This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Puerto Rico
Designer: Andreas Seyfarth
Year: 2002
Country: Germany
Publisher: Lautapelit.fi
In Finland, there’s a boardgame called Afrikan tähti (Eng. The Star of Africa) which has a special place in our national boardgame discourse. It’s one of those games everyone has played as a child and which has sold gazillion copies, with simple game mechanics that make it uninteresting for older players. Narratively, each player travels around Africa trying to find valuable gemstones, including the titular Star of Africa. Because of the game’s colonialist vibes, it’s become a symbol for old-fashioned attitudes in games.
Puerto Rico has a similar role in English-language boardgame discourse. This time, the players are colonial governors seeking to extract as much value as possible from the colony of Puerto Rico and ship it back to the old country. Trying to learn the rules, I watched a How To Play video which also critiqued the game politically, a first for me in a normally deeply apolitical and staid corner of Youtube.
The game itself is a mid-weight Eurogame in which you build plantations and the buildings to handle their produce, shipping it off the island for victory points. Each core action has a card and each turn, you can choose one of them (assuming an opponent didn’t play it first). In a neat trick, when you use a card, all the other players take its action too, although you gain an extra benefit. Thus, each time someone does something, it directly affects everybody.
Each player has a player board which has two major sections: The fields and the town. In the fields, you try to accumulate different crops depending on your strategy. Then you need to acquire a colonist from the special colonist ship to activate each plantation. The rulebook called these brown tokens settlers but the How To Play -video I watched suggested they might better be understood as enslaved people given the game’s general setting and theme and how it connected to real world history.
There’s a separate board with a selection of buildings you can buy, and indeed need to buy to be able to complete the loop you need for produce to be produced. Once you have all three, plantation, settler and building, you can make a barrel of coffee, which you can then send to the ship to gain a victory point.
Earlier during this project, I played a game called Spirit Island. Having now played Puerto Rico, I understand better the way that game was designed as a response where the players are ancient spirits seeking to repel colonizers.