You Have To Burn The RopeYou Have To Encourage Your Friends To Subscribe To Play This Thing | Submitted by the99th on Thu, 04/10/2008 - 17:15. |
There are apparently a lot of people who play this game and have difficulty figuring out what the fuck you're supposed to do. That factoid is the pearl of this game, and an indictment of the way the games industry has trained its population of players. It also says something about the algorithm of human stupidity. This is a game that is fun because of how you relate to it, relative to how other people relate to it.
To continue a theme, my fondness for German board games is no secret. I’m hardly a Germanophile; it's just that the most complex, thoughtful, and engaging tabletop games seem to come out of that country. For the most part, they lend themselves to social gatherings, including family groups, are generally well researched, have far more substance than games like Trivial Pursuit or Taboo, and yet do not require the same commitment of time, study and focus of a game like Go. Ra, Modern Art, and Puerto Rico, the subject of this review, are among my favorites.
Like a well-written book, each playing of Puerto Rico reveals further complexities. A trading game set in colonial Puerto Rico, when ships had sails, the game tasks you, the player, with sending goods back to Spain. While there are several different mechanisms that become more or less important as the game progresses, there is really one way to win: amass the most victory points, something that's important to remember -- during a recent game, one of my fellow players adhered to what seemed like a foolish strategy, seeking out quantities of a commodity with no cash value, but won the game, having earned the most points by sending the most goods back to the Old World.
