Board Game Review - Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is another one of those foreign games that are tons of fun. In Puerto Rico, an economic and city-building game, you are acting as a plantation owner in the city of San Juan on Puerto Rico during the colonial period, and you control virtually all aspects of life: what buildings will be built, what crops will be produced and which of your colonists will work where, among other things. Your job is to manage the economy so as to make more money, build more buildings and ship more goods than any other player.

Each player plays on their own game board, which is divided into two main areas. There is an island area, where you build plantations to produce one of the game's 5 resources: corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco and coffee; and there is a city area, which is where you build normal buildings that have some special effect, like allowing you to utilize your plantations or get extra money for selling your goods in the trading house instead of shipping them. Each building also gives you a certain amount of victory points, depending on how expensive it is: the bigger, the better. Victory points, as the name suggests, are how you win the game, and they are also gained by shipping out your goods on cargo ships. Whoever has the most at the end of the game, wins.

The game is played in rounds, and during each round each player takes a turn. Now what is unique about Puerto Rico is that during each players' turn, they chose to do a single action; however, after they have completed that action, everyone else is given the opportunity to do the same thing, only the original player gets an advantage for picking that action. Each player selects one of the several jobs during their turn, which tells them what action everyone will be taking and what the bonus will be for the player.

There are jobs like the mayor, in which each person gets to place one of their colonists in a job of their choosing, but the mayor gets to place 2; the settler, who gets to pick either a new plantation to place or a quarry to help with building costs, while the other players only get to chose from the plantations left over; the captain, who gets bonus victory points when everyone ships their goods; or the craftsman, who allows everyone to produce but gets extra goods themselves. There are also the Trader and Builder jobs, which are fairly self-explanatory, and depending on how many people there are, one or two prospector jobs, which only give the choosing player extra money.

There is very little direct player interaction in Puerto Rico; it is a game of management, but how you decide to manage your assets affects the others in a large way. The cargo ships can only hold one type of good and in limited quantities; if there is no room for someone's goods during a shipping phase, they have to get rid of them. Only so many goods can be sold to the trading house, so one player can be blocked from selling their highly profitable coffee by another player beating them to the punch. And then, of course, you have to decide every time you pick a job what the effects of the actions taken will be on everyone else. If someone has just built a new building that will give them an advantage, you probably wouldn't pick the mayor job and let them place a colonist in it to operate it. Virtually everything done in the game affects the other players in some way, because you are all on the same small island, working to be the biggest and best.

Puerto Rico is another wonderful medium-sized group game, for 3 to 5 players. At an hour and a half to two hours, it's a game you have to plan to play, but it is perfect for a weekend gaming night or the like. Puerto Rico has won several international board game awards, and is currently ranked the number one game at BoardGameGeek.com, with an overall rating of 8.31 out of 10. With a price tag of $25-30, depending on where you look online, it is most definitely worth looking at and picking up.

There is also a website set up to let you run the game online, against other humans or computer opponents. It is helpful to see how the game works, but be forewarned: if you play against computers, the game moves rather fast and it is sometimes hard to see what their moves were when you are just learning the rules. Also, nothing can recreate the experience of sitting around a table with some friends actually playing a physical game, so if you think you might enjoy Puerto Rico after looking at this online game, I would highly recommend buying it.

Board Game Review - Intrigue

Game Summary (from rule book): "You begin the game with a palace (encompassing 4 areas) and 8 scholars in your color. You send your scholars to foreign palaces and try to place them in high-salary positions. In order to successfully apply for positions at other palaces (and try to ensure a higher income), you must convince the palace owner of your scholar's excellent qualities. Competition for each position is fierce, and even a hired scholar can be replaced. Everything is allowed -- a little bribe under the table, promises, threats, persuasiveness, and flattery -- and every promise can be broken.

You make money in 2 ways during the game. You collect wages from all of your scholars employed in other players' palaces. You also make money from the bribes that you collect every time someone applies for a position in your palace.

The player with the most money -- collected by whatever means possible -- after 5 rounds wins the game!"

Intrigue is, well, interesting, to say the least. Once you get the game play down, it is very simple. There are only three things to do during your turn: collect the salary for your scholars working in other players' palaces, which is over in a few seconds; decide who to hire in your palace, which is where you'll spend most of your time; and send two of your own scholars to any of the other players' palaces.

The second action is where things get interesting. After people apply to your palace, you get to decide how much they get payed, and which player's scholars get hired when two are vying for the same position. To help you decide, those applying grease the wheels with a little cash, as well as try to wheel and deal to convince you that their scholar should be hired, and at a good pay. But the catch is, it doesn't matter what deals you make or bribes you take: nothing's permanent and every promise can be broken. This creates some very tense moments in the game.

I played with fellow Hobsonian Drew, his girlfriend Kelsey and her roommate, Kat. This, I felt initially, put me at a slight disadvantage, because Drew and Kelsey might work together, and the same might hold true for Kelsey and Kat. However, as I was delighted to discover, the game was so good at creating bad vibes between players that I needn't have worried about pre-game alliances. All it takes is one deal going south for you after you've just forked out for a hefty bribe to realize all bets are off in Intrigue. Thankfully, we all went into the game knowing that's what it was, a game, so there was no lasting harm, even after all of us were back-stabbed by those we trusted. Perhaps even because of it: everyone betrayed everyone else, so there were no hard feelings.

The game was well balanced throughout, and even at the end, when we were only going to get one or two more payouts from our scholars' jobs, it was still very competitive in terms of who would be hired and who banished to the island, although the bribes were a bit smaller. There were all sorts of deals, which were then completely ignored once one person realized the other would be unable to do anything in retribution. It was also interesting to see how being betrayed (or betraying) didn't really affect how you interacted with each other later. If you needed to make a deal to get one of your scholars into a high-paying spot, you made it, even if you had just had the rug pulled from under you last turn. The game is not about trust, but about manipulation, and as such, I enjoyed it very much (even though I lost).

Board Game Review - The Settlers of Catan

I’ve always been a fan of the classic board games: Risk, Monopoly, Scrabble and even some other not-so-rare ones you might have played but may not have, like Boggle and Stratego. I’ve also been known to partake in that game of kings, Chess, every once in a while. After I came to Harding University, I was introduced to such gems as Apples to Apples and was able to indulge my passion for party games that take more people than I normally had around to play with, like Catch Phrase and Scattegories.

But those were the games I stuck with, the old stand-bys. It was not until recently that I was exposed to some of the games off the beaten path. Last summer, my fellow Hobson's Buffet author Drew Spickes bought a couple games of the type you can only get from a specialty store or the Internet, and one in particular that we played all the time and I ended up buying for myself: The Settlers of Catan.

In The Settlers of Catan, each of the four players’ goal is to establish a presence on an island abundant in natural resources by building roads and settlements and controlling ports on the coast, while competing with other players for best position and trying to avoid a thief that will steal your resources. The premise sounds fairly basic, but there are a few things that make this one of the best games I’ve ever played, and that made it good enough to receive numerous awards from different publications and organizations.

The first thing you notice when you begin to play Settlers is the board. It is not a traditional board that you just set down and place pieces on: it is made out of 37 hexagonal cardboard pieces, which you set up in a random position every game. This makes the board, and thus the game, different every time you play, which keeps things interesting, even when playing more than once in one sitting.

Another aspect is the social interaction. You could play the game all for yourself, mercilessly boxing people in, cutting them off from the resources they need and trying to rip them off, but it will come back to haunt you in the end. When you develop ill will in the game, you risk having the other players turn against you and send the thief in your direction or refuse to trade with you, even if it might be in their interest to work with you. Trust me; I know. I’m a very competitive person, and I have to make sure that my competitive streak doesn’t take over too much when I play Settlers or I wind up being stuck, unable to move towards my goals because I can’t get the resources I need and looking at three unsympathetic faces.

While the objectives and game play remain pretty much the same every time you play The Settlers of Catan, the player interaction and board set up always make for an interesting, unique game. One of the best things about it is that even if you reach a point in a game where you know you can’t win, you can still have fun by picking a way of playing that makes things either more difficult or easier for the other players, or just changes the game entirely. One player can completely change the outcome of any game, even if they can’t in a way that gives them a victory.

For even more variety, you can buy expansions to the game. While they cost almost as much as the original game itself, they provide a lot more depth to the game, like adding other islands and pirates or letting you build cities and create knights. There are several other smaller expansions that cost a lot less, but can now only be found on eBay or the like, of which I bought several. My favorite smaller expansion adds in fish that you can harvest from the sea and then spend to get special benefits. Whatever way you want to play, expansions make a good way to change up an already expansive and fun game.

The Settlers of Catan is a wonderful addition to any board gamer’s collection, whether you only play games at family gatherings during Christmas and Thanksgiving or you play every weekend and even some nights in the dorm. Many people I've introduced it to have ended up buying it for themselves: my parents bought it since I take my game to school with me, and two friends each got it for their respective families. It finds the perfect balance of being easy to learn, yet complex enough to keep you interested the hundredth time you play, and with each game taking only about 45 minutes to an hour, it’s perfect for when you have a little time to kill and aren’t in the mood to try to take over the world or manipulate the real estate market. All you have to face in The Settlers of Catan is the deceptively simple task of managing a little island. How hard could that be?