On a recent post on Gone Gaming, writer Yehuda talks mentions briefly an alternate universe where the goal of the game Puerto Rico is not stated as part of the rules. Could it be turned into a cooperative game, he wonders?

This question isn’t really the point of his article, but it drew my attention. Could Puerto Rico be turned into a cooperative game? Let’s take a look.

Zeroth: What will the goal actually be? Attempting to maximize the score seems like a reasonable goal. Even better, you could have titles like “Manager”, “Governor,” and “Viceroy” if certain point thresholds are reached. Scoring (say) 142 instead of 139 does not seem like a big deal, but if we called 140 a “winning” threshold (unless you get 140, you lose), people would take whatever risks were necessary to cross the line. Having a series of achievement ranks seems like a neat compromise with titles that add some fun flavor.

First: Something will need to be done to prevent stalling. In my experience, the game ends in at least 80% of games by running out of colonists and the last 20% of the time by one player filling up a city. I have never seen the VP chips run out. If players were working together, none of these things ever has to happen, so players could make sure all the buildings were bought, all colonists distributed, and all VP chips awarded on the same, final turn.

A limit to the number of turns, either “hard” (i.e. 10) or “soft” (if 6 + a 2d6 roll is greater than the turn number, end the game) is the obvious solution,  but this feels contrived and boring to me. The game is still just a static exercise in optimization. I would rather see a “evil” deck like in Shadows over Camelot, where every turn something bad happens that makes the game closer to over and gives the players a reason to hurry. Examples include: Remove 10 colonists from the store; remove 10 VP chips from the store; each player adds a 0-point building  to his town (it just takes up space); subtract 10 from the final score of the game; and so on.

Second: Some unpredictability in the play of the jobs would be nice too. I suggest this mechanic: After the last player moves, but before money is added to the jobs, a “phantom player” chooses the job with the most money (choose randomly if there is a tie). All players perform that action as normal. This could be helpful (giving the players a free move) or harmful (if they were hoping to stall the game by not picking the Mayor or buy warehouses before calling the Captain). It would also restore the urgency of needing to pick jobs with money before “someone else” gets the cash.

Third: I would like each player’s score to be important. It seems like a good strategy would be for a couple people to specialize and the rest to take the scraps. I think this would feel unsatisfying for those players, even though it’s theoretically a cooperative game. My best idea so far is this: The highest-scoring player’s score is reduced to the score of the lowest-scoring player. (The second and third players are unchanged.) Letting one person score a runaway total doesn’t do any good, and finding a way to give points to the last player would count “double” (because it also increases the first player’s score.)

A huge amount of tuning is needed, of course, but I may give this a try sometime.