Puerto Rico

A while ago I bought a new European boardgame called Puerto Rico, mainly because it has been the highest rated game on www.boardgamegeek.com for several years. I had never played this game before I bought it, but I had played many other Eurogames over the past few years, such as The Settlers of Catan, Amun Re, Bang, and Dominion to name a few, and so I figured I was well prepared for Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico is so popular not just because it's fun to play, but also because it's a very engaging game, requiring a high degree of strategy. The strategy comes from the fact that there are many different things in direct control of each player, and every decision you make affects all the other players. There are a number of different roles that the player can take in the game, which determine what actions may be performed during the round. The player needs to choose each of these roles many times to do well in the game, and there is a lot of strategy in deciding the best time to choose each role. Each role is very different to play, which helps to keep all the players engaged in the game at all times.

The game is a simulation of building a settlement in Puerto Rico, growing resources, building factories, growing goods from the resources in the factories, selling goods, and shipping goods home to Europe to obtain victory points. The ultimate goal of the game is to obtain more victory points than anyone else by shipping the most goods to Europe, and in order to do this one must be proficient at all the tasks involved in producing those goods. You must be a good settler, farmer, builder, and trader if you are to produce and ship more goods to Europe than your opponents, and that's the basic idea of Puerto Rico.

It's a really fun game to try if you're familiar with Eurogaming, and I highly recommend it.