Downloading Mike Doyle’s PRege, La Ciudad might take a while, but it’s well worth it. Mike Doyle was frustrated because he was unable to see the whole picture of a Puerto Rico game. He went on and created some new art for the game. Instead of personal player boards, there’s a large common board, which features all the different buildings players can build. Players just place their tokens on the map to show which buildings they have. It’s an interesting idea and the artwork is stunning. I wish I had such a board. The files are available for do-it-yourself people, but I’m afraid it’s just too much trouble and I wouldn’t be able to make it pretty — handicraft isn’t one of my strong areas.
3 responses to “Amazing Puerto Rico board”
The website is very pretty and the pictures of the board look good, but I can’t even see where to download the the board or pieces. I cannot believe that anyone who made such an unusable website could improve on the usability of the basic Puerto Rico components.
I thought it was most obvious: when you click “the Board, the first thing you see is “Download art & Printable directions”. Same with the tiles. While the usability of Flash designs can be debated, I don’t think this one isn’t really that bad.
And really, the usability of the board has little to do with the usability of the web site. Designing those two takes — in my opinion — a different set of skills. Reading through his ideas of the board construction makes it seem like a pretty well-done board. For example, the buildings are grouped on the board by the phase of the game they are used in.
I just have no patience with Flash websites in general. Maybe I just closed my mind as soon as I saw it? Just having to click a button to read every 20 words is very annoying.
I’ll wait for some session reports. If people really think it improves things, I might persevere with the dreadful site design.