[1] Players assume the roles of colonial governors on the island of Puerto Rico during the age of Caribbean ascendancy.
[2] The aim of the game is to amass victory points in two ways: by exporting goods and by constructing buildings.
There is an official expansion released in 2004, which adds new buildings with different abilities that can replace or be used alongside those in the original game.
During each round, players take turns selecting a role card from those on the table (such as "Trader" or "Builder").
The player who selected Settler has the option to instead take a quarry tile, which provides a discount on building prices.
Trader: Each player in turn order has the option to sell one of their resources by placing them on an empty space in the trading house and taking the appropriate number of doubloons in return.
Puerto Rico uses a variable phase order mechanic, where a "governor" token is passed clockwise to the next player at the conclusion of a turn.
Puerto Rico was released as a 3-5 player game but later received an official two-player variant from Alea.
Corn is produced free and indigo has a low investment cost, therefore these goods are commonly chosen when this strategy is used because all exports are valued the same.
Expensive buildings can give a player many victory points, but fewer goods are likely to be shipped to the homeland, and so the VPs from exports can be expected to be low.
It is based on Puerto Rico and published by the same companies, following the same art style and making use of some of the same buildings and resources.
[8] While Puerto Rico was highly reviewed upon its initial release in 2002,[2][9] it has come under renewed attention since then for its core premise of colonialism.
[10][11][12][13][14] In 2011, Jarrah E. Hodge at Bitch Media observed that "Puerto Rico is sanitized of all references to the exploitation of African slaves on plantations, or the indigenous Taino inhabitants of the island, who were virtually wiped out by the Spanish colonists.
"[13] In 2017, Sam Desatoff at Vice magazine wrote "It feels disrespectful for Seyfarth to disregard slavery so completely.
The effect is to make players gathered around a table for a game of Puerto Rico into unwitting moral accomplices in the horrors of human servitude.
Thus, the subaltern, who, from a historical point of view, had inhabited the Greater Antilles prior to colonisation, is excluded from the re-enactment of this colonial reality.
"[12] Philosophy professor Stephanie Partridge wrote of Puerto Rico in 2019: "Still, even those of us who are fairly good at seeing the connection between some games and our collective, colonialist past and present tend to find ourselves bracketing such concerns for the sake of gameplay.
(Honestly, we probably pull in and out of the gameplay as the incorrigible social meanings impress themselves on us more or less, depending on what game activity we are carrying out).
It suggests that we have subjectively made an internal calculation about how egregious we think that the representational offense is and whether it is “worth it” to criticize the collective ludic activity of our friends.