What’s the best board game ever? Ask around and you’ll probably get an assortment of names we all grew up with. The game we played over and over with our friends and family.
But if you ask someone who’s made a hobby of games. Someone who’s closet and bookshelves are straining under the weight of hundreds of colorful boxes. Well, your probably going to get a very different answer.
There’s a huge online database that is attempting to list every board game ever made. It’s called Board Game Geek, and it not only lists the name of the game, but a large amount of other information about it as well. Readers of the site can contribute additional information, such as pictures, reviews and strategies for playing the game. Another thing readers of Board Game Geek can do is give ratings to the games, and for many years one game has continually held the title as the highest rated game.
The game is called, Puerto Rico.
You haven’t heard of this game? That’s not surprising, almost no one outside the board game hobby has. It’s an obscure game full of strange mechanics. For example, there’s no dice rolling and no pawns to move around the board. The theme of the game is even stranger. You play as a 18th century plantation owner in Puerto Rico trying to decide what crop to plant.
But, for experienced gamers, this title has some of the aspects we most value in a game. It has a lot of different strategies for winning. It doesn’t eliminate players partway through the game, and most of all, it presents interesting choices to the players. When a player chooses to improve his or her plantation by buying a new building or hiring new workers, then all players at the table also get to do that same action. So, each player is continually asking himself, “Would doing this action help my opponents more that it would help me?”
By the end of the game, each player has built his or her own little working plantation, turning crops into refined goods and selling them for cash or sending them back to Europe for fame (and victory points). The player with the most victory points at the end is the winner. But, even when you don’t win, you can still be proud of the economy you’ve built. It gives you a feeling of accomplishment, especially when you didn’t have to force another player into bankruptcy to do it.
Will everyone love this game? Certainly not. The rules are complicated and unlike any other game the average person has played. But, if your weekly gaming group wants a challenge, a game they can really plot and plan and strategize over, then there’s no higher recommendation.
What’s the best board game ever? One that exactly matches the group of people playing.
Photos by Rio Grande Games and KitAy
