Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
Porto, the iconic city in the north of Portugal, is known worldwide for Port wine and the beauty of its historical center. Porto is a fast-playing, competitive tile-laying game driven by card play.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Read the full game description
Porto, the iconic city in the north of Portugal, is known worldwide for Port wine and the beauty of its historical center. Porto is a fast-playing, competitive tile-laying game driven by card play. On your turn, you either draw cards or build floors. If you draw cards, the total value of the drawn cards cannot exceed 3. (Cards have values between 1 and 3.) If you build floors, you MUST play two cards from your hand. The number of one of the cards determines exactly how many floors you will build, and the color of the other card determines the color of those same floors. Thus, with only three cards in hand, you have six different possibilities for building; with more cards, your options increase even more! Building gives you the possibility of scoring points but also opens new possibilities for your opponents because buildings do not belong to any player. You might start a building that can be completed by other players, and it is this risk management that makes Porto a very interactive game in which paying attention to the moves of your opponents is crucial. Build floors, gain bonus points by completing houses or by constructing in the most crucial spaces, fulfill public contracts by building at crucial moments and by chaining combos to make a very profitable turn, shape the city so that it complies with your private contracts in order to maximize them at the end of the game, but above all, capitalize on opportunities opened by your opponents on the board. That said, in Porto any missed opportunity will lead to a new array of possibilities. The game end is triggered at the end of the round in which a certain number of buildings have been completed. The player with the most points wins. —description from designer