Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is a great game, one of the best I have ever played and certainly worthy of recommendation. The game is beautifully produced has a strong theme and offers deep strategy with many potential paths to victory.

Each player has an individual game board depicting the island of Puerto Rico and the city of San Juan. Players found plantations and quarries on the island and construct buildings in the city of San Juan. Plantations produce goods that can be traded for money or shipped for victory points. Quarries allow buildings to be constructed at a cheaper cost whilst the buildings themselves confer certain privileges that are crucial in the progression of the game. Buildings also carry victory points at game end. Quarries, plantations and buildings only become active after they have been occupied by settlers.

Progression in the game is determined by players taking turns at choosing various roles, Trader, Builder, Settler etc and taking the actions associated with those roles.

A nice feature of the game is that every player moves at every turn. So if player one chooses the Builder role everyone gets a chance to build. This increases involvement in the game and prevents any “downtime” waiting for other players to take their turn.

Puerto Rico allows a real wealth of strategy and provides many possible paths to victory. You can have one player basing a strategy on trading and building whilst another bases their strategy on production and shipping and each has an equal chance of victory. There is also constant competition for resources: limited numbers of buildings; limited opportunities to ship or trade and so on.

The game quite simply gets better every time you play it. It is also worth mentioning that despite being sold as a 3 to 5 player game Puerto Rico actually plays quite well as a 2 player game as well.

Thoroughly recommended!

Puerto Rico is definitely not a game for the faint hearted. It’s one of the most complex and engaging strategy games I’ve come across. The most interesting aspect of the structure of the game is the rotation of roles throughout. It's played in rounds, and at the beginning of each there's a new governor, who chooses a role for that turn of play: settler, mayor, builder, craftsmen, trader or captain. Each role affords a certain advantage, a particular function, and during the round, each player must fulfil that particular function. Once all players have done so, the next player gets to pick a role card and the same thing happens again. At the end of the round, the governor card goes to the next player in clockwise order.

Players have to sell goods, purchase plantations &/buildings, load ships, place colonists to plantations and other buildings. These various actions results in the player getting victory points and at the end of the game, the person with the most points wins.

Puerto Rico is a game for 2-5 players; it works best with 3-4. It will take an hour or two to play and has only a small element of chance. It rewards strategic thinking, and is not a party game. The balanced design usually leaves the outcome of the game in question up to the final round, when the losing players all wish they could have had just one more round to take the lead. It’s an excellent game for those of you who enjoy strategy type games.

Positives –

Game Mechanics are very clear and function well. A player selects one of the seven roles, they then perform the function get a bonus for choosing it, every other player then gets to performs the function. This role is then unavailable for the rest of that round. Once every player has chosen and performed a role the starting player rotates.

Negatives -

Too many buildings
21 violet buildings that break the nice rules, consequently it is very important to understand every building and if/when it should be built. This is rather difficult for new players and requires 2 to 3 games before they really get the hang of it.

Strategies
Only 2 ways to gain victory points,
1)by shipping off lots of cheap goods, generally corn, problem you get no money
2)by building (produce expensive goods, sell them and then build), problem takes longer to get and produce goods.

Sum up
Good game with nice mechanics but not great with new players. There just isn't enough interaction with other players to make this game amazing. Some times feels that you don't have much control as you are forced to do certain functions.