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What makes Puerto Rico tick... and how can we use that?

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sedjtroll
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Like I imagine most of us do, I like Puerto Rico. One of the things I like about it is the 2 basic strategies and how they interact... You can go witht he Building strategy in which you get stuff that makes building more efficient and spend your time and effort buying bui;dings to increase your score, or you can go the Shipping route where you attempt to rake in the VPs through producing lots of goods and then exporting them in the captain phase.

Many games have "Multiple Paths to Victory," but this game in particular does a good job of intermingling the actions and strategies such that following one route does not preclude the other route and it's not just a race to see if the builder or the shipper gets more VPs byt the end of the game. There's a lot of overlap and if you intend to win you can't simply ignore the strategy that isn't your main strategy.

So I was thinking, how could this integration of strategies be implemented in other games? And why only 2 paths to victory? Would a game that balances 3 VP paths not be really interesting in the same way Puerto Rico is interesting?

So I thought about it some more. In PR the VPs come from Exporting stuff (foreign business) and building stuff (local bsiness?). But they both lead to the same end- a number of VPs. So what would I want my 3 paths to be such that they are not just the same thing as each other? Well, I figure they'll all lead to the eventual end- some form of VP. Maybe money. So what different ways are there to gain money? Well, you could steal stuff, you could sell stuff, and you can invest in stuff. That's three seperate and different ways to get money. So maybe those can be my three paths to victory.

So the rest of the game would have to relate those things in some way For example, investing in something is only interesting if you can affect the value of the thing you invest in. Perhaps the thing that you could sell is actually a couple of different things- say Red things, White things, and Blue things (just for example), and those are the same things you can invest in. Then selling red things either increses or descreases the value of the red things. And I suppose stealing would affect the value as well.

Thus, if an opponent is setting up to sell Red things, maybe you'll invest in Red. Likewise, if you are going to be able to get White things, maybe it's a good idea to invest in White before selling it to make a good return on your investment (or vice versa).

Then there'd of course have to be other parts to the game as well, like how do you get these 'things' in the first place? Who do you sell to? Buy from? Steal from? etc.

This might not be the best implimentation of multiple paths to victory... does anyone else have an idea that would be better? That would make this idea work better?

- Seth

jwarrend
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What makes Puerto Rico tick... and how can we use that?

I think this is a great topic, and with Seth's permission, I'd like to move it to "Topics in Game Design", because this is exactly the kind of analysis we're looking for in that forum.

I think Seth makes a very insightful point. While Puerto Rico is generally praised (and imitated!) for its Role Selection mechanic (which we'll be discussing next week in Topics in Game Design), I think that this mechanic is almost incidental to its greatness. That's not to say it's not a great mechanic, but rather that the game probably could have worked just as well without it. (and in fact, this mechanic is the source of PR's greatest weakness, the seat order effect).

What makes PR so singularly great, to my mind, is the robustness of its economy. As you point out, there is a great element of Multiple Paths to Victory, but these are interwoven elegantly through the system of Goods, and in a way that is dripping with theme to boot! The game is all about producing Goods and leveraging them to Victory Points, but the Goods can be used either for shipping (directly acquiring VP) or Trading (generating money, indirectly acquiring VP by facilitating Building). That, to me, is why the game is such a neat implementation of the "Multiple Paths to Victory" model; at any given point, in principle, you can jump on either bandwagon (Shipping or Building), but the game-imposed restrictions and tactical considerations don't always make this optimal or favorable.

It's also nice that the paths, while starting at the same source, don't have a lot of cross talk. Once a Good is shipped, it can't then be used to get money. And for the most part, the Buildings don't help shipping directly (with the obvious exceptions of the Harbor, Wharf, etc). So the game's economy gives you a legitimate choice to do "one or the other" at any given moment, but having made that choice, it's locked in.

In that sense, I think your abstracted "Red, White, Blue" system is probably too vague to know whether it will work or not. Some considerations to focus on include tightness; MPV shouldn't mean that all roads are equal. PR gives you different ways to do things, but as I said, at any given point you have a strong preference for how you want to do things. If you have a Large Market and one Coffee, you don't want to have to ship that Coffee if you can help it; you'd rather Trade it.

But on the other hand, I don't think completely differentiating the VP goals, in the sense that pursuing A precludes you from pursuing B and C, is necessarily a good unto itself. I think ultimately, you want to force the players to make interesting decisions, but it becomes a question of at what level the VP goals require differentiation in approach. I think PR strikes a nice balance between having the resource system of the game facilitate pursuit of either of the main goals, but once you've chosen a goal, the resources you invest into it go into a "black hole", for the most part (a bit of an oversimplification, but anyway).

All that said, I think that what makes PR great is the way the systems are tightly interwoven, there is substantial differentiation between the Goods, and the economy is incredibly well balanced. I don't know if I'd necessarily set out on a design project by saying "PR has 2 paths to victory; how about a game with 3?" The real key in designing a great game like PR is, to my mind, the balance and integration in the economy, and not so much how many goals the game has. Having several different goals is great, but it's all a question of how well the rest of the game interlocks to allow you both flexibility in pursuing combinations of the goals, but also rigidity that shapes your decisions and makes them meaningful.

-Jeff

Anonymous
What makes Puerto Rico tick... and how can we use that?

The game is very well balanced and there are so many ways to win. And everything in the game has a use except for a few buildings.

Caparica
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What makes Puerto Rico tick... and how can we use that?

The game is very well balanced and integrated.
But a really great thing about PR is that the game is lot easier to play than you would expect for a game of its complexity. The game almost play by itself, and you can focus on playing (fun stuff) and not on the rules (not fun stuff).
That reflects good design and probably a lot of play testing.

Caparica
www.2concept.com/games

sedjtroll
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What makes Puerto Rico tick... and how can we use that?

Jeff, I think you did a great job of clarifying what I was thinking and saying about Puerto Rico... that the interactions between the rest of the game are what makes the multiple paths to victory interesting. So by extension one could make a game with several paths to victory and it could be either terrible or wonderful. The point is in order to make it good, the rest of the game would have to integrate the paths and create decisions such as the one on your example- should I ship this Coffee, or should I sell it for money?

In my initial post there's a lot of stuff missing from my proposed game, which is the stuff that the players would have to interact with and make decisions about. That's what makes the game interesting.

In Puerto Rico there are plantations, which you can sometimes substitue for a Quarry, and they produce the goods that you either sell or ship. There are also the buildings with abilities. So even if you're not on the Builder track, you'll need and want to buy some buildings anyway. Furthermore, if you ARE on the builder track, you'll have to be shipping some goods as well.

So what other similar types of interactions can we think of for this proposed game, which may or may not be about Investing, Selling, and Stealing money (I imagine a mob theme could be applied perhaps, or maybe a Pirate theme)?

- Seth

doho123
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What makes Puerto Rico tick... and how can we use that?

What makes PR work for me on a lot of levels is the way your personal economy grows from nothing to something. This lends itself very easily to teaching the game while playing it. The game actually does a really good job of teaching itself, starting with just a simple plantation, and then adding the various concepts as you go.

Just as an obvious example, when you start the game three of the roles aren't even worth mentioning. Unlike Princes of Florence, which is a good game in it's own right, but really have no idea what a good play is at the beginning until you've played a bunch of games and started to understand what the true value of, say, the jesters are versus the builders. At a basic to intermediate level, PR's mechanics are pretty intuitive; only when you get more advanced some of the less obvious choices become good choices (such as the occasions where it's a good thing to select trader when you have nothing to trade).

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