Chopra Ships For The Win!

Shiv Chopra ships for the win with 4 unmanned big buildings at the end.

This year’s Final included the event’s laurel leader and 2-time winner, David Platnick, former champion Micah McCormick, and longtime participants Shiv Chopra and Tricia Wolff.

Shiv had built up a serious lead in shipping, but he could see the ‘end was nigh’ as the other players all had the money to buy a large building and Tricia’s would fill her city. With no shipping available, he picked Builder to get as many points as he could. All the other players built large buildings. Micah crafted to produce the most goods. David settled to fill up his island for his Residence. With the last move, Tricia had to decide between mayor, to populate her City Hall, or not. She chose Prospector. Although this prevented the other players from getting bonus points for their large buildings, it also put her 2 points behind Shiv, instead of 2 points ahead. David would have picked up 12 points from that choice, but that would not have been enough to pass Tricia. With all the large buildings except Guild Hall empty, Shiv’s 22 point lead in VP tokens over Tricia overcame her 20 point lead in the city for the win.

Photos of the final positions and a transcript of the final game are at: https://www.playboardgamesbetter.com/2025/08/puerto-rico-tournament-wbc-2025/. A video of the game will also be added. The link will be on the page above.

In a disappointing note, there was an online post by a player who was disconcerted by table talk about their play and does not plan on attending the event in the future. Any player who feels this way should see the GM immediately. It is very important to me that the tournament be a fun experience for all players.

Analysis of the results

Seat 3’s advantage seems to have been tamed by changes in starting money and Factory cost. It is not clear that seat 4 is balanced. There were three 3-player games. For the second year, the 4 Semifinal games were each won by a different seat and the Final was won by seat 3, in a close game that could have ended differently.

The distribution of winning strategies showed a greater success for building over shipping this year. Roughly dividing the wins into three categories gave the following wins:

• Ship – 10
• Mixed – 6
• Build – 31

Game ends were triggered evenly between filling the city and using all the colonists, with no VP chip depletion:

• VP ran out – 0
• Colonists – 17
• City Filled – 28
• Both – 2

The results of this year’s Puerto Rico tournament are being reported as part of the Meeple League (meepleleague.com). All players’ results are included in the annual Puerto Rico rankings on that site. Game results are also sent to AREA for inclusion in historical rankings.

Thanks especially to my assistant GMs, Rob Kircher and Marcy Morelli.

Thanks to all the players for their support and patience, I look forward to seeing you next year!