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posted by [personal profile] mylescorcoran at 11:09am on 17/01/2005 under
I played a game of Puerto Rico last night, the first I've played in several months. After it burst onto the scene we played it heavily, but the game managed to fall into that category of being loathed by one of our regular players. Now we rarely get to play it, so last night when the PR hater was at the cinema, three of us got together and shipped some corn. And, as it transpired, far more tobacco than I ever planned on shipping.

The three player game is quite different to the four and five player games I'm used to. There's far more money available, with a bonus gold on three roles out of six each turn, with a corresponding boost to the building strategies. I think we Crafted more than we would in a bigger game too, as the ideal position to craft comes up more often as the Governor moves round the table at quite a pace.

In the end I won the game, 64 points to Sam's 57 and Alex's 49. I went to bed smiling, despite the late hour. Even with 3 players, we didn't really get the game to come in under two hours playing time.
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posted by [identity profile] whytcrow.livejournal.com at 08:29am on 17/01/2005
Puerto Rico is a great game that just manages to get past my tolerance threshold to keep me from playing. I love so much about it, and yet it is too long (I tend to only want about an hour per game) and there are far too many things to keep track of.

Then I discovered San Juan. It's got almost all the cool stuff of PR, without a lot of the stuff that for me seems to drag. Yes, you lose a layer of the detail in the strategies and there's a higher level of randomness involved, but I think it is a wonderful game.

Maybe you should try that with your PR hater.
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posted by [personal profile] mylescorcoran at 01:19pm on 17/01/2005
Oh yes, San Juan is a keeper alright. We've found that it plays remarkably well with two players, which catapults it into a special category of games we play, like Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers, as husband and wife on those nights when we can tear ourselves away from the net long enough to get a game in.

While SJ has more luck in it, there's less than I thought there was after the first couple of plays. It bears plenty of replaying, which I count a good sign in a game.
 
posted by [identity profile] sammywol.livejournal.com at 01:35pm on 17/01/2005
My only beef with SJ is that the Guildhall strategy is so bloody useful that it is hard to vary from and in the two player game, even if somebody has a working chapel, usually both will see a Guildhall. Nobetheless games have been won without one in sight. I would like to find a good rules tweak for the Triumphal Arch though that makes it less crap.
 
posted by [identity profile] sammywol.livejournal.com at 01:33pm on 17/01/2005
Well, we are never going to play fast anything. Alex is not the only culprit but he has set us a very bad example of refusing to do the obvious thing, thinking about all the other options and then doing the obvious thing anyway. Meanwhile I really help to speed things up by deciding what I want to do and then inviting the table to second guess it and argue the toss before choosing.

We should have played Transamerica and got to bed sooner though, I agree.

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