Thurn and Taxis revolves around the premise of building a postal system that connects the cities on the board together. You are rewarded with points for how “well connected” you are. Being a Rio Grande game, it has a similar “end game” situation as Puerto Rico and Stone Age, in that, you’re not trying to be the first player to reach X amount of points. You’re just trying to be the player with the most points whenever scenario X happens to end the game.

Overall, our search for a game comparable to Settlers left us wanting. Perhaps our focus is all wrong. Maybe we should simply find a game that’s a “good enough” alternative to Settlers, for those nights when we’re all “settled out”, because maybe we’ll never find a game as good as Settlers. Then again, Board Game Geek has Settlers ranked only 41st overall, with both Puerto Rico and Stone Age ranked above it. Meh.

As I suspected, Puerto Rico reminds me of Stone Age. They’re not the same game, but they have similar concepts. I’m not a huge fan of Stone Age, but I’ll give Puerto Rico a few more runs before I make a call on it. All in all, I still prefer Settlers.

Hard to tell from the picture, but the TRS guys (Totally Rad Show, one of my favorite video podcasts) were in the same freeplay room. Couldn’t tell what game they were playing, though.