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

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

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).