Puerto Rico

9th February 2020

It's a Sunday and we're at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. There's no 50 Fathoms this week as 3 players are absent.

Instead we are playing 'Puerto Rico'.

William Shakespeare wrote:
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.​

Well if you happen to play a plantation owner in Puerto Rico, you will play 7 roles, I dunno about 7 acts though.

What's in a game?

• Game board: Not really a game board speaking conventionally, it's used to display all the game's buildings that available to be purchased by players and to store money.
• Player boards: Each player has their own board. These boards have 12 'city' spaces and 12 'plantation' spaces. There is a spot marked as 'San Juan'. There's also a spot marked with a 'windrose' 
• Role cards: There are cards for the 7 different types of role in Puerto Rico.
• Building tiles: There are a total of 49 buildings, 44 standard sized buildings and 5 large buildings. Each building has 1 to 3 little circular spaces for colonist markers.
• Plantation tiles: There are 5 different types of plantation, corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco and coffee. There are 58 of these tiles, but they are not distributed equally amongst the goods, there are slightly less of the more valuable plantations (Tobacco & Coffee) and slightly more of the less valuable plantations (Indigo & Sugar). Each tile has a little circular space for a colonist marker.
• Quarry tiles: Used to indicate quarries (Explained below.), there are 8 of them.
• Colonist markers: Little wooden discs used to represent colonists.
• Colonist tile: Used in conjunction with colonist markers.
• Goods tokens: Little wooden tokens to represent the 5 types of goods that the plantations produce. There are 50 of these tokens, like the plantation tiles they are not distributed evenly amongst the 5 types of goods.
• Trading tile: This tile has 4 spaces on it for 4 goods (When they are traded.).
• Ship tiles: There are 5 tiles to represent ships, they can store cargo. Each ship has a different amount of storage space, this range from 4 to 8 spaces. Although only 3 ships are ever used at one time.

There are also victory point markers, cash and a first player card, but these are self-explanatory.
The quality of the components is mostly quite good.
What artwork there is in the game is OK, but it's not particularly memorable or interesting.

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An empty player board.

Game board without small buildings on it.

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How's it play?
As always, we begin with setup. It looks quite long, but it's actually straightforward. 

• Put out the game board and place all the building tiles on their allotted places on the board.
• Put all of the money on the bank space on the game board.
• Shuffle all of the plantation tiles face-down and then put them randomly into 5 stacks, Put these stacks in a row next to the board. Then turn over tiles from the stacks face-up. There should a number of face-up plantations equal to the number of players +1.
• Place the quarry tiles in a stack face-up next to the row of plantation stacks.
• Put out the trading tile next to the game board.
• Put out the Colonist tile, place a number of colonists on the tile equal to the number of players. The remaining markers form a supply of colonists (The number used varies according to the number of players.)
• Put out 3 ships, the ships used depend on the number of players.
• Put out victory points chips, the number used depends again on the number of players.
• Put out all 7 role cards.
• Give each player a player board, some starting money and a starting plantation. This too is dependent on the number of players and turn order. Money and goods are stored on the windrose on a player's board.
• Finally determine a starting player.

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Early on in the game.

Investing heavily in Sugar early.

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In Puerto Rico there are 2 ways to earn victory points; by shipping goods out and buying buildings.
Each round, in turn order, each player will assume 1 of the 7 roles and carry out the action associated with that role. When a player chooses a role, all players can the also carry out that action, but the player who chose the role can do it's bonus action instead. When players chose a role, they take the relevant role card from the display.
The roles are:

• ​Settler: Starting with the active player, each may take a plantation from the available face-up tiles and place it on an empty space on their board. Once all players have taken their action, remaining plantation tiles are removed from play, new plantation tiles are drawn from the stacks and placed face-up. Bonus action; the player may take a quarry instead of a plantation (And place it on to an empty plantation space.).
• Mayor: Starting with the active player, each player takes a single colonist marker from the colonist tile, continue going round and doing this until all the colonists have been removed from the tile. Players can now place these colonists on to their plantations, quarries and buildings as they see fit. None of these can become active until at least 1 colonist is placed on them. Excess colonist markers are placed into 'San Juan' and can be moved out San Juan to fill empty spots during this action too. Once every player has take their colonist(s), the colonist tile is refilled, the number of markers placed on the tile is either; equal to all the empty circles on all the players' buildings (Plantations & quarries do not count.) or equal to the number of players - whichever is highest. Bonus action; before taking a colonist from the colonist tile, the active player may take an additional from the supply.
• Builder: Starting with the active player, each player may build (Buy.) 1 building from the game board. The cost for each building is shown on the tile, for each active quarry the player has in their plantation area, the cost is lowered by 1, thus the cost can be lowered to 0, although there are limits on how discount quarries confer. Once bought, the building tile is placed on to the player's city area. Bonus action; the player who chose this role can deduct a further 1 from the building cost.
• Craftsmen: When the Craftsmen role is chosen, starting with the active player, players may produce goods. To produce goods, a player must have both plantations and matching production buildings that are active. Furthermore, there must be at least as many colonists in the production buildings as in the plantations to produce all the goods. The exception is corn, that needs no production buildings All goods produced are placed on the windrose on a players game board. Bonus action; the player may produce 1 extra good of any good that they can already produce.
• Trader: Starting with the active player, each player may trade 1 good for money. The player takes the good from their windrose and places it on a space on the trading tile. Only 1 good can be traded and the same good cannot be traded twice. Nor can goods be traded if there are no spaces on the trading tile. Once all trading has concluded, if the trading tile has all 4 spaces filled with goods, then the goods are all removed. If there is at least 1 space available, then  no goods are removed. Bonus action; the player who chose the Trader role earns an extra coin for their trade.
• Captain: When the active player chooses the Captain role, then players must load all of their goods on to the 3 ships, however there are strict rules on how this is carried out. In turn order, starting with the active player, each player will load 1 type of good on to a ship, they must load as much of that type of good as possible. All of these goods must be loaded on to the same ship. If a ship already contains the type of good that the player is loading, then those goods must be loaded on to that ship. If no ship already has those goods, then they can be loaded on to an empty ship. Goods cannot be loaded on to ships that already have a differing type of good. If a ship is already completely loaded with the type of good a player is trying to load, or there are no empty ships, then that kind of good cannot be loaded. Play continues in turn order with players loading (Or not!) 1 type of good at a time until players have had the opportunity to load all their goods (Or not!). Players earn 1 victory point for each good they load - regardless of what type it is. Victory points are taken from the supply. Any player who has any goods left over when loading has ended must discard all of those goods except each player gets to keep a single good. Then, any ships which are full 'leave Puerto Rico' and a replacement ship arrives, essentially, the ship is emptied of its goods and is now an empty ship. Any ship that still has any space in its hold, remains how it is (Phew! It's not a complicated as it sounds!). Bonus action; the player who chose the Captain role gains an extra victory point when loading goods.
• Prospector: When the active player chooses this role... nothing happens! Really, nothing happens. Bonus action; the player who chose Prospector takes a coin from the supply (And possibly more - see below.).

Once all players have chosen a role for the round, a coin is placed on to any role card that was not selected in that round. A role card can accumulate multiple coins if it not chosen for consecutive round. If that role is taken in a later round, that player also acquires the coin(s). Since there are more role cards than players, coins will always be placed on at least 2 different role cards.

Players return their role cards and the next player in turn becomes the new first player and a new round begins.

There remains one last thing to discuss - what function do buildings serve. Firstly, they earn player points. Some buildings are necessary to process goods. Other buildings confer bonuses when trading and shipping or allow players to 'break the rules' in some way or other. Finally, the 5 large buildings give extra victory points according to the conditions on each individual large building tile.

Endgame
There are 3 manners in which the endgame can be triggered.

• When a player places a building into the 12th and final space in their city.
• All the victory points in the supply are taken (Extra points are still recorded for the remainder of the round.).
• There are not enough colonist markers to sufficiently fill the ship tile after the Mayor action has been executed.

If any of these conditions are met, play continues until the current round has ended.

​Players then tally their scores, highest value wins.

Late in the game.

Some investment diversification.

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Overall
​​Puerto Rico is not a complicated game, but it is a fairly involved one and the rules are fairly detailed. The game has minimal 'downtime' as it allows players to act in other player's turns. This keeps players on their toes, being able to take advantage of another player's role is key to optimising strategy.

It's also a game of very little luck. The only random element is drawing the plantation tiles, everything else is down to player actions and choices.

Talking of choices, the game mostly provides players with useful and meaningful decisions to make. There's always the balancing act caused by there being one too many actions that players will want to do, pushing them into making tricky choices.

The trading and shipping rules give Puerto Rico a little bit of a competitive edge. Players need to watch what each other are doing, because as mentioned above, a decision that the active player makes can aid another player.

Since the trading tile and ship tiles are not emptied until full and even then only at the end of their respective actions. Players can screw each other (And themselves to be fair.) by initiating trading or shipping at particular times, this can and probably will deny certain players the benefits of trading or shipping. After all there are 5 types of good, but only 4 spaces on the trading tile and 3 ships.

Since the game has 2 ways of scoring points. There are broadly speaking, 2 strategies for winning.
These are; accumulate victory points by shopping goods out, or buy buildings and accumulate victory points that way.
In the few times, we've played it recently, it seems to be that acquiring buildings might be a better way of accumulating victory points. Perhaps the trading approach has a harder learning curve?
This is about the only negative I can think about the game.

But other than this, Puerto Rico is a game that rewards thoughtful play and that's always a good thing.