I've joined the throng of people playing and enjoying Puerto Rico. It's the first game I've played since Settlers of Catan that I thought about all night after playing and wanted to get up and try again immediately.

While playing, I had a thought about the game mechanics and how gamers will often use "luck" and "random" interchangably. See, when people won Puerto Rico the first times we played it, we would say "Oh, I only won because I was lucky!" But here we are looking at a game with virtually no randomness in it (except the tiles of plantations which shouldn't greatly effect winning or losing). So how come people could pass off a win as pure chance? At the same time, though, we were all beginners, no one had a long-term strategy for the game...we merely did what seemed expedient and tried the effects of various buildings. So you can't say that the person who won did so because of superior strategy or out-maneuvering.

So, I concluded: there is a significant difference between "luck" and "randomness." Randomness is a game mechanic used by the designer to build unpredictability into the game. Settlers, of course, is a prime example of this. Rolling the dice and collecting resources is the heart of the game, and it's a random mechanic (albeit based on probability laws). Puerto Rico is low on randomness, but that doesn't mean it's low on luck.

Luck is events (random or otherwise) occurring at the right moment to provide a benefit to one person. Say in a 6 player game of Settlers, 2 players both have 9 points but it is neithers turn. Someone else rolls a 9, and this allows player 1 to collect an ore and build a final city during the building phase and win the game. Lucky! The events just happened that enabled them to be 1 resource short and then get that resource filled. All things being equal in their play, you couldn't fault player #2's strategy.

So you can certainly win Puerto Rico by luck. Some of that luck might be other players making decisions without seeing the benefit to you, or leaving you a character you really needed. It's a whole confluence of events that happen to enable one person to win over others who are actually playing equally well (or poorly). Actually, given the phrase "beginner's luck," we can assume that sometimes you have enough luck to win something even while playing worse!

I wonder if some games lend themselves to luck more than others. Does a random mechanic automatically led to more opportunities for luck to strike? Is it possible to eliminate luck entirely from a game?