The board game Puerto Rico was released in 2002, and while it by all accounts played very well, it was also a deeply colonial game that made light of the fact you were being asked to build a commercial empire large part on the back of slavery.
Princess Peach’s Leading Role And More New Releases
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That’s, uh, yeah. Luke Winkie’s excellent 2021 piece for The Atlantic sums up the game’s premise:
Slaves, then. It’s talking about slaves. Throw in the fact the game completely ignores the island’s indigenous population and environmental concerns and you can see why, in more recent years as board gaming has expanded its audience and sought to reckon with its output, it was not a great look for a major publisher like Ravensburger to be lending its name to the game.
As Dicebreaker report, that led to a revised edition being launched last year, which set the game in 1897—after Spanish rule but before America’s—and basically “decolonized it”, keeping the central mechanics but changing much of the imagery and thematic overlay.
Sadly, while the relaunch had good intentions, it badly whiffed on its manufacturing. As Dicebreaker say, “The game’s release was beset by complaints of missing components – notably four fruit tiles and half the coffee tiles needed to play – and production oversights, including rulebook errors and text missing from building tiles that explained their unique effects”.
