The Captain phase is the phase in which the bulk of the points in a game of Puerto Rico are generated. This is the only phase of the game in which you are forced to take the action of the role, wether you want to or not.
There are always three different boats, each of which holds a different number of barrels of goods. The size of the boats is determined by the number of players in the game, with more players providing bigger boats.
Each boat is only allowed to ship a single good. In the picture below, the boat on the left may only ship sugar, the one in the middle tobacco, and the one on the right indigo. What a boat ships is determined by the first good loaded onto it when it is empty.
The captain phase works as follows, starting with the player that chose the Captain role:
- The player chooses a good to ship. The player MUST choose a good that can be shipped, if possible. This means that if the player can only ship one thing, they must ship it, no matter what.
- Of the good selected, the player MUST ship as much of that good as possible, by loading it onto the boat carrying that good. If there are no boats carrying the good you want to ship, but there are empty ships, you MUST pick the biggest possible ship, if you have enough of that good to fill it. So, given a choice between a ship of size 6 and size 7, if you want to ship sugar, and you have 7 barrels of sugar, you MUST choose the size 7 boat.
- Get one victory point for each barrel that you have shipped. If you are the player that chose the captain role, you get 1 extra victory point. You only get the extra point once per shipping phase.
This cycle continues around the table over and over again until everyone has shipped as many goods as they possibly can. Once that happens, spoilage occurs. Each player is allowed to keep only a single barrel of any good of their choosing that they have left, and the rest must be discarded.
The last thing that happens in the Captain phase is that any boat which is completely full is emptied out, and the goods are returned to the supply.
By far the most points are made in this phase, and is the best place to employ "screwage" to mess up the other players. Timely selection of the Captain role allows you to get points while also possibly forcing people to either ship goods that they were hoping to sell to get money, or (even better) stop them from shipping anything at all because all of the boats are full, thus forcing them to discard all of their goods.
