Puerto Rico, Part the First

My friends and I played an interesting board game recently. The game is called Puerto Rico. It is a building/trading kind of game, where each player takes the role of an entrepreneur. It has some interesting concepts. For example, most games have a fixed set of phases in a given turn. First you move, then you attack, then you buy new troops, and so on. In this game, in any given round, only a certain number of phases take place, fewer then the number of phase types that exist. Each round each player picks one phase to occur, and any phases that are not chosen do not take place. I thought this was pretty neat. One of the phases is the "colonists" phase. In this phase, "colonists" arrive to the island of Puerto Rico on a "colonist ship". These "colonists" are distributed among the entrepreneurs, who can use them to enable production on plantations they may have, or for buildings they may own. To top it all off, the "colonists" are represented by small, dark brown, wooden disks. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Making a historical game that pretends slavery did not exist does far more disservice to society than making the same game that acknowledges the events of our past. Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it.