Puerto Rico | Great Board Game

Puerto Rico | My favorite board game

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Murder in Coweta C... Mad Hot Ballroom The Maya, Seventh ... A First Course in ... Puerto Rico

	Puerto Rico Rio Grande Rio Grande, 2007 average customer review:based on 68 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The players are plantation owners in Puerto Rico in the days when ships had sails. Growing up to five different kind of crops: Corn, Indigo, Coffee, Sugar and Tobacco, they must try to run their business more efficiently than their close competitors; growing crops and storing them efficiently, developing San Juan with useful buildings, deploying their colonists to best effect, selling crops at the right time, and most importantly, shipping their goods back to Europe for maximum benefit. A novel game system lets players choose the order of the phases in each turn by allowing each player to choose a role from those remaining when it is their turn. No role can be selected twice in the same round. The player who selects the best roles to advance their position during the game will win.

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Great Board Game

I recently picked this board game up because I was looking for a board game that relied more on strategy than chance. I chose Puerto Rico based on its long running position as first on the boardgamegeek ratings. This game has not disappointed. The best way to describe it is as an economic competition.

The objective of Puerto Rico is to see who can create and ship the most goods back to Europe before the game ends. You get points based on the number of goods shipped as well as the number of buildings, plantations, and colonists on your 'Puerto Rico'. In order to be successful you have to balance construction, colonist assignment, and sale or transport of goods. Additionally, with the round and phase system it uses for player moves, it ensures that every round looks a little different and players have to plan and adjust to the shifting order of phases.

Puerto Rico can be played with 3-5 players and the game feels different depending on how many people play. A 3-person game plays out much differently than a 5-person game. I've now played Puerto Rico with several different circles of friends and family and everyone has really enjoyed it. I highly recommend this game to anyone who is interested in a fun board game that requires strategy and planning.

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My favorite board game

I don't really have anything valuable to add that isn't already included in the other 65 positive reviews. This is by far my favorite board game. The first time you play Puerto Rico it is easy to get caught up in the game mechanics and lose sight of the ultimate goal, which is the get the most Victory points. However once you have completed a single game and seen value of your strategy measured in Victory points, the diversity and depth of strategies available become apparent and clear from the very beginning of your second game.

TIP:
Don't read ahead in the manual on your first game, it will only serve to overwhelm you.

If you are playing with others that have played before then at the beginning of each of your turns read what you need to play that turn. Most importantly don't read while everyone else plays, instead watch what they do and how they play their turn.

If your with an entire group who has never played before, then walk through the setup steps, and then read the instructions for each phase as you get to it. Learning will be very easy this way and you will be playing without the rules in by the middle of the first game.

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A great game overall!!!!! the best i have play...

This is the best game i have play in my life!!! at first it a little hard to understand but once you learn everything it becomes addictive ...i recommend this game to everybody..so what are you waiting for!!!!

One of the best

This is one of the best strategy board games I have ever played. In it, you and your opponents are engaged in an economic competition in colonial Puerto Rico. The object of the game is to obtain the most victory points, which are earned primarily by shipping crops overseas that your plantations have produced, and by constructing buildings in your corner of the island.

There are two things about this game that make it interesting for me. First, there is only a very small element of randomness to the game. Almost everything that happens is the direct result of the choices that you and your opponents make. Secondly, there are a number of different strategies that can be employed. The strategy you select is important, but equally important is your ability to adapt your strategy to what other players are doing. Directly competing against another player for the same thing is often less advantageous than finding a unique path that won't be impeded by your opponents.

The biggest downside to this game is the learning curve. New players are often turned off by the number of different rules and options that must be learned in order to be an effective player. Once you've gotten a hang of the basics, this is a very challenging and stimulating game.

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However grand, never more than a game

It was a muggy July afternoon when I last played Puerto Rico. I was at the club, sitting in one of the high-backed chippendales by a yawning fireplace that had been extinct since March. The ceiling fans fought the thick air, but made about as much progress as a platoon of Frenchmen at the Somme. I absently shuffled the pieces around the board in a form of "Puerto Rico solitaire" invented out of unfortunate necessity.

My solitary game was played in honor of an absent opponent who, rest his soul, I had known in the war, yet my mind was not on military matters. The tiny cardboard vision of Puerto Rico which lay before me--fertile with corn and beautiful as a salsa dancer asway--had conjured up memories of the days after the war, when I had returned to the states only to be immediately shipped abroad by my new employer, the United Fruit Company.

Compared to my previous occupation, the life--and the money--was easy. It was nothing but seersucker suits, sprawling haciendas, and cold daiquiris. But United Fruit did not want me to fill the settler role. I was to be an overseer, in charge of two hundred people who meant no more to the company than a pile of small brown disks.

There was one small disk that I knew better than the others. Manuel. We formed an immediate bond when he met me at the dock and helped me unload my trunks from the steamer. He quickly became a sort of personal porter and valet and, eventually, a friend. But as a new arrival, I didn't realize how desperately poor these people were. How Manuel, in pursuit of the American greenback, would go directly from laying out my linen suit and fine straw hat at my hacienda to an overnight shift at the large sugar mill. Poor man must have slept an hour a night. Eventually, his lungs filled with sugar dust from that grueling labor.

But the taste was anything but sweet for Manuel.

He left behind a widow and six orphan disks with nothing to support them but a lousy handful of dollars and nothing to look forward to but a life of toil in the very mill that had taken their father.

I had to deliver the news to his widow and it was there, standing on the stoop of her miserable hovel, that I first felt ashamed of my fancy suit. I realized that no amount of blood-sugar could sweeten the acidic taste of ill-gotten daiquiris. I resolved that from that moment forward, I could not in clear conscience perform another iota of work for United.

When I snapped out of my reverie I saw that I was in grave danger of losing the game as the chips were quickly accruing to the vile Captain.

But in a way, we had all already lost. Not just Manuel and the pitiful orphans he left behind, but me as well. Yes, it was as though I had been set on a path toward loss long before I ever heard of that enchanted land.

Puerto Rico.

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