Customer Reviews

Puerto Rico

5 star:		(90)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Winner of an International Gamers Award in the General Strategy category for 2003.

Chosen Best Strategy game in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands and USA

Winner of the Golden Feather for the best game rules.

THIS GAME ROCKS!!!

I am a game collector and have played them all. Honestly this game is by far the best game I have ever played. My friends and I are literally addicted to it. Having NO DICE at all means 100% strategy and ZERO LUCK. You have to make the right decisions or you WILL lose. The best part is that you will not find a winning pattern on this game. The strategy used to win in one game will be useless once your friends catch up on it. This means each time you play it will be different.

Here is a raw description of this great game.

Each player has a small board with city and land spaces to build on. You start with one plantation and a small amount of money. Each player in turns will chose a role according to their strategy. These roles will allow you to create more plantations, build structures in your city that will help you according to your strategy (e.g. warehouse, office, factory, harbor, etc), bring in workers for your crops and buildings, produce goods, and sell or export those goods in exchange for money or victory points. You have to choose these roles carefully since they will also make or break your opponents.

Each building you chose to purchase will give you an advantage and will cost differently. The most expensive building will give bonuses at game end. So you must choose how to spend your hard earned money wisely. The crops you chose to build also work differently. Corn can be produced quickly and in larger amounts and have little to no value in the market but gives you an edge while exporting. On the other hand coffee is slow and hard to produce but will sell nicely in the market giving you a large amount of money. Of course you can produce a little of everything if you wish, though it takes more time.

It will take you a couple of rounds before you get a hang of this game but once you do there is no turning back. You will get hooked, guaranteed. The game is at its best with five players so include as many as you can. It can be a bit pricey but have in mind that every single piece of this game is made of high quality material. I'm saying no plastic but wood pieces, and the tiles and boards are made to last a lifetime of total abuse. You will not find this quality in any Hasbro game. This game looks like a Special Collector's Edition kind of thing. It is very educational and will stimulate your thinking cells to the max. Game play will last about 1½ to 2 hours.

An EXPANSION PACK is available which you can download for FREE at riograndegames.com. This expansion pack is awesome and a must for experienced players.

If you call yourself a game player and have not played Puerto Rico you have missed on one of the best experiences in your life. This is a no brainer. Buy this game and thank me latter. BRAVO Amazon! I never thought you will listen to my pleads to include this awesome game in your site.

EXPERTS: To make this game even better we raised the victory points to 200, use all the expansion tiles and invented a large building bonus card called World Bank - It will allow it's owner to count all the doubloons he has in hand as victory points at game end (cost 10 doubloons/value 4 vp's). Try it; it will broaden your strategy options.

Have fun!!

Puerto Rico is the best all around board game i have ever played. The balance i would say is near perfection and of all the games I've played the score was always very close.
While this game out of the box takes a little while to understand the nuances of the rules and how to take advantage of the different roles, it's very worthwhile and rewarding. After two plays, my friends were all very into it and anxious to play again.

The fifty foot view of the game looks something like this. Everyone has a board that has an area for placing plantations and city area for buildings. Plantations grow crops, you need certain buildings to produce/store the crops which go in the city area and you eventually want to ship those crops(back to the mainland...whateva) and that's how you ultimately score points. There are variety of different crops you can grow and different types of buildings which give different type of advantages(and are worth a certain # of victory points). Each person takes a turn and on their turn chooses a certain role which is how the game functions. Each role offers different functions/phases of the game, ie building where everyone gets to build a building, or captain where you get to ship your goods....the player choosing the phase typically gets and additional bonus which is where a lot of the strategy revolves around.

Some of the things i like about Puerto Rico, are that you really don't know who's going to win until the game ends and the points are counted up. This keeps everyone interested and playing intently throughout. You also have to be alert on each turn and take advantage of other players moves in order be successful. Also, as the other reviewers have stated, luck simply is just not a factor so it's hard for people to be sore losers or point to game flaws that caused them to lose(or someone else to win), instead it's typically a friendly chat about how picking x and y strategy seemed to make the most sense.

The only real downside to this game, is that there really isn't the need for much interaction with other players, or any direct conflict. Those coming from a Settlers of Catan background, the robber phase and the trading are really what makes that...these features are lacking in Puerto Rico. Some say the captain phase can be like the 'conflict', but i disagree. This is a small quibble, and allows you to play with friends and non-friends with no-one getting upset.

Many say that this game is too deep for non-gamers and that you may want to start off with simpler games to get up to speed. I would actually disagree with that. I've bought a lot of games in the past few months, and i think we could have played Puerto Rico right off the bat. If you are in the market for new board game, go with this game! Take a quick read through the rules, set it up and take a few rounds to get the questions out of the way...than start over and you'll be all set to enjoy a great game.

Playing this game is a blast! Unlike games like Settlers of Cataan, there is very little randomness (no dice needed). And yet, it's never the same twice. Players take turn choosing roles. Those roles either produce goods, sell goods for money, build structures, or ship goods for points. The chossing the role affects all players, but the chooser gets an advantage for that role. The choice of roles goes around the board, the role cards get replaced, and then the next person gets first choice.

As the turns go, you develop crops, build structures that give you a strategic advantage, move people to buildings or to work crops. At the end of play you add up the points (not the money) to determine who wins.

What makes it especially odd is that there is no direct trading with other players, and yet your choice of role can either help or hurt other players. Choosing carefully to not favor other players while making progress yourself is where the challenge of the game lies.

Definitely takes a play through to learn all the rules, but very fun after that.

Winner of an International Gamers Award in the General Strategy category for 2003.

Chosen Best Strategy game in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands and USA

Winner of the Golden Feather for the best game rules.

Still Ranked Best Game Ever at [...]

I am a game collector and have played them all. Honestly this game is by far the best game I have ever played. My friends and I are literally addicted to it. Having NO DICE at all means 100% strategy and ZERO LUCK. You have to make the right decisions or you WILL lose. The best part is that you will not find a winning pattern on this game. The strategy used to win in one game will be useless once your friends catch up on it. This means each time you play it will be different.

Here is a raw description of this great game.

Each player has a small board with city and land spaces to build on. You start with one plantation and a small amount of money. Each player in turns will chose a role according to their strategy. These roles will allow you to create more plantations, build structures in your city that will help you according to your strategy (e.g. warehouse, office, factory, harbor, etc), bring in workers for your crops and buildings, produce goods, and sell or export those goods in exchange for money or victory points. You have to choose these roles carefully since they will also make or break your opponents.

Each building you chose to purchase will give you an advantage and will cost differently. The most expensive building will give bonuses at game end. So you must choose how to spend your hard earned money wisely. The crops you chose to build also work differently. Corn can be produced quickly and in larger amounts and have little to no value in the market but gives you an edge while exporting. On the other hand coffee is slow and hard to produce but will sell nicely in the market giving you a large amount of money. Of course you can produce a little of everything if you wish, though it takes more time.

It will take you a couple of rounds before you get a hang of this game but once you do there is no turning back. You will get hooked, guaranteed. The game is at its best with five players so include as many as you can. It can be a bit pricey but have in mind that every single piece of this game is made of high quality material. I'm saying no plastic but wood pieces, and the tiles and boards are made to last a lifetime of total abuse. You will not find this quality in any Hasbro game. This game looks like a Special Collector's Edition kind of thing. It is very educational and will stimulate your thinking cells to the max. Game play will last about 1½ to 2 hours.

An EXPANSION PACK is available which you can buy or download for FREE at [...]. This expansion pack is awesome and a must for experienced players.

If you call yourself a game player and have not played Puerto Rico you have missed on one of the best experiences in your life. This is a no brainer. Buy this game and thank me latter. BRAVO Amazon! I never thought you will listen to my pleads to include this awesome game in your site.

EXPERTS: To make this game even better we use all the victory points and invented a large building bonus card called World Bank - It will allow it's owner to count all the doubloons he has in hand as victory points at game end (cost 10 doubloons/value 4 vp's). Try it; it will broaden your strategy options.

Have fun!!

Players get a chance to make the island of Puerto Rico a successful venture. This is done by producing corn, indigo, coffee, tobacco and sugar. Success comes from production, sales and trade. Except for corn, the commodities need to be processed after growing. Players make plantations and build buildings but each of these needs population (colonists) to activate. Players try to balance production and trade in order to gain the most victory points. Sales produce money but shipping goods produce victory points. Different buildings help with production or offer other benefits including exceptions to limitations.

On each cycle of the game there is one phase per player. Each player takes turns being first in the cycle. The phase is determined by a player taking a job. They can be Mayor and provide new population to man the buildings and plantations. They can be a builder, a prospector, captain of a trade ship, or other jobs. There are more jobs than players so each cycle will be made up of different phases. Players must figure out which phase will be best for them on their turn and how best to play the phases of other players' choosing. Once a cycle ends, all jobs are again available.

The game consists of player boards for keeping track of their plantations, buildings, money, produce and victory points. There are tiles representing jobs, buildings, plantations, money, the colony ship, trade ships, money and victory points, and wooden tokens to represent colonists and barrels of produce. All of these pieces make set-up take a little longer but helps to add a great deal of variety to each playing of the game. Game ends when a city fills up, there are no more colonists, or no more victory tokens. Victory points and bonuses are tallied to determine the winner. Game play runs over an hour and improves as players become familiar with each of the different jobs and types of buildings. Although there are a lot of different things in the game, it is very easy for a first-time player to follow and do well. Check it out.

There is also a card-game version called San Juan.

Puerto Rico is a terrific game and quite innovative... especially the whole 'role' system that breaks turns apart into separate actions and lets you play them in any order, according to what ppl want/need to play (or simply to hinder the leaders). This is fantastically clever, and really sets it apart.

Even better, Puerto Rico is deceptively deep and fairly well-balanced, so that many different strategies can yield victory. This gives the game very good replay value, something lacking in many other games. You don't start to see just how clever the game is 'til you've played it a few times. Additionally, it's not super-complicated by any means... the rulebook is all of twelve pages.

The thing that throws new people who are trying to learn Puerto Rico is that the turn/role system is very original and probably unlike anything you've played before. The best way to learn it is to simply PLAY it a couple of times, at which point it will become second nature. Just reading the rulebook over and over again without playing won't cut it, just like reading an auto repair manual, while highly recommended, will only help up to a certain point unless you actually start DOING something with the knowledge.

My main quibbles for now (maybe I'll add more later, when I have time) is that some of the 'Game Ends' conditions can cause the game to finish too quickly, at least for players who are new to the game.

Specifically, the game set-up specifies too few colonists for newbies: for example, in 3-player play, we'll go with 60 colonists in supply instead of the officially spec'd 55, and the game seems better for it (and yes, we always do remember the 3 additional colonists that start out on the ship).

HOWEVER, once you become a bit more advanced with the game, you'll find the above to be much less of a problem. In most of our recent games, it wasn't running out of colonists that ended the game, but rather running out of shipping victory points or someone building out their city 'til it was full, i.e. the other two 'End Game' conditions. That said, the game could probably still stand to spec a few more colonists.

Additionally, the building counters are extremely 'BLAH' and uninspiring... no picture of the building you're buying, just some text. C'mon guys, live a little. These should have some nice artwork. If you care about such things, there is some fan-created custom artwork for the counters over at the BoardGameGeek website (a great website in general for boardgamers, despite the unflattering name).

I'd also say that the rulebook could use an upgrade, as some of the rules explanations are too brief/vague/terse, and there aren't always enough examples to make things clear. And the rulebook, like the counters, could definitely stand to get hit with the 'high production values' stick and gain some nice artwork/graphics.

Perhaps in a '10th Anniversary Edition' re-release of the game in 2012? One hopes.

Finally, there is a minor issue with the building costs... the designer of the game himself has said that if he had to do it over again, the one change he'd make would be to swap the costs of the University and the Factory, i.e. have the University cost 7, and the Factory 8 (instead of Factory at 7 and University at 8). This is a change that works well in practice, and one we always play with. In fact, it's become a popular rules change among many who follow the game. =]

Other than that though... Puerto Rico is pretty darn close to golden. You owe it to yourself to give it a try, it has much to recommend it.

I am relatively new to Euro board games, having only played 7 or 8 of them over the last 2 years. I started with Settlers of Catan and Carcasonne and moved my way up to Puerto Rico. While Catan is great for beginners and still fun to play for experts the overall depth is fairly limited to a few strategies and the wishful thinking that chance will go your way (via tile layout and dice rolls).

Puerto Rico is a significantly deeper strategy game and the player will be forced to evolve their strategy based on which opportunities are available, which avenues are closed off (limited resources), and whether they deem it more valuable at each turn to help their standing or hinder others. I also like the more secretive nature of the game so you are never really sure who is winning until the victory points are tallied at the end of the final round.

The only catch to this game is it has a steep learning curve and takes a good deal longer to play than Catan/Carcasonne. After buying PR two of us spent 2 hours just setting up the board and reading the rules before we could even play (hint: when you put the game away group and band the building tiles sequentially for quick future setup). On the second attempt we played a 4-person game and it took about 2 hours (and we got one of the management rules wrong - don't forget to ante up the unplayed roles!). After that initial 4 hour investment we can play with 3-4 players in about 90-100 minutes.

For medium-expert strategy players or those with patience I would highly recommend this game. If you are relatively new to Euro / German games or have little patience for learning something more complex I would recommend you first try the sister game, San Juan, which is a more portable 2-4 player card game that uses the same principles but simplifies the majority of the setup, management and accounting and can be played in 40-60 minutes. If you find that you like San Juan you should then definitely try out Puerto Rico and the learning curve will be simpler because you have already learned many of the basic concepts of revolving roles and the opportunity costs of the high level strategies.

There are also some free PC versions of both games on-line if you want to check them out and get a feel for the play but the rule explanation, interface and AI are fairly rudimentary.

My family and I have only played a few times, so we are still learning the ins and outs of this game. We have been playing Settlers for over a year now and wanted to venture out and try something new.

I love the idea that the game doesn't use dice and doesn't limit players to relying on luck as much as many other games do. Sure there is some element of randomness in this game, but not much and not enough to swing the tide like in other games.

There are different strategies to winning this game, of which I'm just starting to get the hang of as we haven't played it a whole lot yet, but I'm intrigued by the genius of those that developed the game play.

As for how complicated it is; well at first it seems almost impossible to figure out to those that aren't into games and rules, however we got our twelve year old to understand the basic game rules and play in one game and by the second and third game she had developed her own strategy and style. In other words, it is learnable with a couple of plays, don't get bogged down by all the details at first, just try and learn the basic mechanics.

I give this game a very strong recommendation, it's great for both informal family play as well as highly competitive play.

My husband and I own dozens of board and card games that we lose interest in pretty quickly, no matter how much we like them to begin with. Puerto Rico is the one exception-- it seems to become MORE stimulating each time we play it, as we try new strategies. We have introduced our friends to the game, and everyone agrees (both the men and the women, believe it or not)-- Puerto Rico is truly the best game ever. Anyone who likes intellectual, complex games that are challenging and fun at the same time will love this game.

My friends and I have been addicted to "Settlers of Catan" for years, and we were looking for a new strategy game to get into to mix things up a bit. After checking [...], we discovered "Puerto Rico" which was rated #2 by the site. We also found a sister game called "San Juan," which is a faster and easier version of "Puerto Rico." I ended up buying both just to have options, and I'm glad I did.

We decided to start by learning "San Juan," which I highly recommend. The directions were somewhat confusing but we figured it out after playing a few times. Then we moved on to "Puerto Rico,"which was a more in-depth version of "San Juan." Had we not played "San Juan" first, "Puerto Rico" would've been extremely hard to figure out. It's a very complex game, but once you get the hang of it it's awesome!

The thing I like most about this strategy game is that no two rounds are ever the same. There are so many different things you can build or strategies you can try every time you play that it ads tremendous variety to the game, which is why I love it so much. If you like strategy games and you aren't afraid to take on a challenge, I highly recommend "Puerto Rico" AND "San Juan."