Puerto Rico (game)

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Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico jeu 01.jpg
Game data
author Andreas Seyfarth
graphic Franz Vohwinkel (2002),
Harald Lieske (2011), (2014)
publishing company alea / Ravensburger
Publishing year 2002, 2011
Art Board game
Teammates 2-5
Duration about 2 hours
Age from 12 years

Awards

Puerto Rico is a strategy - board game for 3 to 5 players from the game designer Andreas Seyfarth which the 2002 Ravensburger -Spieleverlag label Alea appeared. In 2014 the game was relaunched by Ravensburger with a new design and two expansion modules. The game theme is the economic development of a Caribbean island . The players plant plantations , build buildings, produce goods, sell and ship them.

In addition to the German Games Prize won and many other awards, the game is ranked first in important player surveys for the best games or, since 2008, partly second behind Agricola .

According to the publisher, over 250,000 games had been sold worldwide by 2011.

Game material

Game components Puerto Rico
  • 1 building plan
  • 5 game boards
  • 49 building tiles
  • 58 plantation tiles
  • 50 goods stones in five colors (wood)
  • 100 colonist stones (wood)
  • 54 money doubloons (one and five)
  • 50 victory point chips (one and five)
  • 8 role cards
  • a governor card
  • 5 transport ship cards
  • a trading house card
  • a colony ship map
  • 12-page rules of the game

Puerto Rico is equipped with numerous accessories, including in particular wooden game pieces and cardboard cards.

Backstory

The game takes players to the Caribbean , Puerto Rico , the easternmost island in the Greater Antilles . After Christopher Columbus discovered the island in 1493, the island experienced its first economic boom for half a century. Each player now takes on different roles, he expands his city of San Juan , brings colonists to the island, sets up plantations for the production of corn , indigo , sugar , tobacco and coffee , sells and finally ships the produced goods to the old world.

Game flow

Each player has his own game board on which you can build plantations and buildings. Plantations and production buildings produce raw materials. Additional buildings can bring various advantages to the player. The game material used varies with the number of players.

The game takes place in several rounds. In each round, the starting player changes; he or she is the first to choose one of the following actions, which all players then carry out one after the other (with the exception of the prospector). The active player always has an advantage (for example he gets more money when selling).

  • The builder allows you to build a building for money doubloons .
  • With the settler you can take a new plantation from the display of randomly uncovered plantations.
  • The mayor brings new colonists into play. Only produce occupied plantations, and only when a building is occupied can you take advantage of it.
  • The goods come into play through the overseer . Each plantation with the associated production building produces a commodity if both the plantation and the production building are occupied by a colonist.
  • You can sell goods for money through the dealer . He accepts up to four goods, but not two of the same goods.
  • The captain forces all players to load the ships. One type of goods must always be completely loaded, but each ship can only take one type of goods and has a limited capacity. You get one victory point for each good, goods that are not loaded can be lost.
  • The prospector only brings a money doubloon to the active player.

As there are always more players, some of the actions on display are not chosen. At the end of the round, a money doubloon is added to these so that they are more attractive in the following rounds. The game ends when not enough colonists can be placed on the ship, all victory points have been distributed or a player has built his city with twelve buildings. The winner is whoever has the most victory points at the end of the game.

The buildings allow the players advantages in actions, for example, a shipyard can be used for the captain's action. Since there is only a limited number of (almost) all building types, these have a significant impact on the strategy.

Puerto Rico is a tactical trading and building game in which there is no random component, apart from the plantations available to choose from. In every round you have the problem that you would like to choose several of the actions in order to further advance your plantations. So you need to plan ahead in order to build your plantation properly and to sell your goods properly. But despite all the planning, the teammates' choice of action always leads to surprises, which forces you to rethink your strategy.

Extensions and Variants

Variation for two players

Even if, according to the instructions, the game can only be played by three players or more, the publisher has official instructions that make the game playable for two players. When working out the rules, emphasis was placed on ensuring that no new game material is required for the two-player variant, that the original rules are largely retained and that the change is not too serious. The changes mainly consist of an adaptation of the game material used, so many pieces and cards are simply set aside before the game.

New buildings

The Ravensburger Spieleverlag offers three-page instructions and graphics for new buildings for the game on the alea website. The total of fourteen new buildings offer the player even more strategic options. The new buildings were at times included as a supplement in the print edition of spielbox . In 2002 alea raffled five games signed by the author as part of a competition among all those who submitted building proposals. Furthermore, it is possible to create your own purple buildings with the help of alea's building generator. After you have entered the desired name, costs, victory points and description, this creates a printable graphic of the building in PDF format.

alea treasure chest

In 2009, Ravensburger Spieleverlag published an extensive expansion for Puerto Rico as part of the alea treasure chest . As expansion I: The new buildings contain the building tiles published in the magazine spielbox , now in printed form, as well as eight completely new building types. In addition, other types of people came into play under the title Expansion II: The Nobles .

Anniversary Edition

For the Essen game fair Internationale Spieltage 2011, a limited special edition was published to mark the tenth anniversary of the board game. In addition to revised, high-quality game material (metal coins, larger colonists and goods stones, stronger cardboard), this also contains the two expansions The New Buildings and The Nobles as well as the rules for the variant for two players .

San Juan

The card game San Juan , published in 2004, is a thematically similar game with individual mechanisms based on Puerto Rico . It is also from Andreas Seyfarth and is less complex than Puerto Rico.

development

Puerto Rico was first presented to the public as a prototype at the 2001 International Game Days, before launching a year later. Compared to other board games, game development took a long time due to the high complexity of the game, and “the tests in Puerto Rico alone probably took more time than the entire development of Royal Turf and all the trimmings.” The graphics are by Franz Vohwinkel , who has illustrated more than 200 different board and card games. He also created the graphics for the card game offshoot San Juan .

criticism

In addition to the numerous awards and consistently good placements in important player surveys, Puerto Rico also performed very well in many independent online player reviews .

The “lack of interaction between the players” is criticized in places . It is often difficult to keep a leading player from winning.

The author himself sees Puerto Rico as his best game in terms of design, but technically he prefers the shorter card game San Juan .

computer game

In 2006 bhv Software released a Windows PC version that was developed by Dartmoor Softworks . This 1: 1 implementation of the game offers the player either a classic board view or a 3D mode. The game also includes 24 new buildings and can be played against computer opponents as well as against other people in multiplayer mode. Alea, Ravensburger and author Andreas Seyfarth as well as Stefan Brück were actively involved in the PC implementation.

After it had long been possible in the board game world to play the game online against other players, this offer was discontinued in 2007 after Ravensburger transferred the rights to the electronic implementation to Microsoft . To date, it is still unclear whether Microsoft is currently developing a computer game implementation. Since January 31, 2010 the game can be played again in the board game world.

Ravensburger has been selling a version of the game for the Apple iPad developed by Codito Development since 2011 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ List of the best rated games on [1]
  2. ↑ Aaron's Top 100
  3. ↑ Currently at aleaspiele.de on September 19, 2011
  4. ↑ Instructions for 2 players (pdf)
  5. ↑ New buildings at alea
  6. ↑ Puerto Rico Building Generator at alea
  7. ↑ Extensions in abundance: The alea treasure chest at Ravensburger ( Memento of the original from February 25, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at rimaldo.com @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / rimaldo.com
  8. ↑ Puerto Rico - Limited anniversary edition at poeppelkiste.de
  9. ↑ Email interview with Strefan Brück
  10. ↑ Game review ( Memento of the original from August 27, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at spielbox.de @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.spielbox.de
  11. ↑ Game review at brettspiele-report.de
  12. ↑ Game review at reich-der-spiele.de
  13. ↑ Games review at gamesweplay.de
  14. ↑ Game review at michas-spielmitmir.de
  15. ↑ Interview ( Memento of the original from May 3, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. with Andreas Seyfarth (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.thedicetower.com
  16. ↑ Product manager Klaus Starke on the PC implementation in Puerto Rico
  17. ↑ Report on spielbox-online aktuell ( memento of the original from March 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.spielbox.de
  18. ↑ Puerto Rico - “reloaded” ( Memento of the original dated February 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at brettspielwelt.de @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.brettspielwelt.de