Puerto Rico runs on Windows operating systems. Some displays not running at 1600x1200 may require a patched version of the computer program to run properly; the patch is available from Eagle's Puerto Rico page.

The Gameplay

The Puerto Rico computer game faithfully reproduces the gameplay of the original Puerto Rico game.

The object of Puerto Rico is ultimately to build up your city of San Juan and ship back crops to the homeland. This is done by buildng plantations, factories, and a number of other buildings to support your plans, and by taking roles which allow all players to take certain actions.

The computer game of Puerto Rico also includes all of the buildings from the expansion. You can choose to use the original set of buildings, a selected set of buildings, or a random assortment. These new buildings replace or supplement the ones found in the original game.

See my reviews of Puerto Rico and the expansion for more information on the gameplay.

Ways to Play Puerto Rico

There are three ways to play Puerto Rico: versus AI, versus hotseat players, and on the 'net.

AI: You can play against up to four AI opponents, ranked as either "beginner", "amateur", or "professional". I've only played against the "professional" players and they're OK. They've beat me sometimes, I've beat them sometimes, and I feel like if I played more attention to my Puerto Rico games I could beat them much more regularly. I suspect that casual Puerto Rico players (like me) will find them plenty challenging, while more experienced players may be disappointed.

Hotseat: Up to five players can play Puerto Rico hotseat. Victory points are kept semi-hidden on the screen to try and keep this fair, which is a nice touch.

Network: I haven't tried out the networking, but it's done in the real-time gaming model: one player creates a server and other players create clients that connect to it. I find this disappointing in some ways because there wasn't even an attempt to create a central hosted location where you could find other Puerto Rico players.

If you have friends that you'd like to play against in distant locations, however, you'll probably find the networked play useful.

The Game Design

Puerto Rico is a superb board game with many different routes to victory, and varying & meaningful strategic paths that will change from game to game, depending on your setup.

In many ways, this makes it an ideal candidate for a boardgame-to-computergame conversion, because the game has sufficient depth of play and sufficient replayability to keep you interested. The inclusion of the Puerto Rico expansion is much appreciated and just increases that replayability.

In some ways Puerto Rico is also a very challenging game to convert. In a tabletop game of Puerto Rico there's a lot of information on the table, and that's hard to all squish onto a computerscreen. In addition, there's a constant stream of actions that you need to track, which is another challenge in this type of conversion. The computer game ends up doing well in the display, but less-so in the data reporting, as further discussed in The User Experience, below.

Looking at the superb design of the original Puerto Rico gameplay, the good selection of ways to play it, the decent AI, and the inclusion of the expansion to increase replayability, I find that Puerto Rico: The Computer Game earns a full "5" out of "5" for Substance, just like the board game did.

The User Experience

Besides the actual gameplay, Puerto Rico inclueds tutorials and high-score lists.

Tutorials: A set of tutorials expaining the game, all the buildings, the roles, and the special 3D views included with the game. I found the main game descriptions a little rough, but the building-by-building descriptions are excellent, and the role explanations include snippets of gameplay, showing you clearly how to use the interface.

High-score Lists: Puerto Rico uses simple high score lists to memorialize the winners of Puerto Rico games. It furthers separates them into a list for each number of players and whether expansions were used or not. I don't find these sorts of listings very exciting, but it's nice to have a record of what was done.

(I'd prefer it if more games used ranking systems, such as those found on the Carcassonne computer game, and the online Ticket to Ride.)

Graphics & UI

2D Graphics: The original Puerto Rico game really isn't high on graphical design, and so the developers of this computer game had to do some work to create an attractive control panel. They generally did a great job. There's some nice texturing on the 2D control panel, with wood and rope highlighting various areas.

2D graphics have been created for each of the plantation tiles, while 3D pictures have been created for each of the building tiles. The plantation tiles threw me at first, because they look very different from the original game, but once I figured out what was what it all became very easy to use

Overall, the 2D control panel is very attractice.

The downside of the 2D graphics is that there's only space to show one opponent (and yourself) in full. However graphical shorthand is used to list the goods and money for everyone else. There's a bit of information overload, but you get used to it.

3D Graphics: The game also offers a second way to view the game: a 3D view which shows all of an individual player's buildings in 3D that you can zoom around in. I can't imagine this screen being at all useful since you don't even see the names of the buildings without clicking in on them. So, all you're left with is eye candy. It's kinda neat being able to look at an aerial view of your island, but on a purely one-time basis. The best thing I can say about this feature is that it's very easy to ignore, and you will.

Audio: A fairly simple background tune is complemented by individual effects for some of the game events. Unfortunately these effects aren't used to good effect, and so you don't have a clear tone marking the start of your turn or alerting you to events that you should be aware of. Instead they seem somewhat haphazard.

User Interface: Unfortunately the user interface really detracts from the game experience, making the game hard to play, at least for me personally.

The main problem is that it has no focus and no emphasis. An imperative appears at the top left of the screen whenever you need to do something, but nothing particularly draws your attention to the brown-on-brown text. There's also a log of what's going on at the bottom left of the screen, but you only get to read four lines at a time (unless you let it cover the vitally important information about the other players' current status). In addition I find the listing just about impossible to read because it's line after line of white on orange text with no bolding, no italics, no paragraph breaks, no icons, and no colors. This could have been made so much easier to read with just a few of the above elements, but they're not there.

This all becomes more of a problem because of how the game deals with other players' turns. It just whizzes by them, sometimes not even pausing for you to take your own actions, if there's an obvious answer (e.g., you can't trade, or the goods you must ship are predestined). About the only thing that's easy to see is the construction of buildings, since the game uses a little swirly icon to indicate those, and pauses briefly. For most other phases of the game, things go by so fast that you either have to go back and read the log afterward or just shrug your shoulders and figure that maybe the other players' turns weren't that important.

There are two solutions to this, but neither really works. First, there's a "delay" option which lets you change a delay in the game, but that unfortunately only affects the drawing of the buildings, and so the build phase gets slowed down, but not all of the other phases which whiz by. And it also slows things down when you take actions. The other option is to say you want to confirm after every player's turn. This drove me crazy the one time I tried it, but it's what I would do if I really wanted to pay attention to the game (though I suspect I'd have to keep reading the hard-to-read log to really know what's going on).

I should note that this experience entirely comes about from plays against the AIs. Real players would go a lot slower, and so you might be able to see what they were doing better, though i suspect you'd still have to pay very close attention.

There are some other minor annoyances with the interface, but it's mainly this issue, of not being able to see what other people are doing that drags the game down. It leaves me with a intense feeling of isolation during the game, and it makes it hard to really figure out what's going on.

When it's actually your turn, the interface works well enough. You're told at the top left what to do, and often there's something highlighted or blinking to help you along. (The highlights and blinks are very useful, but they're scattered all over the screen, so that you sometimes have to look at everything to figure out what to do.) It's a simple click interface where you make selections, then eventually end your turn.

Player Helpers: Puerto Rico keeps count of the remaining VP chips, colonists, and goods for you, which is helpful. I wish it offered an alert when you were getting dangerously close to the end of the game, but as is you just have to watch the numbers. There's nice mouseovers for what the buildings do on the building screen, which I find helpful for the expansion buildings that I haven't used that much. The computer also helpfully shows you just how much you have to spend when you're building, adding up quarries, forest houses, privileges, and gold. None of this is a very big deal, but it's all helpful, and I don't know what else you'd want a Puerto Rico computer game to do for you.

Technical Issues: There are three small, but notable, technical issues that I'm aware of with the game. First the game doesn't run right on all systems out of the box because of a screen resizing issue. As mentioned above, the patch resolves that. Second, the graphics will be stretched on some large or oddly shaped LCD displays because the game only runs full-screen and uses pre-generated 2D graphics. Third, the game doesn't respond correctly to the Windows key or the Alt-Tab key which usually allow exit from a full-screen program.

Only the issue with the graphics is a real show-stopper, and probably only if you have a widescreen laptop, but the others are minor annoyances.

Puerto Rico gets a split rating for me on its Style. The graphics are beautiful and the information display is very good given the huge amount of information implicit in the game. I give that a Style rating of "5" (excellent!). However, at least for single-player play, I find the User Interface badly lacking in how it tells you what's going on. The information is all there, but it goes to fast for you to see AI turns, and it's not very easy to go back and review everything on your turn. That aspect I give a Style rating of "2" (needs work), with the comment that it is usable, and would be moreso if you either constantly clicked or else are willing to play without knowing everything that's happening.

Averaging these out, Puerto Rico earns a "3" out of "5" for Style. I'm really hoping that a future release makes it easier to follow AI plays. Just adding some color and some emphasis to various bits of text, and actually slowing down computer turns with the delay function would make all the difference in the world.

Conclusion

In many ways, Puerto Rico: The Computer Game is a good adaptation of Alea's classic game. It's got nice graphics, a good control panel that manages information well, and fair AI. Unfortunately it's also really hard to follow computer player turns because the game whizzes right through them, often giving you almost no visual cues as to what happened, requiring you to read a dense log or else not concern yourself with what the other players are doing. I personally find the game very hard to follow, but your mileage may vary, and it will definitely work better for network play with human opponents, who won't go nearly as fast.

Puerto Rico: The Computer Game was released into distribution, but if your local game store doesn't carry it, it's also available directly from Eagle Games.