Review #3: Puerto Rico

# of Players: 2-5
Playtime: 1-2 Hours

Core Mechanic: Role Selection

Theme: City Building
Type: Euro

Weight: Medium-Heavy

Year: 2002

Rating: 9.5*

When I first started playing modern board games, the three games at the top of the BoardGameGeek All-Time rankings were Agricola, Puerto Rico, and Twilight Struggle.  Having already played Agricola and with minimal interest in a two-player Cold War simulation, I decided that my next game would be this "classic" shipping game, considering it was already a few years old.

This is a relatively straightforward role-selection game where the starting player picks a role to do an action with a bonus, and then everyone else gets to perform that action as well, but without the bonus. Then the next player picks from the remaining available roles, and so-on until the round ends. Unpicked roles get a doubloon (coin) added to them as incentive to be picked the next round and the game continues until the city size is maxed out or the colonist or VP pool is exhausted, at which point the player with the most victory points is the winner.

To get victory points, you want to construct buildings or ship goods. Picking the “Builder” role allows you to construct buildings that build up your production engine and are worth victory points. You will need to pick the “Settler” role to create plantations that, with the correct activated buildings, will allow you to produce goods when the “Craftsman” role is selected.  To activate the plantations and buildings, the “Mayor” role will need to be selected to place colonists. Then you can either sell your goods for doubloons, which allows you to buy buildings, by selecting the “Trader” role or ship your goods for victory points by selecting the “Captain” role.  If you are desperate for money, you can select the less than ideal “Prospector” role which only becomes worthwhile after it has been passed over a few times.

This all comes together in a wonderfully strategic package where the only randomness is in the draw of the plantation tiles.  However, as more experienced players will point out, this game depends significantly on player order. When selecting your role, a lot of thought has to be given into what role you think the players after you will be selecting based on your own selection.  For example, if you select “Craftsman” you may be giving the player after you a lot of victory points if they are able to select “Captain” after your turn. This is where a lot of the strategy bubbles up from and when playing with new players, it is possible for a more experienced player who selects his or her role after a new player to gain a significant advantage due to the lack of familiarity of how the roles interact with each other. But isn't this true of all games, where experience trumps and you just need to play more?

Although far from a gateway game, the rules are simple enough that I would consider teaching this to relatively new gamers who want to try their hand at something tipping into the heavier end of the spectrum.  Even though experienced players may run away with the score the first couple games, instructing new players to play in such a way to make sure that whatever they do benefits them more than the player after them will help to overcome the player order bias.

After all these years, this is still one of my favorite games as it is pretty easy to teach, there is deep strategy, and it plays quickly compared to my other high-ranking games. The Limited Anniversary has definitely given this classic a new coat of paint as well. Without a doubt, this game belongs in the Essentials and Collector collections, but also the Middleweight and Heavyweight collection. The role selection has inspired numerous other games since, demonstrating how influential this game is.