(30/41: 1991) ANDREAS SEYFARTH (1962–)
The Fifteen-Year Silence
In 1994, a postal official near Munich won the Spiel des Jahres for a game about stacking skyscrapers. Then he vanished. Eight years passed without a major design. When he returned in 2002, he brought Puerto Rico—a game that held the #1 position on BoardGameGeek for six to seven consecutive years, the longest reign in the site’s history, and introduced a mechanic so widely copied that it spawned an entire genre of tabletop games.
Andreas Seyfarth has published roughly fifteen games across three decades. His day job was financial controller at Deutsche Telekom. He never went full-time. Yet one of those fifteen games changed how designers thought about turn structure, and the mechanic he created appears in over 160 subsequent designs. The ratio of innovation to output may be the highest in modern board gaming.
He once told an interviewer that Puerto Rico’s ideas had been gestating for approximately fifteen years. The silence wasn’t absence. It was an auditor running the numbers until they balanced.
The Mechanic
Role selection existed before Puerto Rico. Marcel-André Casasola Merkle’s Verräter (1998) and Meuterer (1999) let players choose roles. Bruno Faidutti’s Citadels (2000) made role drafting the core of a card game. But in every prior implementation, the role-chooser acted alone. Everyone else waited.
Seyfarth’s innovation was making role selection communal. When one player chooses the Builder in Puerto Rico, every player builds. The chooser gets a privilege—a discount, a bonus—but the entire table participates. Phases not chosen by anyone simply don’t occur. The result was a game where downtime effectively disappeared. You were always doing something. You were always watching what other players chose, because their choice gave you an action too.
The origin story is revealing. Puerto Rico began as an attempt to rework the economic engine of Outpost (1991) with human workers in a Caribbean setting. When alea editor Stefan Brück told Seyfarth to move away from Outpost’s approach, Seyfarth repurposed a role-selection mechanism from a failed gangster prototype. That salvaged mechanic became the engine driving one of the most influential Eurogames ever made.
The evidence of adoption is documented at scale. BoardGameGeek lists over 160 games tagged with the Variable Phase Order mechanic, most tracing their lineage directly to Puerto Rico. Thomas Lehmann’s Race for the Galaxy (2007) explicitly credits Seyfarth. Carl Chudyk began Glory to Rome (2005) after an argument about San Juan. Seth Jaffee’s Eminent Domain (2011) merged the mechanic with deckbuilding. Shannon Appelcline wrote a four-part “Anatomy of a Genre: Role Civilization” series documenting the entire lineage. Justin Bell at Meeple Mountain put it bluntly: players of newer games often don’t realize the Follow mechanic they’re using was first implemented in Puerto Rico.
The Shared Credit
San Juan (2004) introduced another influential paradigm: cards serving triple duty as buildings, currency, and goods. Discard a card to pay for another card. The tension is constant—every card spent as money is a building you can never construct.
But the intellectual history is more complex than one name. When alea commissioned a card game version of Puerto Rico, both Seyfarth and Tom Lehmann worked on prototypes. The concept that cards could serve multiple purposes in an economic game was contributed by Richard Borg and Tom Lehmann—both receive acknowledgment in San Juan’s rulebook and reportedly received royalties. Alea selected Seyfarth’s version for publication. Lehmann continued developing his prototype, merging it with a 1990s space-themed design, producing Race for the Galaxy.
The multi-use card system became foundational to an entire subgenre. Shannon Appelcline identified San Juan as the basis of the “role civilization genre.” The mechanic propagated through Glory to Rome, Eminent Domain, and dozens of tableau-building card games. But the credit belongs to a collaborative process, not a single mind. The methodology scores accordingly.
The System
Puerto Rico’s architecture is extraordinary by almost any measure. The game contains near-zero randomness—the only stochastic element is which plantation tiles appear during Settler phases. No dice. No card draws during play. Five interlocking subsystems—planting, building, producing, trading, shipping—connect through a circular dependency where every component affects every other. A plantation needs a worker to produce. A building needs a worker to function. The number of available workers depends on collective building capacity. No single strategy can be pursued in isolation.
Extensive opening theory exists, most famously documented in strategy articles establishing the “Main Line” for four-player games. Competitive play on Board Game Arena features ELO ratings and chess-like established openings. The game supports two primary strategic paths—shipping and building—with countless intermediate variations. Twenty-three years after publication, the architecture still sustains tournament-level play.
The known flaw is seating advantage. Competitive tracking of over 1,000 games established that in four-player games, seat positions rank 3, 4, 1, 2 from strongest to weakest. The World Boardgaming Championships addresses this through a seat-position auction. Board Game Arena offers a balanced variant that adjusts starting resources. The flaw is real, documented, and manageable—a measurable imperfection in a system that otherwise approaches the theoretical limit of strategic board game design.
San Juan was not flawless either. The first edition suffered a known balance issue: the Guild Hall was overpowered, creating a dominant strategy. The Second Edition (2014) corrected this and opened new viable strategies. Strong architecture, but requiring a second pass.
The Lehmann Lineage
The chain of influence running from Puerto Rico through San Juan to Race for the Galaxy is the single most extensively documented propagation lineage in modern Eurogame design.
When Lehmann’s San Juan prototype was rejected in favor of Seyfarth’s version, he continued developing it independently, eventually producing Race for the Galaxy (2007)—a game that explicitly credits Seyfarth alongside Borg and Brück. Lehmann gave a formal Game Developers Conference presentation documenting the Puerto Rico connection. In a BoardGameGeek post about New Frontiers (2018), Lehmann wrote that the game was designed with Seyfarth’s permission, taking Race for the Galaxy back to one of its inspirations.
The lineage continued branching. Roll for the Galaxy (2014) adapted Race into dice. Jump Drive (2017) distilled it into a lighter card game. New Frontiers (2018) brought the mechanics full circle—a board game derived from a card game derived from a board game. One reviewer described it as “Puerto Rico: The Card Game: The Board Game.”
Parallel branches: Chudyk’s Glory to Rome (2005), born from an argument about San Juan, innovated three new role variants—role playing, role following, and role multiplication—and spawned its own derivatives in Uchronia and Mottainai. Jaffee’s Eminent Domain combined the lineage with deckbuilding. Games like Carnegie (2022) and Earth (2023) carry the communal action selection forward into present-day design.
The Early Work and the Partnership
Before Puerto Rico, before Manhattan, there were commission games for Schmidt Spiele. Zorro: The Fight Against Alcalde (1991), Max und Moritz (1991, co-designed with Karen Seyfarth), Harry dreht alles um (1992), Spiel des Friedens (1993). Licensed titles for a commercial market. The Spiel des Jahres website called them “commission works for merchandising games.” They left little mark.
Karen Seyfarth is the through-line. She introduced Andreas to gaming through Hase und Igel. Her employment at Schmidt Spiele provided his professional gateway. She co-designed Max und Moritz and Thurn and Taxis, and Andreas has said she “had a hand in all of his games” through playtesting and critique. His description of her playtesting role was blunt: she’s a killer, but she recognizes potential hits. The attribution on major titles is clear—she is formally credited as co-designer only on Max und Moritz and Thurn and Taxis—but the informal collaboration runs through everything.
Manhattan (1994) was the breakthrough. Hans im Glück publisher Bernd Brunnhofer requested a building game different from Sid Sackson’s designs, and Seyfarth delivered a three-dimensional area majority game where players stack building floors across six city districts. Control belongs to whoever placed the top floor. The Spiel des Jahres jury called it “original and highly stimulating.” It won. The 3D stacking concept was novel but not widely copied—El Grande (1995) became the more famous area-majority benchmark.
Then came the long silence before Puerto Rico. Seyfarth said the ideas had been gestating for fifteen years. The jump from Manhattan’s light spatial competition to Puerto Rico’s deep economic engine-building was enormous—a leap in complexity and ambition that suggests either extended hidden development or a fundamental shift in what he wanted to build.
The Craft Arc
Seyfarth’s trajectory doesn’t follow a linear progression. It moves across a complexity spectrum in an arc: lighter (commission games) → complex (Puerto Rico) → lighter (San Juan, Thurn and Taxis) → experimental (Airships). After 2007, the original design output effectively stopped. Only revised editions and expansions followed—San Juan Second Edition (2014), Puerto Rico 1897 (2022).
Five consistent design principles emerge from his games and interviews. Theme-first initiation: the theme has to be strong enough to build a game around. The no-catastrophe rule: setbacks should always result from your own miscalculation, never from a random event or a direct attack. Efficiency as core tension: every game asks you to do more with less. Indirect competition: you outperform opponents rather than attacking them. And anti-math, pro-playtesting: balance emerges from hundreds of sessions, not from equations.
His professional background as a financial controller is visible in the work. Puerto Rico’s economy functions like a closed ledger where every transaction has a counterpart. San Juan’s card-as-currency system forces constant opportunity-cost calculations. Even Thurn and Taxis, a lighter route-builder, is fundamentally about optimization. The auditor’s eye is the design signature.
Thurn and Taxis (2006), co-designed with Karen, won the Spiel des Jahres on the strength of accessible route-building with postal-office scoring and carriage progression. It drew a telling critique from one experienced reviewer after 45 plays: everyone he introduced it to commented favorably, yet few ever requested to play it again. A solid gateway game lacking Puerto Rico’s enduring depth.
Airships (2007) explored dice-building engine construction—an early precursor to modern bag-building. It was Seyfarth’s last original design. Fifteen games total. A financial controller’s catalog: lean, balanced, nothing wasted.
The Colonial Problem
Puerto Rico’s theme—players as colonial plantation owners using dark-skinned “colonist” tokens—drew increasing criticism as the hobby’s cultural awareness evolved. Puerto Rico 1897 (2022) moved the setting to the post-autonomy period following the abolition of slavery, Ravensburger’s attempt to address the concern while preserving the gameplay. The thematic controversy is a significant part of the game’s contemporary legacy. It does not diminish the mechanical innovation. But it explains why a game that held the #1 BoardGameGeek ranking for years now sits in the 30–50 range—cultural context reshaped perception of a design whose architecture had not degraded.
The Scoring Case
Invention (8):
“Changed how people designed games.” The communal role selection mechanic in Puerto Rico (2002) is the anchor. Role selection existed—Verräter (1998), Citadels (2000)—but making it communal, where everyone acts on the chosen role and the chooser receives a privilege, was genuinely new. The adoption evidence is unambiguous: 160+ games tagged Variable Phase Order on BoardGameGeek, direct descendants including Race for the Galaxy, Glory to Rome, Eminent Domain, and Carnegie. Appelcline’s four-part genre analysis documents the lineage. This is a specific mechanism, widely adopted, with clear priority. Manhattan’s 3D stacking was novel but not propagated. San Juan’s cards-as-currency paradigm was influential but carries shared credit from Borg and Lehmann. The 8 rests on communal role selection—one mechanic that restructured how an entire genre handles turn structure.
Architecture (8):
“Serious engineering others noticed.” The dual test: quality AND propagation. Quality: Puerto Rico’s near-zero-randomness architecture sustains competitive play twenty-three years after release, with multiple viable strategic paths, extensive opening theory, and ELO-rated tournament play. The seating-position flaw is real but manageable. San Juan required a second edition to fix a balance issue. Propagation: Lehmann used Puerto Rico’s action-selection structure as the foundation for Race for the Galaxy. Chudyk amplified San Juan’s card mechanism in Glory to Rome. New Frontiers explicitly circled back to Puerto Rico’s framework. But the critical 8-vs-9 question: others borrowed structural elements and built their own distinct systems, rather than replicating the full architecture. That’s adopted elements (8), not a whole-system blueprint (9).
Mastery (7):
“Skilled professional at top of game.” Multiple quality games with clear personal authorship: Puerto Rico (sole designer), Manhattan (sole designer), San Juan (lead designer). Recognizable design voice refined from commission games through Manhattan to Puerto Rico’s quantum leap. Two Spiel des Jahres wins, Deutscher Spiele Preis, International Gamers Award. Documented craft philosophy: catastrophe avoidance, efficiency tension, indirect competition. But the thin catalog constrains the score. Fifteen games across thirty-plus years. Part-time designer—financial controller at Deutsche Telekom was always the primary profession. Output essentially stopped after 2007. He reached the top of his game with Puerto Rico, but the body of work lacks the sustained volume that separates 7 from 8. Compare Stafford at forty-plus years of continuous output, or Dunnigan at 100+ wargames. Seyfarth’s peak is extraordinary; his sustained depth is modest.
Adjustments (+7):
- ■ Longevity 20+ years: +2 (1991 through 2022. First published design: Zorro for Schmidt Spiele. Most recent: Puerto Rico 1897. Thirty-one years with published design credits across the span.)
- ■ Full-time career: No. Financial controller at Deutsche Telekom. Game design was always a side pursuit, never the primary profession.
- ■ Awards: +1 (Two Spiel des Jahres wins: Manhattan 1994, Thurn and Taxis 2006. Deutscher Spiele Preis winner: Puerto Rico 2002. International Gamers Award, À la carte Kartenspielpreis, Essener Feder, Japan Boardgame Prize, and multiple additional nominations and placements.)
- ■ Branded name: No. Puerto Rico and Manhattan are prominent within the hobby but do not pass the grandmother test. Non-gamers do not recognize these titles.
- ■ Cross-genre success: +1 (Board games—Manhattan, Puerto Rico, Thurn and Taxis—and card games—San Juan. Two distinct tabletop formats.)
- ■ Commercial success: +1 (Two Spiel des Jahres winners. SdJ wins typically generate sales of 300,000–500,000 copies. Thurn and Taxis at 2006 retail prices places at least one title above the $10M lifetime threshold. Puerto Rico was alea’s “greatest success game” and has been in continuous print for twenty-three years across multiple editions. This is the least certain adjustment—based on reasonable inference from industry sales data rather than confirmed figures.)
- ■ Design propagation: +2 (160+ games tagged Variable Phase Order on BoardGameGeek. Documented lineage: Race for the Galaxy, Glory to Rome, Eminent Domain, New Frontiers, Carnegie, Earth. Appelcline’s four-part “Anatomy of a Genre” series formally mapped the propagation chain. This is among the most extensively documented design-influence lineages in modern board gaming.)
The Hidden Pattern
Seyfarth’s career is a study in compression. Fifteen games. One full-time job that never changed. One marriage that runs through every design. And one mechanic that restructured how an entire genre handles the fundamental problem of turn structure.
The pattern beneath the catalog is an auditor’s logic applied to creative work. Strip away everything unnecessary. Make every component serve multiple functions. Ensure that failure is always your own fault, never the system’s. Let the math emerge from testing, not from equations. The games don’t feel designed by an accountant. They feel designed by someone who understood that efficiency is the deepest form of elegance.
Puerto Rico gestated for fifteen years because the numbers didn’t balance until they did. San Juan distilled it into thirty minutes because the engine could be compressed. Thurn and Taxis simplified it further because the principle worked at any weight class. And then he stopped—not because he ran out of ideas, but because a financial controller doesn’t publish until the ledger clears.
What Remains
The mechanic. One hundred and sixty games and counting carry the communal role selection forward, most of them unaware of the postal official in Haar who salvaged it from a failed gangster prototype. The Lehmann lineage—Race for the Galaxy, Glory to Rome, Eminent Domain, New Frontiers—is a family tree rooted in a 2002 design about Caribbean plantations. The architecture: a game engine so precisely calibrated that competitive players still argue over half-point seating advantages two decades later.
And the career itself: proof that you don’t need to go full-time to change an industry. You need one idea that solves the right problem, the patience to test it until it works, and a spouse who recognizes potential hits.
Puerto Rico held the #1 spot on BoardGameGeek for six to seven years. Seyfarth held the same day job the entire time. The methodology measures what you built and whether others built on it. Over 160 designers built on what Seyfarth built, and he built it on nights and weekends.
That’s the kind of efficiency his games teach you to admire.
Total: 30 points. Year: 1991.
Total: 30 points. Year: 1991.
That’s the kind of efficiency his games teach you to admire.