FallCon - A Cornucopia of Gaming

Name: Puerto Rico
Designer: Andreas Seyfarth
# of Players: 2-5
Playtime: 90 minutes
MSRP: $54.99 CDN
Link to Rules

Synopsis: As plantation owners in the age of sail, you try to be the most efficient manager of your resources.  You choose various roles each turn that help you with growing crops and processing them; then either selling them to buy bigger and better buildings or shipping the goods back to Europe for glory and victory! 

Are you ready to manage your plantation and ensure your name is heard all over Europe as the Master of Puerto Rico?

When I first got into playing designer boardgames, the king of the hill on BoardGameGeek was Puerto Rico.  Andreas Seyfarth’s role-selection masterpiece came on to the scene in 2002 and has been in the top 5 rated games since.

Why?  Because you can teach this game in 15 minutes; it has multiple routes to victory, tons of replayability and you never feel like you are out of the running. Add to that a 90 minute playtime and you should be able to get just about anyone to play this game.

For new players, there are many avenues to explore: do I produce a lot of goods, and use my market to generate lots of income for big buildings?  Do I focus on one type of good and just keep shipping it to Europe? There are so many decisions to be made, but since you can only choose one role a turn, you won’t get bogged down in analysis paralysis.

FallCon offers a great opportunity to learn and to play this game and we would love to show you why this has been one of the best-rated games of all time!

Find a couple of your friends and join us at the table!

Darren

Sometimes people laugh when they open my game boxes. Inside they find carefully organized plastic boxes, bags or metal tins, stacked in just the right way to fit into the original game box. Even more humorous for some is when I tell them that by the time I’ve added my storage elements, my ‘cost-per-game’ is sometimes 10-15% more than the purchase price.

Yes there is an extra cost, but I think this is money well spent. There are a number of reasons for this “approach to game-bit-organizing”, but for me the biggest one is setup. When I am setting up a game, I’m often preparing to teach the game to new people and I want to get them involved as quickly as possible. If having a well-organized game can get me up-and-running quickly, it’s worth it.

Protecting game pieces is also important. A number of my games are stored vertically so certain pieces, especially cards and smaller player boards, are prone to wear or warp just through storage. I find that if I have good internal storage trays or boxes, then the risk of damage is greatly reduced.

For some games, certain storage containers also double as draw boxes or even organizers during play. For example, in my copy of Le Havre I use the 0.07L Really Useful Boxes storage box, and sit that right on the game board for easy drawing of the resource chits.

Here’s some links to some of my favorite “Inside the Game Box” organizing items that are pretty easy to find here in Canada:

Really Useful Boxes – the best storage box I’ve ever found. These come in every size from 0.07 Litre volumes to 1.0 Litre and above. And the secure side clips means then never open inadvertently. I graduated to these from small cardboard boxes that I found at my local craft store. These are available at Staples.

Staples 3 x 5 Zip Top Poly Bags – are great, and how can you beat 100 for $5. They also have a write-on label area. Of course, the Zip Loc Snack Bags work too, but the Staples bags use a heavier poly and hold up a bit better.

Lee Valley Seed Containers – these were a pleasant surprise. They come in a variety of sizes, and have secure twist on lids. They remind me a lot of medical and laboratory petri dishes, but because these aren’t made for those applications, they are a lot cheaper.

Tim O'Connor

Let's set the scene. You're sitting at the auction, leaning slightly forward in anticipation, your mind bubbling with questions:

"What's the next item going to be?"
"Is that the German version, or the English?"
"They're going to run out of apple pie again, aren't they?"
"Which release of Candyland is this one?"
"What on earth does Brent have stuck in his beard?"

I'm here to announce we've got a new toy for the auction this year that can answer some of those questions. It doesn't have an official name yet, but for the time being, we'll call it...um...the FallCon Auction Queue, or FAQ, at least until we get a better suggestion from our loyal readers. It used to be a rondel, but that damn circle was using up too much real estate.

Birthed from a comment by Ian Blizzard (of 12-Man Titan fame), the FAQ is meant to both improve the experience of buyers and sellers in the auction *and* reduce the number of REM sleep hours of its developer. Synergy!

Here's how it works: during the auction, you'll see information regarding the current game up for auction - as well as similar info for the next two games in the auction. Take a look at the screenshot above for a detailed view of what info we're throwing at you. As items are sold, this list will automagically update through the Power of Technology.

• Buyers win, because they can see the info they need to make informed bids. 

• Sellers win, because they can provide informative and amusing comments to drive interest. (Sellers - that's your cue to write some informative and amusing comments.)

• FallCon auction volunteers win, 'cause they get to use a cool wireless barcode scanner.

The only person who doesn't really win is the resident FallCon Code Monkey, who'll probably be having some kind of simian panic attack during the auction as he worries about whether everything will work...but Monkeys Aren't People.

Jordan (aka Code Monkey)

• Akrotiri by Jay Cormier & Sen-Foong Lim
• Ciceron by Jérôme Morin-Drouin
• Undermining by Matt Tolman
• Yum: Realtime Ice Cream by Gavan Brown

I want to reiterate that we had an excellent crop of games this year and the selection of these four finalists was extremely difficult. Based on the ratings & comments from our prototype judges, the general consensus was that nearly all of the designs were imminently publishable. As there will only be one CGDA Winner, I'm personally looking forward to seeing many of our submissions from 2011 back in the competition next year making our decisions difficult once again. We take it as a good sign that these designs are all of such high quality. It's good omen for the future of game design in Canada!

Thanks to all who entered the contest this year and we hope you'll consider entering the contest again in 2012, especially considering the amazing and ongoing support from Valley Games and Panda Game Manufacturing. We'll be opening up submissions in late October, early November.
Congratulations and good luck to all our Finalists!

Jasen