Puerto Rico

We were given Puerto Rico for Christmas 2013. It's a strategy game for three to five players, and one that we've played perhaps once a month over the past year.

It takes a while to set up; there are lots of little cards representing plantations, buildings, gold ('doubloons') and victory points, as well as little wooden pieces for people and barrels of crops. Different numbers of some of these are needed for different numbers of players, and the buildings have to be sorted and placed on the central game board before starting.

Nonetheless, it's an interesting game, and one that has gradually grown on us as we've realised the potential for different ways of playing.

Each player has a board with spaces for plantations and buildings. In each round, every player chooses a 'role': the mayor brings more people to the islands, the settler digs more plantations, the craftsman produces and harvests crops, the trader sells crops, and the captain exports them to other lands. Strategies, broadly, either focus on getting plenty of crops to export or in getting as many buildings as possible, since these are the two ways of gaining victory points.

The rules are quite lengthy and highly detailed; it took us a game or two to get the overall feel of how it works, and we then re-read the rules and discovered one or two ways in which we had been playing incorrectly. 

This shows a game as it nears the end. Many of the building cards from the central board have been bought and populated (the little brown circles are the people) and piles of the little red-rimmed hexagonal victory points have been collected. 

It's a good game where tactical skills are at least as important as overall strategy. There's no real overt competition, other than thinking, before taking one's role, what will most benefit oneself while not helping the others so much.  There's no trading between players, no way of spoiling someone else's chances other than by forcing crops to be exported rather than sold; or, perhaps, by buying a building someone else wants - but that's surprisingly rare. 

What I like best is that there's no scoring until the end. We sometimes have an idea of who's winning, but it's never certain until we finish and start adding up, as victory points are turned upside down. I've sometimes played a buildings strategy and won with a lot of points for my buildings, but that doesn't always work.

Puerto Rico is recommended for players of age thirteen and over; I think that's about right. It certainly wouldn't be suitable for anyone who couldn't read well and think fairly fast, but while some strategically-minded children of around ten might be able to play it, I suspect that many under thirteen or so would find it a bit complex, maybe even dull. 

A game takes about an hour, and we find it far from dull: now we're familiar with the mechanics, we can chat while playing, and like it very much. It's not a game for casual players, or for introducing as a quick after-dinner game; the setup is a bit slow, and new players will be at a disadvantage as it's not really clear how different tactics work until a few games have been played. 

But for a family who like this kind of tactical strategy game, I would recommend it highly.