 So we're going to get right into it. We're going to teach you Puerto Rico and I want to preface this a little bit. So ideally you're all here not just to play Puerto Rico, you're not just playing with the toy, you want to win. I assume that all of you want to win this game, but it turns out a lot of people who play games don't actually try that hard to win because if they did win a lot more often. So I got to warn you, if you do the things we're going to tell you to do in the course of this panel, other than just following the rules, it's going to take you to a fun place and you'll be good at Puerto Rico and good at other games, but it's also going to take you to a very bad place. The better you get at games, the less fun games are for your friends. You ever had that friend who's really good at Street Fighter and you're not as good because they practiced a bunch and it's like if you play against them, you don't even hit them once and your solution is don't play Street Fighter with them anymore? You'll be the friend who it's like well I'm just not going to play Puerto Rico with you anymore because I can't even do anything. And the other fair warning is that we have played the three-player version of Puerto Rico easily like hundreds of times. A lot of times. And third player always wins, so don't play Puerto Rico three-player, the game's kind of broken and solved, but we'll get to that. So we also got to really briefly touch on what a game is because Richard Garfield has a really good definition to avoid that nonsense argument of oh that isn't a game. An ortho game is a competitive game with two or more players, rules you all agree on at a method of ranking. Your only goal playing this game is to have a higher rank than as many other people at the table as possible. Fun does not fit into the equation. So we're going to get right into it and one last thing, heuristics. We're going to talk a lot about heuristics. The idea is simple, you cannot calculate in your brain the state of Puerto Rico or chess or checkers. I mean maybe you could, but if you can, screw you, but also we don't have time to wait for you, right? Take a turn, let's go. We only got how many hours of packs here? We got to be out of here in like two hours, right? Hurry up. So basically if I throw this thing at someone out there in the audience there's a good chance they'll catch it. Yet none of you I assume can do differential calculus in your head. It turns out humans cannot easily predict where something will land when it's thrown, but if something is thrown to a human we're very easily able to catch it and the reason for that is something that's built into humans called the gaze heuristic. We will instinctually look at an object that has a ballistic trajectory, lock our necks at a specific angle and then move our bodies forward or backward as long as that angle remains constant we are guaranteed to catch that object. You don't even consciously realize that's how you catch things, but it is that's how you catch things, right? So we're going to develop heuristics for Puerto Rico so that you always score points by locking your neck and moving back and forth. And there are two kinds of heuristics. These are terms we're going to be using in the course of teaching the game. Directional heuristics are how you decide what to do. Am I going to go left or am I going to go right? Maybe my heuristic is the bridge that looks safer. In games like chess a simple heuristic move toward the other side of the board. What do I do on my turn? And the other kind of heuristic is a positional heuristic. How do I know who's in first place and who's in second place in the middle of the game? I have to be able to know that in order to help me with my directional heuristics, right? But in Puerto Rico just like in many games that might seem simple. Whoever has the most victory points right now. But as you all know that is often not the case. There are often complex heuristics where the person who's in second isn't first. In settlers the person who almost has the longest road and largest army is doing better than the person with a bunch of cities and no way to get more points easily. So that graphic very well illustrates the difficulty of figuring out who is winning in a game at any given time. So over the course of us teaching you the rules to Puerto Rico, think very hard about the information you're giving you and think about how you will use that information to determine how well you are doing and how well you'll use that information to determine what to do next. And if you don't know what to do next, acting randomly is a pretty good directional heuristic in a lot of games. Way better than you might expect. All right. Last thing we want to say is that Puerto Rico is a classic important board game. Right. When we came when we were in college like early 2000s for many many years Puerto Rico was number one on board game geek and it was locked in. It was the number one game deservedly so. I think maybe it should still be the number one game. Right. It was unceded by like pandemic legacy. It's deeply elegant. Twilight struggle. I don't think those are better than Puerto Rico. Right. They're not as elegant at least. But Puerto Rico has a problem as a big problem. We're not making excuses here. We are criticizing this game. This is awful. Basically German games your games in general from this era in particular tended to focus heavily on colonialism because it makes a very interesting game if you don't think about the cost in human tragedy. And a lot of people don't really think about it. So this game's theme is problematic. And yes it's okay if it makes you uncomfortable because it should. And as we teach the rules it probably will make you more uncomfortable. But if you want to play a game that explores colonialism in a way that really makes it clear why it's bad John Company by Cole Ware is that game where you find out that the reason the John Company existed is because someone wanted to marry their daughter off to someone with a fancy hat and the destruction of Hyderabad was basically just a consequence of that or a game like Race for the Galaxy that is mechanically similar to Puerto Rico. Race for the Galaxy is almost the same game as Puerto Rico kind of right. It's very very similar. You just have to if you look at it you can see these symbols if you never played it before and you're like oh I can't learn this game it's so complicated. Once you learn the symbols it's like a language. And now you can play all the Race for Games. You can play Roll for the Galaxy. You can play all these games use these same symbols and you can suddenly play all of them once you learn the language. So it's really good. So all that aside you can open up these boxes and start taking this biz out so you can start to set up to be ready to play the game while we teach. And we're going to go through while you're doing this we're going to explain what all these components are what they do and if you have questions in the course of our teaching I guarantee they will be answered by the end. Right if you have a question that's cool. Hold your question till the end because there is a high likelihood we will answer the question as we were explaining the game and you won't actually have to ask it. Now I will say if we have not answered a question that you have by the end what I am amazed and two I guess I'll give you some sort of prize. All right so while you're pulling all this out this is one thing to remember in terms of setup and you won't know what these mean yet but there's victory point looking chips and you'll see what they are. The orange chips with the numbers those are victory point chips right. The thing the gray chips with the numbers on them those are doubloons money. The colonists those are the brown wooden the tiny brown wooden ones. And the roll cards are the things like prospector and such and basically it's all five players here so ignore this one over here yeah everyone takes a player board everyone takes four dollars and then count out in the middle of the table a hundred and twenty two chips I know it sucks to count out. A hundred and twenty two points worth of chips so there are some that say five and some that say one what's up back there you should have five player boards are you missing one uh-oh oh you you try to sort that out I will continue teaching worst case you don't actually need that thing it's like the feather in Dumbo like the board was inside of you all but hopefully we'll be able to track them down for you so stay tuned hundred and twenty two ninety five and then take the three biggest chips and all the roll cards right the ships are the the the small rectangles with pictures of boats that have a little grid on them and then the only other thing and we'll get back to this at the end don't worry if you don't work if you don't set it up now are there any tables but you're going to decide who goes first it's entirely arbitrary who goes first whoever goes first we'll take a thing called the governor and get one indigo plantation players two and three will also just get one indigo and players four and five will get corn one car we will go over all that again at the end this is your player board this is where the action takes place you cannot interfere with other people's player boards you it is your personal player board these spaces are limited so if you run out of space to put plantations in you just can't put any more plantations in if you run out of space to put buildings in you just can't put any more buildings in the buildings there's a whole bunch of buildings you just got to put them on that building board in the middle of the table there are two of every building with the exception of these guys up here we'll talk about what they do in detail later in the in this panel buildings have a few attributes the little number in the circle is how much it costs to buy them it only matters at the time you buy them and no other points in the game this number up here is how many victory points you get at the end of the game if you have that building and these words break stuff they just break rules and make things weird production buildings these are the colored buildings they're the ones that will help you make barrels of stuff these purple buildings the purple buildings all do stuff these big purple buildings don't actually do anything to help you play the game but they get you victory points at the end of the game plantations and quarries these are the things that go in the little squares on your player board they're going to be out and you'll collect them over the course of the game by doing things quarries while they look like plantations and act like plantations are special and do something different they're in their own pile they're separate all the other plantations you just kind of mix up and put face down colonists these are the people who are going to buildings and power them they go into plantations and power them in general any building or plantation that does not have one of these colonists in it will not do anything if there's words on it those words don't mean anything goods there are five kinds of goods corn indigo sugar tobacco coffee right i'm sorry that the tobacco is pretty close in color to the coffee it is a problem for all of us in terms of numbers they're generally the same for reasons we'll get into later there's more sugar than everything else there's less tobacco and coffee and indigo gets sold out in advance in the game so generally there's the most sugar and corn in the least tobacco and coffee in general corn is worth very little money coffee is worth a lot of money more money as i go toward coffee goods can be traded into something called the trading house which we'll explain in detail later corn is worth zero indigo's worth one coffee's worth four you see how this is going ships you're only gonna have three ships the three biggest ships right you got five players using the three big ships if you got three players using the three small ships and if you got four players using the three middle ships you are sharing the other two ships go in the box you don't use them yep all the small ships don't get used the colonists ship is how colonists get to the islands so just set it aside and we'll use it when the time comes the governor is the starting player i recommend you all decide randomly now who the starting player is going to be at your table if you don't know how to decide i recommend a fist fight the roles this is the entire game all you do on your term is whoever is the governor is going to pick one of these roles and do that role with a little bonus then we go clockwise around the table and everyone else gets to do the same role right so if i am currently it's my turn on the governor i choose settler so i settle and i settle awesomely because i chose settler but now we go around the table and everyone else settles settle settle settle settle settle settle then the person to my left will choose a different one they can't choose settler they gotta choose builder so they build awesomely because they chose builder then everyone else build build build build build build build build and we go around until everyone has chosen the thing then we reset the governor moves and we do it again so your choices in terms of what roles you take on your turn are 95 percent of what determined victory in this game there is almost nothing in this game that is random other than one thing and that one thing is extremely minor so if you win this game you make better decisions than all the other people at that table all you're doing is looking at the set of these that are still available on your turn and choosing the right one that's all you gotta do to win this game it's simple you're all gonna be perfect at it go to the uh Puerto Rico tournament and win the blooms that's money money is way valuable early in the game not so valuable late in the game money lets you buy buildings that's pretty much all it does it is public you cannot hide how much money you have if someone wants to see how much money you have you have to tell them victory point chips this is how you win the game there's not a lot of victory points yeah victory points get as many as you can this is one of those modern deconstructed hero games where victory points are bad and you're trying to like tie with the loose like that you're trying to get as many of these as you can get them these are private when you collect them they are faced down you make change when you need to see how many chips you have but they don't know how many are fives and how many are ones unless they've been keeping track it's not that hard it behooves you to assume that anyone who has a bunch of chips has all fives the goal of this game is very simply to get the most victory points victory points only come from three sources those chips those red numbers on the buildings and the text on the special buildings that is it there's no way to get points that's it you get as many chips as you can you build as many buildings as you can remember the number in the top right of a building is points and then the big big buildings at the end of the board those all they do is be worth points they don't do anything else so if you want to win you probably need one or two of those big bad boys what what what if there's a tie if there's a tie all the doubloons you've got plus all the goods all the barrels you haven't done anything all your leftover stuff those are the tiebreakers so they're not that valuable at the end of the game you'd rather get a victory point than like all the doubloons and goods in the world but at the end of the game all right they're not worthless there are no further tiebreakers if there is a fully tied game i will be shocked however among skilled play the score differential will tend to be one point at best like one point between players single digits yeah all right let's go the game ends in with one of these three things happens if someone fills that building area right so the top of your player board right there should be uh 12 spaces that buildings can go in the big buildings take up two spaces uh and if somebody anybody fills that up the game's gonna end right yep victory point chips exhausted so the orange chips if you run out of chips all right we can finish the round and you can sort of keep getting chips even though we ran out of them but then the game's gonna end right and then uh boat can't be refilled so we counted out a number of colonists that we're gonna be in the game at the beginning based on how many players there are more players more colonists but as soon as the colonists supply runs out gg we're gonna count the score yep now we'll get into the details of what all these mean most likely someone will build the last building and then the game will end at the end of that whole term that's the most likely way to end the game second most likely the colonists ship running out victory points really only get exhausted among very skilled players so i'm assuming you'll all end the game with that right victory point exhausted also happens a lot when there's a skilled player and a not skilled player because then they'll suddenly score a bunch of points the other people can't stop so this is the meat of the game you start with the governor the god whoever is that governor the starting player will choose a role they do the role and they get a little bonus because they're the one who picked it let me go clockwise everyone else does the role once as soon as everyone's chosen a role in this manner then we pass the governor to the left everything's always clockwise everyone does the role we pass the governor left and then we continue you start again you put the roles that were taken back so i take the bill reset joey joe joe shabbard who takes the prospector scott takes the craftsman we pass the governor to the left we put these guys back in we go again that's the entire game we also have to bloom the unshoes and shun shun unchosen role i do have a blooming slide somewhere in here where is it i don't know anyway so let's say i take this rim takes that joey joe joe takes this these five have not been taken right so we take one to bloom and put it on each one right and then we reset and put the three back and now there's an incentive to take the ones that weren't taken on the previous turn because now if you take one you'll get it to bloom and if no one takes it let's say no one takes craftsman no one takes craftsman again well now there's two doubloons on it no one takes craftsman in the third round now there's three doubloons on it now you might just take the craftsman just to get those doubloons right so that's how that works so that's why i went at the end of every round we say doubloon them and you put the doubloons on the unchosen roles then you put your role taken roles back then you move the governor okay everything in this game is clockwise player order matters a lot every time a thing happens every mechanic we discuss it'll always go around clockwise so choosing a role we're gonna go through all the roles in detail and then after that we're gonna explain what all those buildings do and then you'll pretty much be equipped to play this game really won't take that long yeah this game takes exactly 40 minutes to teach if we're like in our apartment and we're playing with people who not we can play this game in 40 minutes also so yeah we'll get to that so when you choose a role up here i'm just gonna be the action that you're actually taking prospector settler trader builder captain right and then down here the bonus for the taker right so this text is the bonus you get it's a short description of the bonus you get if you're the person you chose it prospector is easiest nobody gets to do anything the prospector does nothing no one gets to do anything whoever chose the prospector just gets one to blue right so let's say the prospector you get into blue and everyone else does nothing next person chooses something that's it the settler this is how you get plantations right so there's going to be a supply of face-up plantations it's is it number of players it's number of players plus one right five player game we're gonna have six face-up plantations the rest will be faced down and then the person who chose the settler can take a face-up plantation or they can take a quarry instead quarries are always faced up in their own stack so you can choose to take a quarry instead of a plantation if you took the settler right everyone else has to either take a plantation or choose not to take a plantation i think you have to take one there's situations you don't have to but i think your board your bottom of your board is full you don't have to take one that's for sure but you just take plantations you put them on the bottom of your board it doesn't matter where you put them the whole bottom the location doesn't matter you're just filling it in right as the game goes on and that's pretty much it the settler's real simple it's the way you get plantations plantations is the way you build stuff right and then after you take the plantations you you clear it out you can deal out new ones so they'll always be six face up before the next round when someone's deciding if they want to choose this or not right the builder if you couldn't guess this is how you build buildings it's real simple i take the builder i build a building we go clockwise everyone chooses to build a building if they want to or not or maybe you can't build a building because you have no money you're never obligated to build a building you can just pass does not do anything the builder just gets a one to bloom discount that is it right so you look at a building the price of the building is the number in the what the leftmost circle right the gray number that's how much of building costs into bloons so if you look at say the construction cost one right yeah no construction that cost two so construction that cost two so you're good at this game okay when's the last time i play uh the construction cost two so you pay two to bloons you take a construction hut you put it on the top of your area anywhere you want location doesn't matter uh but if you are the builder you're the person who chose builder it would cost you one because you have this one to bloom discount right in addition really cost seven this is where the quarry is coming you notice at the top of the board there's these symbols one quarry two quarries three quarries four quarries in each column that is the maximum discount you can get from quarries buildings cost minus one to bloom for every quarry that you have that has a colonist in it if you have a quarry and there's a columnist in it you get a discount on all buildings of one if you have two quarries and they both have colonists in them you get a discount on all buildings of two except buildings in the leftmost column your discount will only be one because that's the maximum discount from quarries right and it's like you know you can't really make it better than free in the leftmost column right in fact you cannot make it better than free you cannot get paid to take a building right also while you can get four quarries you don't want to get four quarries if you've got four quarries you're probably losing right uh the only other thing i'll point out because remember we're teaching how to be good we're not just teaching the game the game's a little broken in one way i'm going to tell you all now the factory is overpowered the factory is OP there is a balance patch to the game that makes the fact that we have a slide about that if you guys all say is the factory should cost eight there's only two factories right you cannot buy a building if there are no more of that building if you notice most of the buildings are in very short supply this is like two of most of them if the building is gone guess what tough cookies you can't get that building in fact while we're at it the colonists are in short supply the barrels are in short supply everything is physically limited by the board except the balloons they're not physically limited and victory points if you end the game by taking all the victory points and then you still need more victory points than there aren't chips you still get those points just like grace for the galaxy the mayor we like to use this as a verb like i choose to may this term the mayor is very simple this is how you get colonists from the colony ship onto your board and if you choose the mayor you go first and you get one extra colonists directly from the supply so the way this works a nice graphic example we go around the court the mayor takes one player two player three player player five the mayor takes one player two oh no we're out that sucks somebody gets shafted and then the mayor goes into the supply of colonists not the boat the supply and takes one more so this is a five player game if there are six colonists in the supply it's real good to take the mayor because we go around everyone else gets one the mayor ends up taking two from the ship and a third one from the supply daddy three colonists everyone else one colonist that's a good move so there are rules about this we go clockwise like i said at that time anytime anyone chooses the mayor you can pick up all your colonists and put them back down on your board however you want you can just rearrange them up i want to put them in these quarries i want to put them in the plantations i want to put them in these buildings you can rearrange them all you want but it's when you're currently taking colonists and doing the mayor phase you can do infinite rearranging but then once you're done rearranging you cannot move the colonists again until it is mayor time again they are locked in so if we get near the end of the game and you build a nice fancy six building and then no one takes the mayor and then they can put a colonist in that building and you don't get those points yep buildings and plantations only do something if there is a colonist in that little circle hole if you have more colonists than you can use because you must use every colonist if you can they all go in San Juan and do nothing they just party in San Juan and that's it you cannot choose to put a colonist in San Juan if there's any open space they could fit in why would you want to do that because whoever chose the mayor once we all deal with our columnist stuff they refill the columnist ship and they refill it based on the number of open spaces on everyone's buildings across all the player boards so right now if that's the only if no one else has any buildings let's say there's only one player yep they have one open space on their buildings that's one that's less than the number of players which means we go up to the number of players which is five so we put five colonists in the boat from the supply so it'll either be five colonists or however many open spaces there are in buildings so if people have a lot of buildings and they haven't put colonists in those buildings they're all empty then the colonist ship might fill up with a lot more than five colonists now this is something that makes Puerto Rico unique and amazing because it's real easy to forget to refill this thing and then you don't remember when it happened and how many colors it's like you forget to refill the boat then you get around to the mayor again it's like oh crap there's no colonists in the boat we forgot to refill it what do we do is our whole game ruined i don't know this is one of two board games i can think of that has a rule for what to do if you mess up the rules that actually works really well it's in the rule book we'll see it's in there we'll say if you forget yep the rule is you immediately refill it with the number of players so five and that's that and more importantly if you're the mayor you can choose to forget who can call you out on it how would they know but if someone reminds you hey mayor you uh didn't refill that boat there while still you know within the right amount of time it's like oh i guess we have to refill it properly you cannot forget if you are reminded remember this forgetting to fill this up at a critical moment is a good way to end the game early or push it to go on later we'll get to that later we had a whole slide about that the craftsman this is how you get the barrels it's real simple every one of these plantations except the quarries makes a thing like coffee or corn or tobacco or indigo or sugar corn is special you get one corn for every plantation that has a colonist in it you can see why this game is problematic and kind of messed up but corn if i got three corn plantations and i got three guys one in each one of them i get three corn this guy right here with this whole board you'll notice that all these other ones have buildings there's no corn building corn always just produces if there's a guy in it all the others need a guy in a plantation and a guy in a building of the same color to process that thing so on this board this guy has two coffees with colonists two guys in a coffee roaster one guy in an indigo one guy in an indigo one guy in a sugar one guy in a sugar he gets a corn and indigo a sugar and two coffee pretty straightforward so you had this big one with no guys in it zero sugar there's no one in the building to process the sugar you got a guy in a sugar down here but he doesn't have a matching guy in a sugar up there so zero sugars let's say he's got two up there it's still only one sugar he may have a building full of dudes but he only has one sugar plantation that's power pretty straightforward and remember corn does not need a building corn can win you this freaking game because when we get to the next one you'll see why corn is great even though it's worth nothing and the power whoever chose the craftsman any barrel that they created even one of they get one more and it's their choice so if i had the end if i chose this then i could take one extra coffee or one extra sugar or one extra corn whichever one i want this is all physically limited and we go around clockwise so if me and scott take all the sugar and it gets to your turn and there's no sugar barrels in the supply that really sucks for you also if you are if you're getting that bonus barrel you get that bonus barrel at the very end after everyone else has taken all their barrels so you can only take one that is still available right and remember there's only nine tobacco and only nine coffee the trader this is how you get money and it's what's how you do their other ways to get money but this is the way to get a lot of money fast so what you do remember that trading house with the values if someone chooses the trader they start we go around clockwise there's four spots in this trading house you choose any barrel that you have if you wish you put it in this trading house doesn't matter which slot and get the balloons equal to the value of the good you just trade i put an indigo in the training house i get a doubloon from the bank yep if you chose the trader you get one extra doubloon because you took the trader that's your bonus i get two doubloons from my indigo because i chose the trader right then rim's going and he goes he puts his sugar in there he also gets two because he's not the trader he's just trading when i chose it the trader wants to make money so the trader will not accept two of the same good so if i put a sugar in no one else can put sugar in here has to be four different goods in the trading house so if you have a fist full of coffee and there's already a coffee in the trading house you can't trade you just pass us right by you yep one and only one barrel goes in unless you got something else to trade right but you probably want to trade your four dollar coffee you might choose to trade a corn for zero if you pick the trader and you trade a corn for zero you get one doubloon because of the bonus you don't get the bonus if you don't trade a good you got to trade at least one good to get the bonus this trading house doesn't necessarily empty it only empties if it's full so if scott puts the sugar and i put a tobacco and joey joe joe shabbard who puts the coffee and there's one spot left we just leave it with only one spot until someone time someone trades in the game they're going to put something in there then it'll be full then it'll just no one else can trade and then it clears out and then we proceed with the game right once it's full there's no more trading at the end of the trading phase you can do very mean and terrible things to people depending on the modulus math and the player order of this game the captain the most complicated part of the game this is how you get victory points from barrel wait this is how you win victory points come from the captain all this other stuff i guess builder gives you victory points because buildings are worth points but captain is worth points generate winning if you can if you can just captain the right way you will win and no one else here is going to stop you because it's all this other garbage is just so you can make friggin points to win captain we'll get into some of the set strategies in the very end before we start play but it is very hard to do better than the captain unless you've played this game a lot then i cannot stress enough here's how this works it's going to be these ships you start because you chose the captain you choose one type of good type like coffee or indigo you then choose one of these ships you then put all the barrels you can fit of that type on that ship then you have to yes you can't you can't say i want a captain no you have to let's say let's say i choose this i put a bunch of corn on the ship scott has a coffee he wants to trade and it's his only good he has to ship in here he can't just hold on do it you can't hoard your stuff the captain comes around and collects everyone's goods you have to give goods to so i pick a type i put all the goods of that type on a ship i get one victory point per barrel regardless of type coffee corn they're all worth the same they're all one everything's one point coffee barrel one point corn barrel one point yeah trading a lot of coffee to the captain not great putting a lot of corn on the captain that's the good stuff the win the bonus if you are the captain the first goods you put on you just get one extra point total so if i'm the captain i put three corn on i get four points we go around clockwise and then we keep going around clockwise until no player can continue to interact with this so there are other rules of this are only one good and only one type of good to be at any given ship yeah each each boat is going to be one good so this is like a corn boat an indigo boat a sugar boat and that means all the other goods are safe at least from being put on boats yep much like the trading house only full ships clear out so if this ship has one two three four five six seven corn on it those corn just sit on that ship and the next time someone takes captain there's a ship that has one spot for at most one car and all the rest of the corn can't go on any coast yep it's hilarious when that happens there is only one fiddly rule about this it will probably not come up but i cannot let this go because someone will have a problem if you have the choice of multiple ships that are empty and you choose a good where you have more goods than could fit on one of those ships you must choose the ship that can take the most of that good right so let's say i have 10 corns and all the boats are empty i can't put has to go here i can't put six corns in the six boat i have to put eight corns on the eight boat that is the fiddliest rule but you do not have to choose the type of good that you have that i can just do indigo instead if i don't want to put eight corns on that i don't know why you wouldn't put after all the shipping is done every barrel that you have not shipped washes away into the ocean you just lose it it's just gone that sucks you crafted all those barrels and the captain came out you couldn't fit it onto one of the boats it rocks and spoils away but presiding is not totally heartless you get to keep one barrel no one good no one good type one barrel you get to keep it you can hang on to that one barrel so when the captain is done every player will have either zero barrels left or one barrel left everything else either goes on a boat where it becomes victory points or washes away into the sea where it becomes garbage so you can see there's a strategy of craft captain craft captain craft captain the way barrels turn them into points make barrels turn them into points pretty good so i did up a slide for that after all the roles have been chosen because that's it that's all the roles that's the whole game you put in the balloon on everything that doesn't already have to bloom and then you pass the governor to the left and you do the whole thing again so thus i point out something specific if scott has the governor and i'm sitting to his left and he chooses craftmen then i get the governor and i can immediately choose captain think about that while you're playing the game where's the governor gonna go pass the governor we just keep repeating this till the game's over that is literally the whole game all right let's explain on the crazy building all right we're gonna go through the buildings all right so i won the top six buildings all those do is help you with your plantations to make the different kinds of barrels they don't have any other special ability whatsoever you can only have one of any given building yes you can't have two small indigo plants that's why you can have a small indigo and a large indigo right you cannot have two identical buildings in your area at all you can't buy two universities for example that's not allowed it also wouldn't help you right the small market if you have a small market and you have a colonist in it and you trade seeds as trader phase when you put your good into the trading house you will get one extra doubloon right so even if you're the trader you're getting this on top of the existing bonus doubloon so if you get like a small market you can like get money by selling corn to the trading house that's pretty good right the hacienda is a little tricky right the way this works normally when you're doing the settler and taking plantations you're taking the face-up plantations if you have a hacienda with a colonist in it when it comes time for you to settle it doesn't matter if you're the settler or if you're just settling off of someone else to settle right before is it had to be before right it's before it's before before you take a face-up plantation you may take a random face-down plantation from the supply so this lets you fill up your plantation area really really fast because you're getting like two plantations every single time right if you're wild to get a hacienda if you're not going to use it right you may not do this if you're already full and would have nowhere to place it that's yeah obviously okay construction hut normally if you want to get a quarry you have to pick settler that will let you get a quarry instead of a face-up plantation so think about that combination with the hacienda right if you got like a if you're the house if you got a hacienda and you choose settler and you want a quarry you can take a face-down and then the quarry is in place of your face-up right it's not in place of the face-down one but the construction hut lets you take a quarry instead of a face-up even if you're not the settler so i just build a construction hut as all these other people keep picking settler and i keep taking quarries instead of face-up plantations and i know there's a limited number of quarries there are eight quarries everyone's getting a quarry there are eight quarries that's it then you're done no more i saw those people suddenly rumble about the quarries like they're really worried about them you should be get at least one all right small warehouse so when the captain's done and it's time for your barrels to wash into the seat well if you had a small warehouse you could pick one kind of good and save it from the horrible sighting in your warehouse you could have all the corn in the game and store it in a small warehouse but you couldn't store a corn and an indigo in a small warehouse because those are two different kinds of things right so when it comes time for things to wash into the sea if you have a warehouse with a colonist in it you can pick one kind of good and protect all of it and then in addition as always you get to pick one barrel and save that so you could save like infinity corn one indigo and then everything else goes away all right the hospice plus one colonist for settling if you have a hospice and there is a colonist in the hospice already and you are settling when you take your face up plantation or your quarry not your face down hacienda one just a face up one you automatically get a colonist in it right away you don't have to wait for the mayor to happen it just boom automatic colonists right from the supply yep so you don't have to like do it's not one of your existing colonists it's like i someone chose settler i got a hospice i choose a corn and boom i grabbed from the supply colonists directly under my corn it's ready to make corn i'll choose craftsman next turn and make a corn okay the office so normally at the trading house there's already a sugar in there i can't sell my sugar guess what i have an office i can sell whatever the hell i want in the trading house i don't care if there's three coffees in there already i'll put in a fourth coffee right that's what the office is all about you can trade any good you want into that into that trading house as long as there's a room you can't put a fifth good in there right large market typos plus two doubloons plus two doubloons you copy and paste it to small mark i did large market the same as the small market only it gives you even more money when you trade and they stack and they stack you can get a small and a large market and be the trader if you have all of those and they all have colonists in them you would get one two three you can get four doubloons for selling a corn at the trading house that's as much as you get for selling a coffee normally right large warehouse same as small warehouse only you get to save two kinds of goods from Poseidon you can save all the corn in the world all the indigo in the world and then as always one extra barrel that you just store in your house or something the game winner the game winner that is unbalanced and should cost eight doubloons instead of seven all right so this is a little complicated way it works is it gives you free doubloons with your barrels this is crazy types of barrels so let's say i produce a corn i got a first you have a factory with a columnist in it right and i produce a corn because it's craftsman time i grab a corn barrel that's only one kind of good so i get nothing oh well now i set up my indigo plant and we choose craftsman again i get a corn and an indigo at least one corn and at least one indigo obviously i have to actually get the barrels it can't be like oh we're out of corn but then you didn't make one did you right i make a corn indigo that's two kinds of goods i have a large variety in addition to my corn barrel and my indigo barrel i get it to bloom you get money when you're getting stuff just craftsman is making you money you don't have to go to the training house you just give money when the craftsman happens right if you make one of every kind of good at least one you got a you got an indigo and a sugar and a tobacco and a coffee you make it at least one of every kind of good you just grab a whole variety of barrels during the craftsman phase you got five doubloons it's insane right you're getting all your barrels and your doubloons with a single action you don't have to worry about the training house you don't got to worry about nothing you just keep crafting captaining and building who's nor everything else it's insane the university will probably not win you the game because it should cost seven right the university is good but it's overpriced not overpowered it should be seven and there's a patch to flip them right we're not playing with the patch we're playing with the real game we're playing the way it is back to win yeah get that building yes that's right the university costs a the way it works is the same as the hospice you buy a building and then the building would automatically get a colonist in it as soon as you build the building because normally you buy a building at the builder you got to wait until the mayor comes up before you can start using your building because there's no colonists yet you know it's all inactive if you have a university with a colonist in it you buy a building it comes with a free colonist from the supply ready to go immediately this can make a huge difference because especially not only these other buildings but these ones at the end of the game those are victory points if they have a colonist in them on the very last turn you got a fistful of the bloom someone chooses builder you buy a city hall it's worth like 10 points and then the game ends and you don't have a colonist in it yet because you no one could choose mayor before the game ended but if you had a university well the city hall would have come with a free colonist and be ready to score you points and the game ends and you're good the harbor this building will win you the game holy crap this will also win you the game plus one victory point per delivery per delivery if I ship one corn I get two victory points then it goes around I ship two in to go I get three victory points comes around again I ship one sugar two victory points one victory point every time you put any number of goods off any ship yeah you put five corn on a boat you get six points you put four in to go on a boat you get five points you're getting one extra point every single time you put something on a boat this could be in one captain phase you could theoretically put something on all three boats because there's three boats available and if you're making a wide variety of goods with the factory you're probably gonna have stuff to go on all the boats and have a lot of money the three extra bonus points every time the captain comes around the factory and the and the harbor combo deeply broken yes all right the war the war this will also win you the game it's the alternative to the harbor so the thing about the war is you don't think about it as like this different thing it's in the same row as warehouse for a reason it's like a mega warehouse except instead of just saving your goods for the next captain you actually have your own private boat where you sell the goods of infinite capacity that ships every time the captain phase happens so if you've got like a hundred corn somehow which aren't in the game you could sell your own hundred corn on your own war for a hundred points right and you don't have to mess with any of the boats if they're all full or if they don't have goods you like on them it doesn't matter now you can put your stuff in all the other boats that the other players need first and then use your private boat at the end that's totally fine and great it's private boat all right all of these five buildings don't do anything except score victory points at the very end of the game in order to score victory points obviously you need to have a building and you need to have a colonist in them also notice these are the big buildings so where you put your buildings on the top half of the board doesn't really matter but you probably want to squish them all to the left that way if you make like horizontal rows and like you leave the bottom row empty even though you've got four empty slots you can't fit these big ones in there and no you cannot move them around ever under any circumstance so sort of squish everything to the left to make room for the big ones in the end because they're two vertical so actually the footprint of the game says you can rearrange as much as you want but you can never demolish a building yeah you can't demolish them definitely can't do that all right anyway so how did they score so the guild hall gives you a lot of points if you have a lot of production buildings right two for each large so if you have this with a colonist in it this will actually be worth five effectively five four four right two two the small ones give you one extra victory point so this could be worth four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve fourteen this could be worth the maximum of 14 points at the end of the game oh also all these cost ten which is a lot of money yep all right the residents uh if you're doing like the hacienda which gives you a lot of plantations to fill in the bottom of the board this gives you more points if you fill in the bottom of the board with all kinds of plantations doesn't matter if there's uh any uh colonists in the bottom of the board it just matters that you got a lot of plantations to fill in the bottom of the board there's a little scale right if you fill it all the way in you get seven points if you're one short eleven points two short ten points otherwise four points so it's like it's always eight points actually no matter what that's not bad fortress at the end of the game after you figured everything out add up all your colonists the ones in san juan the ones in the buildings the ones in the plantations just how many you got right divide by three round down get that many points if you got 30 colonists you're getting 10 points plus remember these four don't laugh at those four okay customs house one victory point for every four point chips if you're doing the factory harbor like we said and ganging up on those orange chips of victory with your captain this is the way to go because basically it increases your victory point chip score by 25 percent right if you've got 20 victory point chips guess what now you got 25 effectively because it's giving you one point for every four chip points you've already got round down so if you got 26 you're still only getting five yep city hall one point for each violet building right so including this one including itself so it's already worth five points if it's the only violet building you own right so this is sort of the alternate win strategy besides the one that we've been pushing on you the alternate win we'll talk about that soon but the alternate wins what you're pushing on you is remember you can end the game in three ways all the victory point chips run out of colonists and fill in the top of the board if you rush and fill in the top of the board before anyone can start selling goods on the boats you can win that way with some quarries right you know it's filling the top really fast and then this will be your go-to building to end the game fill in the final two spaces and you'll have a lot of violet buildings filling up all those top right and they'll be worth one extra point each so five nine thirteen right and so on so right once this all happens when the game ends the scoring like we said is pretty simple it is just different graphics i know yeah because i wasn't sure what edition we'd have it packed so i had to cover my bases but it's the same these numbers on all your buildings these four no matter what you do not need a colonist in there to score them yes you always get the points in the top right of a building this yellow text in the big buildings only if there's a colonist in them and then all these and if they run out you still get the ones you were owed at the end of the game add those three things that's it whoever has the most points wins so we're gonna really briefly talk about my way you want to do rules questions first any rules questions anybody do we do such a great job is not a single question we will be walking around so make sure if you have questions in the course of play as well yes we're gonna be here for a while so now we're gonna make you all monsters okay so you can be freely really mean to people in this game so let's talk about some directional heuristics what do you do in this game so first things first these are like basic tactics like sneaky crafty things to do to people no matter what your strategy is these are like the tactical things to do if you can take advantage of an opportunity because the game goes clockwise where you sit matters a lot if a bunch of pros are playing together you're probably gonna rotate the seating and play five times or something like that right because if rims to my left i can really bone him over yep this matters a lot so think about clockwise play and think really hard about what other people at the table want to do someone's got a really good building that doesn't have any colonists in it they probably want to take the mayor maybe you will know they're gonna take the mayor and assume that's gonna happen and choose something else more importantly they're probably gonna be fiddling with whatever part of the game they're gonna do the thing with because a lot of you are new to this game they're gonna be like staring at the buildings like reading the text they're probably gonna pick builder on their turn do you really need that bonus like yeah you take the builder you get a bonus if i have eight money i can afford the factory regardless whether or not i take the builder maybe i let joey jojo take the builder and waste his turn right every time someone else takes an action right builders the easiest to explain it with if rim chooses builder and i build a building that's great because that means i basically saved the whole turn right it's a turn i don't have to take the builder i could choose something else and get on with my life right if rim chooses builder and i don't have any money and i can't build anything i say no i'm not building anything i just lost a turn and i'm falling behind and rim is now basically ahead in the game by one step if i see that scott has six dollars and no quarries i know we can't buy the factory that's the best time to take builder is he gonna drop all that money and possibly right if he let the builder come to me i could have taken it and built the factory because six plus the one bonus would be seven but also there's only two of every building so think real hard it's not just the bonus of the discount you might need to go first to buy that factory because literally every one of you is going to try to buy that factory there's only two of them most of you at any table are not going to get the factory if you are the only one with the barrel or there's already three barrels in the trading house or you're the old maybe you have to make coffee and you put one coffee in that big freaking boat that is your personal coffee boat for most of the game at this point also anyone else has coffee was hoping to put it in the trading house now has to put it on the boat if you can take an action and literally no one else can benefit from it it's pretty much just like a plus one toward you right more importantly not everyone at the table is going to be doing that well so if someone's clearly losing at your table don't worry about them don't worry about them at all you don't care what they're doing if you do something that gets joey jojo like four points and he can't beat you great you didn't let the good guy or the good the good person at the table get those points only try to hurt the people who might actually beat you and you'll figure out after a few rounds who's clever or not at your table attack the best players don't attack the week old players get between one and two quarries they're pretty good spot right you could go for that quarry strategy I mentioned which we'll talk about soon but mostly you know can't do bad with a quarry getting a quarry early putting a play a columnist in it and going with it the whole game is going to save you a lot of doubloons optimize the captain like we're not going to do a million examples you'll figure it out but think hard if I put coffee and Scott can't trade his car that's real good you want to make other people have to toss their barrels into the sea they put a lot of work into doing that craftsman action they got a lot of barrels they want to get a lot of points if those barrels go into the sea that's victory points they're not getting that's trading that they're not doing more importantly if you are going to be the governor next so the player to your right is the governor and then you're making your choice you could you're theoretically you could choose craftsman and when the governor passes to you immediately choose captain and no one else get the opportunity take advantage of that craft think a lot about player order in terms of who will play captain and when because that's where the captaining starts and that's where you can optimize and really screw someone over let's say you want to the game to head right so you're winning at this game the end is not controlled by some set number of rounds it's not controlled by a clock it's controlled by the colonists the buildings at the top or the victory point shifts if you are winning the game you want it to end soon you want to rush to the end start pulling colonists off the boat start building a lot of buildings start getting lots of victory points you got a cord just build that small indigo plant you don't even need and just stick it in there just you want to end the game fast if you're ahead so no one can catch up to you if you're behind you want to drag that game you want to say no do you not end the game let's slow this down this is where you move as many people as you can out of buildings into plantations so more colonists come on the ship that'll end the game quicker let's say you don't want the game to end oh i guess i forgot to mirror i forgot to refill the ship literally every time i took mirror that sucks sorry do stuff like that there aren't that many ways to make the game go longer other than not building things but you can probably get away with this especially because you all just learned the game except we just told him yep in general and this is how you really win you're gonna have a starting loadout so like we said before players one two and three we'll start with one indigo players four and five we'll start with one corn plantation plantation not barrels so right now pick starting player give them the governor to do it arbitrarily and give that starting player the governor takes an indigo plantation the two players to the left of the governor also get indigo plantations the let the rest of the players get corn if you got four players i think it's corn indigo indigo corn corn yeah yes indigo indigo corn corn for four players five indigo indigo corn corn right and no buildings no one starts the building the instruction manual has a reference and also we're gonna come and help you as soon as we're done talking but based on what's happening now you're gonna have one of these plantations to start you're gonna know who the starting player is so you should then from there choose one of these big buildings that you're gonna aim for toward the end of the game and then figure out which of these buildings complement that building and we're gonna show you three possible loadouts in a second the only other thing to bear in mind do not do the strategy the player to your right is doing the player to your right can screw you over constantly they will always beat you if this person keeps building buildings and they're going that way and i'm trying to also build buildings they're gonna beat me to the punch on four out of five turns because they're gonna go before me on four out of five turns right so the person to your right if they're doing barrels you want to do buildings that they're doing buildings you do barrels right do something different than what they're doing screw the player to your left like really screw them over if you see the player to your left is doing buildings go for buildings you'll beat them to the punch every single time yeah if they're going for the factory and you're going for the factory you're gonna build the factory before them most likely so here are three strategies you can try to follow and we'll put these up and let you sort of look at them but basically the harbor strategy go for the customs house that gives you victory points for victory points make the game go along try to be the one who picks the captain because you get a bonus point when you pick when you're the person who picks the captain let some other schmuck craft you want them to waste their time crafting so you can just right if you've got that factory you have the factory they're picking craftsman you're getting barrels and money when they pick craftsman then it comes to your turn you pick captain you get a bunch of victory points and have the best victory points make a variety of things so you can you can captain no matter what's going on no matter what's in those boats go after the hacienda go after these small buildings get some tobacco and coffee get that harbor obviously get the factory right here's the other strategy that works the war strategy right so you make a ton of corn you don't need any buildings really sugar is your backup plan you can make a lot of sugar pretty easy and you can trade it for money when you need it right but because you might have been able to fit all your corn because you're making so much onto you know just one boat you get the wharf or warehouses so you can save your corn or sell it all at once in your own boat everyone else is starved for corn you and the harbor person both want to make the game go along the longer the game goes the more you're just pumping that victory point right more captains is more points you want to go after the hospice to get free colonists wanting our first small warehouse early in the game to hoard barrels and the harbor does your own special delivery absolutely yes you get them if anyone in this room gets both a harbor and a wharf you're almost guaranteed to you might as well just like some people just forfeit hey hi can you let that so obviously not everyone can do the harbor and the wharf strategy and you're all going to go for them because they are the best ways to win this game here is the other way to win the big building strategy you want to build buildings as fast as possible and not be too reliant upon getting a bunch of barrels you want the end to end quickly you want to get city hall you want to take prospectors you want to get a bunch of corn right if you do my two three four big buildings just in the game right you don't want to have no barrels because that's a lot of actions you're not doing anything right but what you do want to get is tobaccos or coffees or maybe both and that way when you do get a barrel it's an awesome barrel and you can take it to the trading house get a ton of doubloons and buy some awesome buildings really quickly yep you want to go for the office and all the trading stuff so trading is really lucrative so you can trade you're going crap instead of going craftsman captain someone else fix craftsman you go trade builder trade builder yeah actually one the university here this is why it's hard to win with this thing but someone's gonna have to go for this because everyone else is gonna do the captain stuff or race to the captain stuff and someone's gonna miss it here's the only other real strategy the big colony strategy don't go for this one necessarily this is your like secondary goal and it's also your backup strat right your main remember this because there's two factories there's two harbors right there's two of a lot of things so a lot of times if two people are really captaining well maybe they're sitting far apart from each other what will determine victory is remember the big buildings there's only one of each so who gets which big building but also who's doing the secondary stuff the best will determine the margin between the two players yep go for the hospice and the house yander try to fill the top of your board and the bottom of the board get as many colonists as you can try to get as many of these big buildings as you can and hope that all the people going for the shipping strategies just keep screwing each other over and you quietly win the game or the real way to win do one of the shipping strategies and do one of these that's how y'all really win it's hard to pull off if you can get away with it so the factory and the university like we said the designer of this game actually did release not a rada but in an interview admitted I think it was a board game geek forum post yep but he posted of personally that if he was going to make any change to this game he would flip the cost of these two buildings we're not doing that because that's not official yeah no this is we're playing with the rules as written factories op we warned you all our positional heuristics in this game aren't there's not that many it's pretty simple just while you're playing if you need to figure out who's winning money is worth a lot at the beginning of the game right money is not worth anything at the end of the game right think about early in the game you have some doubloons you buy a building that building's worth points right it's like whoa but later in the game it's like oh you get 10 doubloons you can buy a building that's worth four points right but the early game buildings it's like one doubloon one point almost right but later in the game obviously you know the money at the very very end just becomes a tiebreaker if someone builds a factory first go after them all of you if someone has a good building they're winning if someone has a lot of creature-grown chips they're winning if someone has a lot of money toward the end of the game they're probably not winning and also just reminder again the buildings don't do anything plantations don't do anything until they have a colonist in them from the mayor or from one of the bonuses of some kind so we're pretty much done so i have one last offer to all of you right we're gonna go around helping people with rules obviously while you play but don't be shy to ask any question whatsoever if any one of you want expert advice at this game because we have played this game a lot like we could get into the weird math if you really wanted to get good at modulus math and you'll get better at german board games but if you want to make a deal with us and ask us what to do on your term we will tell you exactly what to do in your game and then we will explain to everyone else in the table why and what that means for them so if you want to know like i know how to play i get all the rules what's the best move for me right now and i'll come and i'll say well you should captain and do this and this and this because this and this and they'll have to put their barrels in the sea semi-colon and these players could stop you by them doing this and i hope that the odds be ever in your favor all right let's play for you oh yeah and if you enjoyed this all i will just say tomorrow at 11 30 am we're doing another panel it's a real panel in the mothman theater the 40 cable top games you must play you don't need to come to that so you've got to set up i hope you all got it set up we're gonna help you get these games going and this should be a fun time raise your hand if you need help anybody all right you hit them i'll hit them