The board game Puerto Rico appeared in 2002, and although it appears to have played very wellit was also a deeply colonial game that downplayed the fact that one was being asked to build a trading empire on the backs of slavery in large part.
That’s, uh, yeah. Luke Winkie’s outstanding 2021 play for The Atlantic summarizes the premise of the game:
To win, one must “obtain the greatest wealth and respect.” In practice, this means that the mechanisms of “Puerto Rico” are centered on cultivation, exploitation and plunder. Each turn, a player takes on a role – the “Settler”, “Builder”, “Merchant”, “Craftsman”, “Captain”, etc. – and slowly tries to expand their tropical enclave into a tidy Imperial settlement the 16th century. Perhaps they are uprooting the wilderness and replacing it with tobacco willows or corn growing, or perhaps they are outfitting the rocky reefs with fishing wharves and harbors to ship those commodities back across the ocean. All of this is only possible with the help of a resource the game calls “Colonists” – represented by small, brown discs in the game’s first edition, published by Rio Grande Games and available from major retailers – who come by ship and will sent by the players to work on their plantations.
So slaves. It’s about slaves. Add to that the fact that the game completely ignores the island’s indigenous people and environmental concerns, and in recent years you can understand why as board games have expanded their audiences and attempted to anticipate their outputit wasn’t a great sight for a big publisher like Ravensburger to give the game its name.
As cube breaker reportresulting in a revised edition coming out last year that set the game in 1897 – after Spanish rule but before American – and basically “decolonized” it, keeping the central mechanics but retaining many of the visuals and thematic overlays have been changed.
Unfortunately, while the intentions behind the relaunch were good, it hampered manufacturing. As cube breaker say“When the game was released, there were complaints about missing components – specifically four fruit tiles and half of the coffee tiles needed to play – and production errors, including rule errors and missing text on building tiles explaining their unique effects.”
It got so bad that Ravensburger had to “stop production” of the game to “fix the tile count and rule errors.” People who have already purchased a copy can do so Fill out a form now To provide them with the missing pieces, a revised edition of the manual was released as a downloadable PDF and a relaunch – the third of the game if you count a visual overhaul in 2020– Hopefully later this year this will be fixed in stores for anyone who buys a copy in the future.
