Hi Everyone!

Today we would like to point you to a couple of excellent video interviews with Julio E. Nazario, designer of one of GMT’s newest P500 additions, Borikén: The Taíno Resistance.

The first interview, streamed on May 7th from the Bonding with Board Games and RPGs YouTube channel, covered many topics including why Julio decided to design this game, in-depth descriptions of the game board, the three different stand-alone scenarios, and the complexity and mechanics. Here is an excerpt:

The game is forty-five minutes to an hour and a half on each separate game. Like you said earlier, the games can be played individually, but they can also be played in a campaign. So if you play from the start, whatever happened at the end of the first game influences the second game, and the second game influences the third. Now, when it comes to complexity, it is definitely on the lower end of the complexity scale. As a designer, I always like to go with language independent designs. So you can see that even though there’s obviously text and all of that, and even on the historical element there’s text, but a lot of the historical elements are incorporated into the mechanisms of the game. So, you are mainly just reading the rules to learn the game, and everything else is through symbology and the interaction between players, of course. So, the game is currently for ages 10+ for complexity’s sake. And that’s, again, going back to the whole education component of it, because I want to make sure to have a wider audience. We want to make sure to teach a wider audience.

Julio E. Nazario, Borikén designer

If you would like to watch the full livestream interview from Bonding with Board Games and RPGs, you can find that embedded below or at the link here. Enjoy!

The second interview, published on May 8th from the Shelf Stories YouTube channel, focused more on the history surrounding the game and the research Julio did (and continues to do) along with cultural advisors to make sure that the game reflects the history of the Taíno resistance as accurately as possible. Here is an excerpt:

So, of course, for historical games, I—like I said—I lived in Puerto Rico for 22 years of my life; I didn’t consider myself an expert on the topic. I definitely knew more than your average Joe, but for that I had to do a lot of research and talk with people, and one of the books that was recommended to me was Agúeybaná El Bravo. Agúeybaná is essentially the most popular Cacique in Taino, Puerto Rican, Boriken Taino culture, and this is interesting because the historian in this book, he essentially went back to the source of the historical references. Because, and I don’t know a lot about how historians do their work, but you a lot of times cite other historians from the past, 100 years ago, 200 years ago. We’re talking about 500 years ago, one of the things that has been very interesting is seeing how the historians in the 1700s and 1800s [on this subject] were all Spanish and their point of view is obviously very subjective because they are from the point of view of the victorious. And the Taíno were seen in a bad light from their perspective. So this historian, his name is Jalil Sued Badillo, he went to the original texts, original letters sent from people that were in 1508 to their significant ones in Spain and learning how it really happened from those original sources. And that was where I started.

Julio E. Nazario, Borikén designer

If you would like to watch the full video interview from Shelf Stories, you can find that embedded below or at the link here. Enjoy!

For those looking to learn more about the game after watching these interviews or for those who would like to preorder, you can go to the P500 page here.

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