So you've got your feet wet. You've played Settlers, Carscassone, maybe you've played Cards Against Humanity. What comes next?
Puerto Rico was top of the BGG list for years, including when I started getting serious about boardgames. It has spawned a couple of different card games, but the unoffical one is better than San Juan. It's a medium-weight role selection game with lots of decisions and low down time. It plays 3-5 players, with an unofficial variant for 2, and it plays quite differently with each number of players. Among my original gaming group (which numbered 5), it became like chess, a game that we knew all so intimately it was like a language. Most games will take just under two hours, but your first will be longer. My fastest game was 40 minutes.
In Puerto Rico, you collect VP (victory points), by either manufacturing and shipping goods,called "shipping", or by constructing buildings (for VP and special abilities), called "building". Each round, the Governor (first player, marked with a red flag token) gets to choose first from the available roles: Settler, Builder, Mayor, Craftsman, Trader, Captain and Prospector. Every other person then executes the same action that the governor took, in clockwise player order. Once everyone has spent their turn, then the next player selects from the remaining available roles. After every player has picked a role and all the actions resolved, the roles reset, the three unchosen roles each get a doubloon, and the flag moves to the left.
Settler: Players choose from the available plantations: corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco, and coffee.
Builder: Players use money (doubloons) to buy buildings that either refine indigo, sugar, tobacco, and coffee into trade goods, OR buildings that give special abilities. All buildings give VP. The most expensive buildings give bonus VP based on certain scoring areas.
Mayor: Players recieve "colonists" to work the plantations and buildings. If there are no colonists on a plantation or building, then it doesn't work. This is the only questionable part of this game. If you're uncomfortable with the games pieces essentially representing colonial era slaves, than I can't really do anything for you. They're just disks.
Craftsman: Populated cornfields and paired populated indigo, sugar, tobacco and coffee plantations and buildings produce barrels of trade goods.
Trader: Players take turns selling a trade good. Corn is worth the least, coffee the most. This is the way most of the money in the game is made (which is then used to buy buildings)
Captain: Players take turns placing trade goods on ships bound for Spain. Each barrel is worth 1 VP, regardless of type.
What makes this game great is that even though there is very little randomness (the order/availability of the plantations), there is a lot of variation in strategy. The war between players who pursue the building strategy and those who pursue the shipping strategy plays out differently every game and player order is just as important to decision making as board state. There is no direct conflict in this game, but even so, players can have a great effect on their opponents' boards. All the game mechanics dovetail nicely into the theme (unlike a lot of games which seem to have mechanics pasted on), without being hampered by it. An elegant system that makes you feel like a badass for making your opponent ship the coffee she had been trying to sell for the last three turns, even though you're just moving around little wooden "barrels".
After you've played a few rounds, it will click. After you've played a few games, you'll want to introduce this game to all your friends.
I love this game. It isn't without it's problems, but its got a lot of interesting decisions, and is kind of the grand-daddy of modern German Boardgaming.
Welcome to Eurogames.
No comments:
Post a Comment