San Juan Review
We gave San Juan, the card game adaptation of the popular Puerto Rico, a test run last night: two games with four players each time. I’m happy to report that, while it differs significantly from its parent, San Juan retains the involving play.
This is due in large part to the ingenious turn sequence they share. For those who haven’t seen them, both games divide turns into functional phases – good production, export, building construction, etc. – but not in fixed order. Instead, players take turns declaring one of the phases to execute. After each declaration, every player takes that action, with the declarer enjoying some bonus, such as turning out an extra good in the production phase, or selling goods for extra money in the trader phase. After each player has initiated a phase, a round ends, and the privilege of first declaring a phase in a new round advances around the table.
The subtleties of this approach to the turn sequence are delightful, and unique to Puerto Rico and San Juan, though imitations are no doubt already headed for the shelves. Timing is everything. Should you declare a production phase now, to have goods to sell in the next trader phase, or a builder phase, so another factory will be available when a production phase is inevitably declared? Will the phase sequence most productive for you benefit another player even more? And don’t forget the importance of the declarer’s bonus, which can make the difference between a major acquisition and diddly squat. If you declare one type of phase to enjoy the bonus, can you count on another player to declare the phase you actually want to occur?
Beyond the signature turn sequence, San Juan begins to diverge from Puerto Rico. San Juan revolves entirely around constructing buildings for victory points, and raising the money to pay for it. Money is cleverly represented by the cards you have in hand: each card is not only a potential building project, but one unit of money to finance building. If you wish to build, say, a sugar mill, costing two doubloons, you must simultaneously discard two other cards from your hand to pay for it. Deciding which cards to relinquish can be painful. Money comes from two major sources: goods turned out by factories in a production phase can then be sold for cash in a trader phase, and the miner and councilor phases entitle one or more players to draw new cards directly from the deck. Some buildings may supplement this income.
Every building is worth victory points; generally, more expensive buildings offer more victory points. But just as important, every building performs a useful function. A market, for example, allows you to sell goods for an extra doubloon in the trader phase, and a library doubles the privilege for declaring any phase. Some buildings work particularly well in combination; finding these combinations is part of the fun of the game. If San Juan has a weakness, it is the random nature of your hand. Coming up a doubloon short for building that coffee plant is trying, but getting stuck with a bad hand when you only need a monument to clinch a victory is maddening, especially when the other players are building monuments of their own.
Eventually, someone builds his twelfth building. The game ends at the completion of the builder phase, and victory points are totaled. Most of your points come from the buildings themselves, but a few buildings provide conditional bonuses. The most expensive buildings give extra points for other construction accomplishments, and a chapel allows a player to sacrifice a card every round for a victory point, exchanging cash for status. The game comes with a pad for tallying points, but we found it unnecessary.
Play in San Juan is fast and exciting, though the remembering to take advantage of all your building bonuses requires some attention, and it isn’t a game for small children. Ignoring labor, agriculture, and shipping, the game is less complicated than Puerto Rico: there is no labor, agriculture, or question of shipping goods directly for victory points. Between the simplification and the injection of randomness, purists may be disappointed in San Juan as an adaptation, but I found the game intense, engaging, and full of meaningful choices.
***** (out of 5)