Workshop Wednesday: Puerto Rico, Great Western Trail Argentina, & Pick A Pen Gardens

Due to popular demand, we will now be teaching three games on Wednesdays.

This Wednesday we will be playing Puerto Rico, Great Western Trail Argentina & Pick a Pen Gardens.

Puerto Rico: 7.9

In Puerto Rico, players assume the roles of colonial governors on the island of Puerto Rico. The aim of the game is to amass victory points by shipping goods to Europe or by constructing buildings.

Each player uses a separate small board with spaces for city buildings, plantations, and resources. Shared between the players are three ships, a trading house, and a supply of resources and doubloons.

The resource cycle of the game is that players grow crops which they exchange for points or doubloons. Doubloons can then be used to buy buildings, which allow players to produce more crops or give them other abilities. Buildings and plantations do not work unless they are manned by colonists.

During each round, players take turns selecting a role card from those on the table (such as "Trader" or "Builder"). When a role is chosen, every player gets to take the action appropriate to that role. The player that selected the role also receives a small privilege for doing so - for example, choosing the "Builder" role allows all players to construct a building, but the player who chose the role may do so at a discount on that turn. Unused roles gain a doubloon bonus at the end of each turn, so the next player who chooses that role gets to keep any doubloon bonus associated with it. This encourages players to make use of all the roles throughout a typical course of a game.

Puerto Rico uses a variable phase order mechanism in which a "governor" token is passed clockwise to the next player at the conclusion of a turn. The player with the token begins the round by choosing a role and taking the first action.

Players earn victory points for owning buildings, for shipping goods, and for manned "large buildings." Each player's accumulated shipping chips are kept face down and come in denominations of one or five. This prevents other players from being able to determine the exact score of another player. Goods and doubloons are placed in clear view of other players and the totals of each can always be requested by a player. As the game enters its later stages, the unknown quantity of shipping tokens and its denominations require players to consider their options before choosing a role that can end the game.

Great Western Trail: Argentina: 8.4

In Great Western Trail: Argentina, you own a vast estancia in Argentina at the end of the 19th century, and you will need to travel the plains of the Pampas with your cattle to deliver them to the main train station in Buenos Aires.

Great Western Trail: Argentina features gameplay elements similar to Great Western Trail such as deck management, the rondel mechanism, and the ability to upgrade your player board, along with twists on these elements and new features.

The player board features a new type of worker — farmers — and different paths await on the game board to confront you with more choices. Will you take the road with buildings or a path past farmers? Maybe you'll have the chance to use your cows — well, the strength on your cow cards — to help farmers, getting them on your side and adding grain, a new type of resource, to your income, with grain being used for boat and city tiles.

Perhaps you can unlock shortcuts that allow you to deliver your herd to Buenos Aires more quickly. Sure, you'll forfeit the use of action buildings, but maybe you can catch others unaware, with the ships leaving before they deliver. The timing of reaching the central train station to deliver your herd has never been so crucial, and valuable bonuses await on the city's port tiles.

Money is easier to get in Great Western Trail: Argentina, but you have more to manage in terms of action options, shortcuts, and cards (including the new exhaustion cards), so the challenges won't let up.

Pick A Pen: Gardens: 6.8

Each turn in Pick a Pen: Gardens, the active player rolls the five colored pencils, then chooses one and marks spaces on their individual player sheet. Each other player in turn drafts a pencil and uses it. Pencils show symbols on their different sides, and the symbols on top of the chosen pencil determine what players do on their sheets.

Each sheet shows bordered gardens, and on a turn, you fill in the indicated number of spaces in that color; all of those spaces must be adjacent to one another, in addition to being adjacent to everything colored previously. Your goal is to fill gardens with only a single color or with five different colors, scoring bonus points as you do so. The game ends when a player has completely colored all of their gardens or failed to color in five times.

Pick a Pen: Gardens includes three difficulty levels of player sheets, with flowers and trees on sheets 2 and 3 to help you earn bonus points in different ways.

Come join us on Wednesday, June 12th @ 6:00 p.m. to learn any of these games for Workshop Wednesday. See you soon! 

*This event requires a 1-Day Membership, credit will be applied back for qualifying purchases. Current Members are always free for this event.*