Puerto Rico
by Andreas Seyfarth
Alea/Rio Grande Games

Great games have paralleled cultures throughout history: go in Asia, mancala in Africa, pachisi in India, chess in Europe and bridge in England and the US. These games endure because they are elegant, deep and rich. They are made for grown-ups, but children can enjoy them, too.

Children's games have a much shorter history, mainly during the last 150 years. The most well-known of these games survive not because the games are elegant, rich and deep, but because parents foist them on children, or because they are branded with the latest trend. Games in this category include Monopoly, Candy Land and Trivial Pursuit.

Children's games have dominated the US market for so long that the idea of games intended for a different audience may seem alien. In Europe, however, the art of producing games for grown-ups is enjoying a renaissance. This wave of quality games reached the shores of America in 1995 with The Settlers of Catan, a delightful, engaging multi-player trading game, enjoyable by both men and women of any age. Play time is a quick hour, skill matters as much as luck and everyone is involved until the game is over. Ever since Settlers demonstrated that there was an international audience for sophisticated boardgames, gamers have been able to choose from a growing catalog of better and better games. Known as Eurogames or designers' games, they are now being produced all around the world, and the trend is for more intensity, more interaction, less luck, more theme and more tactics, while keeping the game elegant, deep, easy to learn and playable in about a hour.

So far, the shining star of these labors is Puerto Rico by Andreas Seyfarth. Puerto Rico quickly took over the no. 1 spot on dozens of boardgame sites — including the largest, Board Game Geek — as well as the Internet Top 100 Games list, and player groups around the world. In the last four years, other games have made valiant attempts, but none has been able to dethrone it from its top position.

Yes, it's that good.

In Puerto Rico, players play a rotating governorship in historical San Juan, where settlers, builders, craftsmen and captains vie to produce the grandest buildings in the city and earn favor with the queen by shipping goods back to the Spanish motherland.

Unlike other games, where players take their turns one at a time, in Puerto Rico there are several "roles" that can be chosen, one at a time. Each time a player picks a role, all players perform the action that corresponds to that role. And unlike other games, where the order of the turn is pre-set, in Puerto Rico players are free to choose the role they want each turn in any order they like.

As a result, your choice of which actions to perform, when, determines how beneficial they are to you versus your fellow players. There's no direct confrontation in the game, but when you select the shipping role at a time when you can load half a dozen barrels onto the boats, while your opponents are forced to dump their hard-earned barrels into the sea, it can certainly feel confrontational.

In Puerto Rico, everything you gain also has other implications. You don't simply build buildings and ship barrels. Each building gives you a special ability, like helping you produce more goods, or giving you extra cash, or getting you more colonists to work your plantations. Each barrel you produce can be either sold for a different value of cash, or loaded onto a ship for points.

Most intriguingly, there's almost no luck — no surprises arising from blindly drawn cards or rolled dice, and therefore no ability to be burned by consecutive random events that aren't in your favor. But the game also isn't like chess, where the same opening gambit can work every time. The order in which the plantations are available for purchase each round is sufficiently random, and the order the roles are chosen by the players sufficiently unpredictable, that every game plays entirely differently.

The vast number of strategies available to you — high cash, high barrels, diverse or concentrated good production, heavy colonists, focusing on building, focusing on shipping, mixing any or all of those options — is unbelievable, and the tactical choices available each turn can be incredibly deep. For all that, the number of rules you need to learn to play the game is not overwhelming; it's on par with Monopoly.

True, this game isn't for everyone. Some people's idea of downtime is not thinking at all: rolling dice, watching TV, what have you. For some people, focusing an hour on a game is too much like work.

But for people who can delve into something fascinating, simple yet complex, themed, interactive, tactical and fun, it's time well spent. I must have played the game online a few hundred times. My wife and I play it two-player at least once a week.

If Puerto Rico has any drawbacks, it's that the game takes a bit longer to set up than other games (a few minutes, rather than a few seconds), and that better players will inevitably beat less experienced ones. But that's how a game should be, really. If you're not getting better at a game each time you play, you may as well be playing Candy Land.

Yehuda Berlinger drops science about all things gamerly at his blog.

— Yehuda Berlinger (shadejon at gmail dot com)