Kaz

As of late, some members of The Rumble Pack crew have become hopeless addicts. No I’m not talking about The Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft. I’m talking about our obsession with games that harken back to simpler times–before pixelshaders, bumpmapping and poly-counts.

We have become boardgamers.

Which is, like, at least a couplesteps above LARPers.

For me board games have been bred into me. I’m sure my DNA resembles Backgammon more than a helical. In fact, I recall fondly finding a stash of my families old dusty board games in the hallway closet as a kid. I remember my dad teaching me how to play Stratego, Backgammon and Risk. And the few memories of my grandfather that I have almost always involved teaching me Chess (which was more of a brutal beat down than “teaching”).

 Since board gaming has become all the rage again where I live I thought I’d take some time to present the cool finds that we’ve been making here in my blog. Maybe you’ll give them a chance if you’re so inclined.

Without further adieu:

Puerto Rico (2002, Andreas Seyfarth)

I picked up this game upon the recommendation of the site: BoardGameGeek (this site also had the pictures of the game I’m using here to illustrate what it looks like). Not that it’s the hot new title out there (it is almost 6 years old) but many on that site claimed that it stands the test of time. It also was very different from the other style of games that we had been playing so the combination of the two factors made it a very easy purchase.

I’ve only played one game so far but I liked what I saw in that game. After only a couple of rounds of play everyone at the table (Tony and Tom were playing) seemed to get the basic rules and we all developed our own simple strategies. Which is the sign of a deep game; our strategies were formed as very inexperienced players, yet none of them dominated and none floundered (except when Tom kept getting screwed early in the game). It seems that the game is setup up for many plays with varying strategies.

The basic premise of the game is that you are a plantation owner on the burgeoning island of Puerto Rico, you need to out ship or trade your rivals to get the most amount of goods back to the Old World. In gameplay elements: you need to collect and manage colonists, plantations, buildings to create goods (of five different types) to ship away for victory points. The total amount of victory points you have the game end is your score, and, clearly, the person with the most wins the game.

Here’s the basic setup of the game to give you an idea of the components you get:

The main feature of the game that (at the time it was released) was incredibly innovative was the turn selection mechanic. There are 8 roles (in a 5 player game) that players choose to take different actions, choosing starts with the player who has the governor card (determined by die roll at game start) and goes around the table, until all players have a role at which point the three leftover roles get a doubloon (the game’s currency) which the next player to choose them gets, the roles are returned to the central pot and the governor cards moves to the next player in clockwise order and the turn starts again. When a role is selected all players get to take the action associated with it, but the player that selected the role gets a bonus for doing so. In effect, each round lets you take 5 actions total, one of which has a bonus since you picked it.

The roles let you build buildings or expand your plantation or get more colonists and so on. Each round is a balance of guessing what your opponents will select and determining which role advances your position relative to your opponents. The best part of the game and the most strategic is that when you select a role you must consider that everyone benefits from the choice, everyone gets the action, you have to choose when to take roles that help you the most.

Here’s what your board will look like in the middle of the game:

So we all went about making our little empires of goods. And everyone had a different strategy going. Tom started the game and took a quarry; which provides discounts to building so he immediately set out to fill his city with buildings. Jard ended up with a hybrid strategy of building and trading the most expensive good: Coffee. Tony, as when we play Settlers of Catan, went for a monopoly. In this case a sugar monopoly, or sug-opoly. I set out to maximize the goods I could send back to the Old World, focusing on three goods (corn, sugar and tobacco) and producing them in bulk. My girlfriend tried to obtain a way to make one of each good providing variety for trading and shipping.

Each strategy had clear benefits but at least for me I noticed flaws. I felt cash starved through the early game, and in the late game both my girlfriend and Tony had a cash surplus. Ultimate my girlfriend tied in victory points with me but won based on the tiebreaker of cash and goods. But the best part of the game was the varied strategies and tactics made the game very close. The total point spread was 49 for last place and 53s for first and second. A tight game indeed.

Based on the fact that I can’t wait to play again (maybe I can con people into it tonight) in the face of an overwhelming amount of video games I want to get to makes me assuredly recommend this game to anyone interested in getting a board game. If you don’t think board games are your cup of tea, then I’d recommend lighter fair. My only pre-game recommendation is to read the rulebook’s description of each building, the tiles that you get don’t have a full enough description to go by. In fact, this fact made Tom’s buy buildings till you drop strategy very difficult and confusing.

Otherwise:

I give Puerto Rico a 5-full-trading-ships out of 5…uh…not full trading ships?

 Oh, just get the game already!