When it comes to board games, or in this case more specifically card games, good things do come in small packages.
That is certainly what you get with San Juan, especially with the second edition of the game from designer Andreas Seyfarth and publisher Rio Grande Games.
In the second edition of San Juan it includes all the cards of the original game as well as the additional building cards from the Alea Treasure Chest although not the event cards from that expansion. This edition also contains a new building card not previously available : ‘The Hut’, a building that grants a card when nothing is sold in the trader phase, which is a neat concept which is still arguably the worst card in the game.
So to start a bit of the theme from the Rio Grande website (www.riograndegames.com);
“Puerto Rico’s golden age returns. Through you! Players travel now to the capital city of this beautiful island. Who will build the most important buildings? Players build palaces, poor houses, silver smelters, gold mines, and many others - each with its own special features. The cleverest player will build well and win ... The game is based on (the board game) Puerto Rico, but different enough to give players new challenges and opportunities for fun and enjoyment.”
A number of board games have been reborn as card games, and some have been major misses. San Juan is the opposite, as it is a stand out in its own right.
The game revolves around a deck of 110 cards consists of production buildings (indigo, sugar, tobacco, coffee, and silver) and building cards which grant special powers or extra victory points.
The neat mechanism here is that the cards from the hand can be either built or used as money to build something else. This is where the tough decisions are made by players. What cards are most valuable to ‘build’ into your ‘city’ and which ones are expendable to be used as money, and lost to the discard pile. It is a sure bet that several times through a game you will lament not having enough cards to do everything you want to do.
A seven-card hand limit is enforced once per round, which adds to the restrictive decisions.
In each round players in turn selects from one of the available roles, (five in a four-player game). Each role typically has an action each player can take, but also a special ability which only the player making the role selection may use.
At the heart of San Juan players are building a city of cards, placing a 12th building ends the game, but you must also produce goods within your city in order to draw cards that allow you to expand.
The game has rules which are simple enough to learn, but there are a lot of tough decisions to make within the game context which make San Juan a gem not to be overlooked.
