San Juan

By Jeremy Anderson


Type/Time/Players: San Juan is a card game for 2-4 players that lasts between 30 and 45 minutes.

The Skinny: If you've played Puerto Rico and Fantasy Flight's game Citadels, you understand 90% of this game. Players take turns assuming roles, gaining some bonus for the round based on which role they've assumed. As with Puerto Rico, the role you claim also permits other players to take activities (in fact, the role tiles are virtually identical, because San Juan is from the makers of Puerto Rico). Like Citadels, the game ends when someone has enough buildings, although the buildings have different point values (so the player with the most buildings isn't automatically the winner).

The Good: San Juan uses the cards themselves as currency, which tends to allow for lots of choice in how players design their city: Players get a bunch of cards for trading goods or prospecting, and then discard most of them to pay for one when someone declares it time for building. It also deserves accolades for being a 2-4 player game that is actually good with only two players. Most games that aren't strictly 2-player games but say they can be played with two are actually designed with three or more players in mind. It's also quick to pick up (and set up), largely because it eschews the many counters and tokens of Puerto Rico and uses the cards themselves to keep track of practically everything.

The Bad: Those who call it Puerto Rico Lite aren't entirely wrong. While the simplicity has a certain elegance about it, the randomness of what players have available makes it impossible to plan several moves ahead as people do when playing San Juan's parent game. The randomness is also not entirely fair; An inferior player might get a lucky card that earns him loads of points, while a superior player finds himself unable to draw the cards he needs, even if he searches for them for the whole game. Because the buildings to be built are on cards face-down in a deck rather than face-up on a board, players have only a vague sense of what they might be able to buy, further limiting their ability to make informed decisions.

Conclusions: San Juan is not as deep, strategically, as Puerto Rico. That said, I found it to be just as much fun or moreso, and an excellent choice for a couple people with a little time to spare. The introduction of silver as a resource was a little odd, particularly because it's a second white resource (along with blue indigo, dark brown coffee and light brown tobacco), but because it's worth so much more than sugar nobody mistook one for the other.
And remember, it is a good game with just two, even though it's not strictly a two-player game. I know it's hard to believe.