Or it was until recently on the BoardGameGeek rankings anyway. Agricola is currently our favourite boardgame, but since it only recently displaced Puerto Rico from the number one spot which it had previously held for quite a while, I’ve been itching to try the older game. Sean was kind enough to teach to us and join in even though he’s played it plenty of times already. His copy of the game certainly has the wear and tear to show it!

Since we’ve already played Twilight Imperium 3 and Citadels, we’re already familiar with the central mechanic of choosing roles, so we found it to be a fairly easy game to learn. Basically there are a number of roles which gives both the player who chooses the role as well as all other players in the game a specific action. The active player does get a small bonus for choosing the role. Every round that a role doesn’t get picked, money gets added onto it and whoever later picks that role gets it as a bonus.

As in many other Eurogames, the objective is to score points, and in the case of Puerto Rico where the players are plantation owners, this is done either by shipping out goods or constructing buildings on your island. Throughout the game, players perform such actions as laying down new plantations, putting up new buildings, assigning new colonists onto empty buildings or plantations, producing goods and shipping them out, all according to the roles picked.

Obviously, the key to this game is trying to pick roles that will give you the maximum benefit while helping your opponents as little as possible. Turn order and timing are also crucial. During our game, I picked the Captain role to ship goods out, knowing that Sean would be unable to load all of his goods since each ship can load only a single type of good. However, I forgot that he was the first to pick a role on the next turn, so he just picked the Captain role to ship the extra goods that he stored in his warehouse while neither my wife nor myself had any goods left to ship. While you can’t take any action directly against an opponent in Puerto Rico, the role choosing mechanic itself is splendidly interactive. Even the limited availability of plantation and quarry tiles as well as buildings available for purchase is a form of interaction since you need to grab them before an opponent does.

While Agricola and Puerto Rico aren’t alike at all in terms of theme or mechanics, I feel that they occupy the same “mindspace”. I do have fun while playing stuff like Struggle of Empires and Descent, and I can happily agree that they’re much more exciting and dramatic than either Agricola or Puerto Rico, but I feel that the latter two are somehow more intellectually satisfying to play, scratching an itch that the former two just can’t reach. Between the two I still think that Agricola is the better game, not least because its cards offer more variation into every game. Both of us are eager to play more of Puerto Rico, but you need at least three players and it’s doubtful that any others are up for such a old game.

Finally, since we finished with Puerto Rico early enough to play another game, we opted for a Pandemic session with just the two of us. We took our time to plan our moves carefully but still lost twice! The first one actually ended within the first few rounds because of two Epidemic cards that came up in quick succession. Those things are nasty! Overall, I’m not as enamoured of Pandemic as I thought I would be. While the basic mechanic is sound enough, it’s just not meaty enough for me to think of it as the main course of a gaming session but takes too much time to be a filler game, making it an uncomfortably middle-weight game. For me, it’s best use would be with other players who are new to boardgaming since it’s rules are simple to understand and everyone can easily relate to its theme. I find it amusing that last year Sean was talking about it as fighting against SARS while this year it’s H1N1!