LogFAQs > #932735272

97. San Juan (2004)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Role selection, tableau-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 30 to 45 minutes
Experience: 3-4 plays over 3 sessions with 3-4 players (2016-2018)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 58/80 (2018)

Summary - Played mainly with just a deck of cards, San Juan has the typical traits of a tableau-builder: your tableau cards grant you both victory points and special powers. The mechanism that drives all of the action in San Juan is role selection: the "Active Player" selects an action to perform, and then all other players get to follow that action if possible. Each player gets a turn being Active Player, and then a new round begins in which the first player moves.

Design - San Juan sits firmly between two revered games of the hobby: Puerto Rico and Race for the Galaxy (and unranked; I've only played them once). It is the card game version of Puerto Rico, with a shorter playtime, fewer fiddly components, and easier-to-explain rules. Race for the Galaxy takes the cards and the role selection and ups the complexity and depth by a lot.

From an adaptation perspective, San Juan is really clever. Puerto Rico (the godfather of the role selection mechanic) is filled with components - it has a map for your plantation, a stack of building tiles, colonists (obviously slaves) you need to work your plantation, an arcane method of shipping goods, specially colored cubes for those goods, money... It's a reasonably complex game that might rank high if I got into it; it was #1 on BoardGameGeek for some time. San Juan excises the spatial puzzle and uses cards to represent every resource. Producing sugar? Take a card. Selling your sugar? Draw cards. Prospecting? Draw cards. Playing a building? Spend a card.

It's the same paradigm which drives Bloody Inn - cards are both the goal of and cost of everything you do - but with a more open decision space. San Juan has a round structure, but it retains quick micro-turns. You'll puzzle over what to do when the Builder was picked and you weren't prepared for it; you'll be excited when you get an opportunity to prospect that you didn't expect; between those mini-turns you'll anticipate when you finally get to call the shots.

Experience - Over a year after learning Puerto Rico, I learned San Juan. This came during the zone when board games finally became clear to me. The quick playtime and lightish stakes and engagement level are nice here. If I have criticism, it probably lies in never really experiencing a massive high in San Juan: it's so polished that all the sharpness might have come off it.

Future - I mean, sure. San Juan strikes me as a "why not?" type of game. And maybe with improved feel for depth of strategy, there is a sense of "boo-ya!" If that happened, San Juan would definitely have potential to rise.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness