Table of Contents

• All my friends went banana
• Gameplay
  • Downsides
• Production
• Similar games

All my friends went banana

A couple of months ago, after a long and exhausting session of a heavy game, a friend pulled out Puerto Banana for a few rounds. Little did I know that I wouldn't stop laughing until morning.

Puerto Banana is a tiny game: 7 erasable pads, 6 pens, and a couple of rules. With just that, and a healthy dose of quirkiness (the art is absolutely banana), it captures the pure fun of bidding.

Gameplay

Let's start with the rules, because they won't take long: you start with 10 bananas, and every round all players secretly bid to win however many bananas the current leader holds. Everyone reveals at once. The highest bidder wins, but pays the difference between their bid and the second highest. Repeat until a player has 200 or more bananas. That's it. That's the whole game.

The catch? You're not bidding your bananas. You're bidding a number and there's no upper limit, which is exactly where the mind games begin.

Every round is all about outsmarting our fellow banana smugglers. Your goal is to either get the highest bid and close to the second, or be the second highest bidder and be as further as possible from the first.

Here you can see an example first round directly from the rules. However the stakes are not that high, so let's see an example round where there are 101 bananas up for grabs. Last round's highest bid was 320, but I go higher and write down 421. We reveal and the highest bid is 432. I win only 11 bananas; the highest bidder wins 90, and since he had 101, now he goes to 191, so close to win.

The game follows the same structure every round, it's fairly simple to follow and can be played by anyone. Its structure rewards the players every round or give incentive to aim higher and higher. The moment that has the most tension is when you have just finished writing your bid, you look at the other players, and you decide to raise yours …and everybody thinks about doing the same.

Downsides

It does happen that some players never quite click with the bidding logic, consistently overbidding or underbidding, which leaves them outside the winners' share most of the game, as only two players take bananas each round. It helps that the stakes grow exponentially, so a won bid can swing everything in an instant, but players who check out mentally will feel the gap regardless. The other con is the mental math: every turn you're adding, subtracting, second-guessing. The numbers stay small, and a calculator helps, but it's extra cognitive load after a heavy game night.

Production

The box isn't tiny nor big, but it contains just a handful of components that you can bring it anywhere. You might think pen and paper would do the same job, and technically the components are that simple that they can be replaced. But the theme carries real weight here; I tried playing a stripped-down version once, just bidding raw numbers with no art, no pads, no banana energy, and it fell completely flat. The quirkiness isn't decoration. It's doing a lot of the work.

Similar games

Bidding games are often very different; For Sale for example gives you a certain amount of paper money that you can use through the game to buy houses; Ra gives you sun disks with different values on them.

Puerto Banana uses an abstract currency, which is something pretty unique. Yet, there is a very close game, QE , that uses bidding in the same way. In QE, you can bid any number throughout the game, with the caveat that the player that has spent the most will have lost and won't count his points. QE builds a more complex framework on top of the same mechanism, adding more layers, strategy and set collection, while keeping bidding at its core. If you like Puerto Banana but are looking for something meatier, QE will be the game for you.