The Day I REALLY Learned How to Play Puerto Rico!
And the Importance of Making Sure You Get Your Marketing RIGHT…
The last blog post was about my first Catan victory. Quick summary: getting that 10th victory point for the first time put me on cloud 9.
But that was 2011… this story takes place in 2015…
I had graduated, was in a new town (Davis, CA), and working two jobs. But who cares about that right now! What matters is I was ALSO taking my first big step into “big-boy-board-games”.
I had three other guys that were wanting to expand beyond Catan, and we started with an all-time classic: Puerto Rico.
The setting places you as a merchant in colonial puerto rico seeking to produce and ship out as many cash crops (indigo, coffee, sugar, etc.) as possible.
If you haven’t played Puerto Rico before, let me give you a quick run down:
Each turn players go around in a circle performing actions
Those actions range from trading, to buying buildings, to gaining more colonists
Whenever you choose an action, you get a bonus, but everyone else benefits from that action
The round ends when no one else can perform an action, and everything resets.
The game ends when the table runs out of victory points
Sounds simple enough, right?
WROOOOOOOONG.
Like all engine building board games with millions of pieces, there are TONS of little rules and strategies here and there.
For example: there are like 16 different types of buildings, and ALL OF THEM have their own rules.
And the resources! The math behind what is the most efficient resource at any given moment can give any novice headaches (click here to see what I mean).
Anyways… we spent a whooooole friday evening learning everything, brutalizing that poor rule sheet with all our look-ups. 5 hours later…
I emerged as the first victor.
Was it as satisfying as Catan? Heck no, but it still felt good :) We played a few more times, liked it a lot, and promised to return to it next weekend.
Well, next weekend rolls around, and another one of our friends (we’ll call her “Mary”) asked if she could play. We of course said yes… after all, the more people that learn, the more often we can play!
So we start explaining the rules, interrupting each other constantly with corrections but confident that after 3 games we knew what we were talking about.
But only 3 minutes in, Mary asks: “wait, why are you guys having the second player pull from the colonist ship first… shouldn’t the one who selected that action go first”…
She was met with awkward silence…
Then a quick google search…
And the embarrassing realization: SHE WAS RIGHT
We had been playing the game wrong the whole time.
But, c’mon, no big deal, right? I mean, it’s not like it discredits our previous play throughs.
And that was true, it didn’t…
BUT THE 9 OTHER RULES WE GOT WRONG SURE DID.
I mean geez, we were taking too many coins, using at least 5 buildings wrong, and completely missed the passive income strategy.
Long story short: that night we ACTUALLY figured out how to play Puerto Rico, and I lost by, like, 50 victory points.
But even though our previous games were complete b&ll sh*t once we learned how to REALLY play the game…
It became a FAVORITE of ours that we would play many, many times in 2014-2016.
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How is this relevant to you as your market your tabletop war game, board game, trading card game, or role playing game?
You have to learn how to “PLAY THE MARKETING GAME”.
Like complicated board games, marketing comes with some maxims; straightforward rules that are relatively simple and can be picked up quickly.
But just knowing the basics isn’t enough to play, because all those big rules have like a zillion little rules attached to them.
And it is VERY EASY to get those little marketing rules wrong… but FEEL like you are getting them right.
To think you know your industry, but never create TA personas…
To start writing blogs, but not SEO optimize any of them…
To have a gorgeous landing page, but not actually communicate anything the customer cares about…
To use social media, but consider every follower a supporter…
To invest in Mailchimp, but send too few emails at the wrong times about the wrong stuff…
Any one of these mistakes can take an otherwise prestine board game marketing strategy.
Because if you don’t get your marketing right, you might FEEL like you are winning…
But the actual, real-world results won’t reflect that.
