I have a tenuous relationship with the games designed by Alexander Pfister. On one hand, I generally dislike Great Western Trail, Blackout Hong Kong, and Maracaibo. On the other hand, two of his co-designs, Broom Service, and Isle of Skye are some of my favourite games ever. While I’ve learned to steer clear from his bigger euro games, I hold out hope that I’ll continue to find joy in his smaller games.
Port Royal is a card game for 2 to 5 players originally published in 2014, although I played the big box edition with art by Fantasmagoria Creative and published by Pegasus Spiele in 2022. In Port Royal, players are trying to extract as much value out of a series of Caribbean mariners as possible to hopefully win the award of most prestigious company.
I’m actually not sure what the players are supposed to be, the theme does no service to the gameplay. The gameplay is a straightforward push your luck game, where the active player flips over cards one at a time until they either choose to stop, or they reveal two ships of the same colour. If the active player chooses to stop, they can take 1/2/3 cards (if they revealed 0-3/4/5 different colour ships), then every other player gets a chance to buy one of the revealed cards, but must pay the active player a coin for the privilege of doing so.
The goal of the game is to reach 12 or more points the quickest, and points mostly come from the crew you hire. Most of the crew members will give you special abilities while they’re in your tableau, such as earning extra money for specific colours of ships, or offering you more card picks, or giving you bonus income if the card market has 5 or more cards when you start your turn. The ships on the other hand, just give you money and are discarded. There are also tax cards, which make players with 12 or more coins lose half their money, and expedition cards that sit off to the side until someone trades in the prerequisite crew members to claim the expedition. Around and around players play until someone hits that 12 point threshold, and after all players had the same number of turns, the player with the most points is the winner.
The fact that Port Royal is naught, but a single deck of 120 cards is really clever. Every card has a coin on the back, and when you take coins, you just draw them face down from the top of the deck, ensuring no one can really be counting cards. This also means when the deck runs dry, and you shuffle the discard to form a new deck, you’ll be likely be seeing new cards that were drawn face down the first time around.
That said, I did not find the game itself to be particularly engaging. More than once someone flipped two ships of the same colour after just 2 or 3 card draws, busting their turn. Money felt fairly hard to come by if your turn busted, as the active player was most likely to take the highest value ship, and taking the lower value ships on their turn means you’re just feeding them more money. Managing how much money you hold is a delicate balance, as having 12 or more puts you at risk of just losing half of it, which is the equivalent of at least 2 turns of taking ship cards. The crew cards themselves cost as low as 3 coins, but as high as 9, meaning if you want to hire a crew on someone else’s turn, you need to have 10 or 11 coins, lest you find yourself at risk.
I see small trappings of engine building in Port Royal, but they didn’t come to fruition during our play. Yes, you can hire multiple traders to get extra value out of those ships, if they come up and are available on your turn. Also, having traders of a colour is a sure-fire way to ensure that the other players don’t let ships of that colour make it to you on their turns.
Luck is a major factor in Port Royal. Having the right cards come out at the right time is key to your victory. It doesn’t even need to be the right cards, it can just be cards that you can afford, or a ship to earn you money. As I said in the paragraph above, if you have a merchant to earn you bonus money if the right colour ship comes out, hopefully you’re lucky enough to draw that ship before you draw two of the same colour and lose your whole turn. I get that this is a push your luck game, but I never really felt excited drawing cards and seeing crew members that I couldn’t afford and ships of the wrong colour flip up.
Port Royal is a clever deck of cards with good flow. It’s easy to teach and understand how to play, but my issue lies in the fact that there are so many more push your luck games that I’d rather play. Incan Gold, Can’t Stop, and The Quacks of Quedlinburg all come to mind. Port Royal failed to create any stand up moments. Every time someone busted it was just a shrug, an “oh well”, and pass the deck to the next player. At no point did I feel tension or excitement. There were no real stakes, nothing exciting to be gained or lost. A ho-hum yawn of an experience.
