine tourism industry. He chose the name Naramata because it rolls of the tongue easily and because people instantly recognize it as a wine-producing area.
Dias is a full-time writer known for his restaurant review blog and has long had an interest in developing adult role-playing games, such as Ultramodern5, a supplement to Dungeons and Dragons, which raised $100,000 in a Kickstarter before it was released in August.
Dias is a friend of Norm Coyne, a film producer whose Northern FanCon brings the stars of Hollywood movie and TV productions and professional cosplayers to Prince George every summer for an annual convention. Coyne is also a wine connoisseur and he loved the game idea and is helping to promote it. He and Dias approached the Naramata Bench Wine Association to help support participation from individual wineries as landing spots on the gameboard.
“The vast majority of wineries in the Naramata region have come on board,” said Dias.
“When you think of Naramata, it’s always 100 per cent always wine, they have a couple orchards there but it’s wine country and they’re starting to make themselves look like the Napa of Canada.”
There are opportunities for individuals who pay a sponsorship fee to get their likeness on the tourist cards which will be used in the game. The amount of money raised from sales and sponsorships at the Kickstarter will determine how much Dias will have to spend to enhance each component of the game and how many games will be produced in the initial run.
Naramata Bench wineries are part of the BeadTrail, a network of tourist attractions in the Okanagan region, which each have their own unique beads for tourists to collect on a chain, similar to a charm bracelet, and the bead-collecting concept is an integral part of the game.
Dias plans to uncork the tabletop version of Naramata at a Kickstarter event in early November, which will raise money to help the game evolve from the developmental stage into actual production. The digital version Naramata is already completed, which will work on game platforms Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator in the next month, and Dias has nearly worked out all the rules for the tabletop version.
He’s lined up a Chinese manufacturer to produce the tabletop version and package it for sales in stores. Dias figures it will sell for between $60 and $70. Retailers will get a 50 per cent discount if they buy six or more of the games.
If the game is successful, Dias has plans to develop other versions centred around other wine-producing areas. The Niagara region in Ontario in one possibility and he’s already been approached about building a game that targets Napa Valley, north of Oakland, Calif.
“Because of COVID, the wineries in Naramata didn’t open until June, about three months late, and when we went down there in August they were packed,” said Dias. “But there’s no doubt they’ve been hurt financially this year and this is one of the ways to help them. We want the game to be popular down in the Okanagan and in Canada, but what I really want is people in France to pick up Naramata as a wine game and then go there sometime.”
