Review Summary: The classic that every gaming collection must have now also includes its expansions. Shame on the publisher for presenting such mediocre production values however.
Blurb from the publisher: 'The classic Puerto Rico game, winner of numerous national and international game prizes, now with redesigned content! Includes both expansions, 'New Buildings' and 'The Nobles'.
In 1493 Christopher Columbus discovered the easternmost island of the Great Antilles. About 50 years later, Puerto Rico began to really blossom.
Which roles will you play ins this new world? Prospector? Mayor? Settler? Trader? Whatever you do, you have one goal: to achieve the greatest prosperity and highest reputation!
Who will have the most fruitful plantations? Who will build the most impressive buildings? And, who will earn the most victory points?'
What you get: Your EUR 38 or equivalent will buy you the 2019 edition of Puerto Rico, the 150-minute, two to five player boardgame that firmly established the mechanics of role selection. The current edition includes both expansions, something that was not the case in the past. In fact, the expansions were rather hard to find.
The original game was first published in 2002, accumulated an incredible number of nominations and international prizes and, 18 years after its initial publication, still boasts of a place in BGG's top-25. No matter how one sees it, Puerto Rico is a modern classic.
In addition to the 16-page rulebook that can also be found on the publisher's website free of charge, the game also contains the following: 5 Player boards, 50 Goods tokens, 100 Colonists, 20 Nobles, 54 Coins, 58 Island tiles, 6 Ships, and 90 Buildings.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have played an unhealthy amount of Puerto Rico before I received a review copy of its current edition. I will try to compare the present edition to the original, even though I parted from my copy of the original a long time ago and I will have to count a lot on memory. In any event, this is not your average playtest.
Gameplay: It feels rather weird to explain a modern classic that has been wildly successful for 18 years but here we go. You win Puerto Rico by accumulating victory points when the game ends in one of three ways: one player builds in his 12th city space, the last VP token is taken, there are not enough colonists to fill the ship. Victory points are gained during the game, as well as at the end of the game via buildings built and large buildings occupied. Ties are broken by counting the sum of gold and doubloons.
Each player starts the game with his own play area hosting 12 fields and 12 city spaces, a number of doubloons dependent upon the number of players, as well as one plantation tile. The player that had the Governor card starts first by choosing a role. Each role grants the player who took it a special privilege. It also grants a specific action that every player can take in clockwise order. The player executes the special privilege, and the other players take the associated action in clockwise order if they wish. Once a role is taken by one player, it cannot be taken again by another player in the same round. There are always three more roles available than the number of players. Roles that were not chosen in a round receive one doubloon each, making them more desirable in future rounds.
There are seven roles to choose from: the Settler, the Mayor, the Builder, the Craftsman, the Trader, the Captain, and the Prospector (twice). As an example, the Builder's privilege is that the acting player pays one doubloon less for the building, while every other player that uses him may build something at normal price. Idem for the Trader ('sell one thing for one doubloon more' as opposed to 'sell one thing').
Being a machine building and optimization game, the idea behind Puerto Rico is to create a flow of raw materials, build the right buildings in order to handle them, manage them and ultimately sell finished goods. There are five different resources to cultivate (corn, tobacco, coffee, indogo, sugar), while quarries help reduce the cost of building.
A player can only have one building of each type. Once built, buildings cannot be removed, even though their location inside the city is grossly irrelevant and can be moved around in order to facilitate large buildings. Buildings are divided into coloured production buildings which roughly correspond to one raw material each (corn has no production building), and beige buildings like the Hospice, the Warehouse, the Hacienda etc. The buildings' limited numbers (two of each of the 12 small beige buildings and one each of the 5 large) means that no player can build everything. As expected, each building produces a different effect. The harbor gives you additional VPs every time you use the Captain, the Large Market gives the person using the Trader two additional Doubloons, while the Hacienda adds an additional plantation to your play area when using the Settler. The large buildings provide VPs at the end of the game just for being built, and even more VPs if they are occupied.
The New Buildings is the game's first expansion. It introduces 14 new buildings (12 small, 2 large, the former being repeated twice), as well as a controlled mechanism about the buildings that will be used in a given game. New buildings include the Aqueduct (gives bonuses when producing indigo or sugar), the Church (more VPs when building more expensive buildings), and the Statue (extra VPs).
The Nobles is the game's second expansion, and adds seven new beige buildings (e.g. the Land Office, the Chapel, and the Villa) and one new production building to the mix. Exhausting the colonist or noble supply no longer leads to the game's end. The colonist ship now also carries nobles in addition to colonists; these are worth one VP at the end of the game. Nobles behave like colonists overall, even though they produce special results when they occupy certain buildings. As an example, the new Royal Garden adds VPs for each noble on the player's island, but not for each colonist.
The strong points: If someone played Puerto Rico for the first time today, he might be wondering what all the furor is about; the role selection mechanic is an integral weapon in the arsenal of game design. Citadels and Twilight Imperium 4 are only two of the games that use the mechanic. When the game came out in 2002 however, and even though it was not the first game to use it, it was a revelation. Citadels might have come earlier, it was however a lighter game. Puerto Rico was involved, strategic, lengthy, a gamer's game that could lure you away into a world of plantations, pseudo-worker placement, and an abstract design that was adequately masked in order not scare those sceptical of euro designs. The experience was, and still is, incredibly tight. It is an optimization game for sure, a sprint to achieve the most possible in the least time possible by being as efficient as you can. It is not however a fully-fledged open information game, nor does it offer a predefined ending. Each play produces its own dynamics. It is not enough to have a plan; you should adapt to what the others are doing. You might not need a role, if you are however in dire straits it might be worth it to take a less efficient primary action which is showered in doubloons, in order to make a strong come back in your secondary actions on other players' roles. Even eighteen years ago the game had the foresight to realise that a) some roles are inherently weaker than others and b) some roles are circumstantially weaker to others. Then, it invented a way of making both relevant. This stuff doesn't get old, ever.
Choices are not however limited to the role you want to pick this turn or the next. What goods do you want to produce overall? What buildings do you approximately want to build, so that they can be put to use no matter what goods you start shipping out? The artificial scarcity that the game creates from the beginning is ingenious; either you will build what you want, or you will adapt the hard way because you can no longer build it. Large buildings are cool and provide many options, yet they limit your space. Are you ready to sacrifice an additional bonus for them? The answer should be positive of course, provided you balance things out and add value to your island.
The game does not have direct player interaction, it gives however the impression that it does. This is a result of both every player acting on each role, as well as the interdependency of the different buildings and plantations. As expected, said interaction invariably comes out as negative. That's exactly the way it should be. The game feels cut throat even when you are doing something as innocuous as building a construction hut, or choosing the Trader. Why? Because that other guy wanted the Trader so badly, because that extra doubloon would have afforded him that extra thing, and that construction hut was the last available and an integral part of that dude's strategy and now they have to think of something else. That's where Puerto Rico shines: your initial plan might have been good, you'd better be able however to think on your feet.
The game is not that hard to learn, it takes however a bit of time to teach seeing how all the meat is in the interconnections between roles, colonists on buildings, and the goods being slowly produced. For anybody who is interested into an advanced game of both strategy and tactics, even learning the game can be a memorable experience.
Both expansions are solid, even though they are not as imperative to the base game as other expansions are for their respective games. The Buildings expansion addresses itself to those that want to freshen up their Puerto Rico experience with a few rounds of calculated pre-drafting. Nobles adds an extra layer of calculation, with dudes that behave almost, but not exactly like, the already existing dudes. Nice, even though in my statistically insignificant playtests I noticed just a bit of shoehorning into a particular way of thinking, when the base game does nothing of the kind. The fact that there is no pre-drafting in the second expansion makes it more easy to swallow for players who are experienced enough yet who would feel uncomfortable about choosing buildings before the game starts.
The art is partially improved over the original game, at least when it comes to the plantations and their aesthetics. The box includes zip-lock bags to store its components. A nice gesture, it is however hardly adequate, taking into account how mediocre the components are. Keep on reading.
The weak points: Puerto Rico is a thinking man's game, and it is prone to leading its players to overthink it. Analysis paralysis is very likely to rear its ugly head. In other games I would have recommended a timer. Here, it wouldn't work well. A gentle nudge should do the trick if you start realizing that each player needs more than a minute to play.
Don't expect to win your first few games against more experienced opponents. I won't go as far as to say that the game has established openings; the few random aspects take care of that. It has however concepts that make your life easier when they are adhered to. As an example, building large buildings too early will reduce the efficiency of your economy. Things can be built at the wrong time, leading to high opportunity costs. On the other hand, a single mistake is unlikely to throw you out of the game, and there are definitely worse offenders than Puerto Rico in that respect. Just accept that you need to commit in order to excel in it.
Irrespective of whether you want to use the expansions or whether you want to limit yourself to the tight elegance of the base game, I am very happy that the game's new edition includes everything in the same box. These expansions were rather hard to find in the past. That having been said, the pre-drafting minigame of the first expansion can take a bit of time, either the because the players are not that experienced, or because they are too experienced. I am not suggesting that this is a bad thing; just don't be surprised if one game of Puerto Rico eats up your whole session.
I am furious by the treatment the game got in this edition when it comes to components and production value. The publisher treated Puerto Rico as if it is an untested design, as if it poses risks when it comes to its commercial viability, and marketed it with outright mediocre, if not worse, components. The art is ok, it is not however better than that of the original. The drawings on each role were emblematic, and immediately recognizable from far away: a ship's wheel for the captain, a cart for the settler, a half-built wall for the builder. Now each character is actually designed at his trade, the designs however are so small as to become meaningless and not easily recognizable at all. Referencing them on the side of the player board is harder than it used to be. I do not see any advantage in swapping the fields and the city locations on the map. Even though it does not come out as flimsy, the cardboard is too thin for this game. The play areas are equally mediocre. The cardboard markers use inappropriate fonts which cannot be clearly seen from far away. The fonts' size add further insult to injury, as if the game addresses itself to airplane pilots only. The plastic inner tray is as generic as they get. When you put the game's components into zip lock bags, they barely fit the box. Speaking of the box, it's light, as in very light cardboard. Leave a heavier game on top of it for a while, and it is sure to bend. It is as if somebody telegraphed the practical, technical aspects of the game's production while half asleep. For that stunt alone, I am docking one full point from the game's style, and no, I wouldn't have done it in any other game. I find it inconceivable that a company treats one of the world's most successful games, and consequently, its customers, in such a disrespectful way, when even average games nowadays come out with droolworthy components. I didn't expect that. Shame.
Conclusion: Puerto Rico is one of the best games in the modern era. Many have followed it in utilizing the role selection mechanic, few however are as firmly and cleanly established on it. Even though the components in this current, risk-free edition, leave something to be desired and bring the overall grade down, it belongs to every library, and even more so because it now includes by default its previously published expansions.
For more info on Puerto Rico visit Rio Grande Games at http://riograndegames.com.
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