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Puerto Rico variant for 4 players
Wed, 11/13/2002 - 10:22
Fri, 08/27/2004 - 15:16
#2
Puerto Rico variant for 4 players
This is basically how I play two-player PR: each player takes two boards, but the trick is that it is the lowest scoring board that counts for you, meaning that you can't just abandon one board and try to maximise the other. I could see this working as a team variant, although it'd be tough to control the table talk.
Fri, 08/27/2004 - 16:18
#3
Puerto Rico variant for 4 players
Scurra wrote:
This is basically how I play two-player PR: each player takes two boards, but the trick is that it is the lowest scoring board that counts for you, meaning that you can't just abandon one board and try to maximise the other. I could see this working as a team variant, although it'd be tough to control the table talk.
I agree that counting the loswest scoring board is better than the sum.
Why not explicitly allow table talk in the team variant? As long as you're not passing secret signals/talking languages your opponents don't know/etc it seems reasonable to me. You are somewhat crippled on what you can discuss with your opponents listening for example "I'll take craftsman, then you can trade your coffee. We just have to hope the person between use doesn't ship or we're screwed"...That wouldn't work with the person between listening.
When I play PR normally, there is a lot of table talk. Usually if a person is about to choose a role that will really help a player a lot, everyone else will say so. Table talk is a part of natual player interaction.
Jason
Sat, 08/28/2004 - 17:36
#5
Puerto Rico variant for 4 players
Oracle wrote:
Why not explicitly allow table talk in the team variant?
Because, as stefu says, it generally degenerates into a two-player game instead. It's one of the few flaws in Knizia's Lord of the Rings game - that with a sufficiently dominant player, the game becomes a solitaire exercise with spectators. (Of course, with two sufficiently dominating players, it can often become a fascinating duel of arguments, which makes up for a lot... :-))
Tue, 01/11/2005 - 22:21
#6
Puerto Rico variant for 4 players
This is definitely interesting but one of the problems I see isn't in the actual mechanics of the variant (for they are sound) but rather in the intrinsic problem of dividing four people into two equal teams.
PR is a highly skill intensive game (unlike many other games which are rife with loads of luck) so you will almost always make a scenario where one team will ALWAYS win, given the below scenario (taken from my own PR group) --
Player #1: wins half the time
Players #2-4: each win equally the other half the time
Whomever Player #1 is with will always win, I'd contend. Granted, this is more of a group-specific problem but how many people really have PR groups where the people in question all win equally?
Nice thought m8 but should table talk be allowed or not? If not then the variant sounds really promising.