Mind Games

JediBoy is always begging me to teach him one more grown-up game. He has a great collection of kids’ games, but he loves to play my games. Today, while BabyGirl napped, we tried San Juan.

Let me start by saying that San Juan is a faster, sleeker, card-based version of Puerto Rico. If that means nothing to you (or fills your head with confusing geographical images) don’t fret, forget I said anything. But eventually I’ll get you playing Puerto Rico too.

Here are the parts to San Juan: a deck of 110 cards, 5 “trading house” cards, 5 “role” cards, a “governor” card and a scorepad.

The idea behind the game is that you are landowners in San Juan, trying to produce goods and sell them back to Spain. Along the way you can build production buildings (for indigo, sugar, tobacco, coffee and silver); you can also build the violet-colored buildings which give you special abilities or advantages.

The game ends when one person has built 12 buildings. At that point, you add up all the victory points printed at the bottom of each of your buildings, and the player with the most victory points wins.

The way this game plays out is an interesting one. On each turn, you are able to choose a role - Builder, Producer, Trader, Councillor, or Prospector. Let’s say you choose to be the Builder. This means you get to build - lay down a building and “pay” for it by discarding a certain number of cards (the number printed at the top of the building). The advantage to being the Builder is that you pay one less card to build your building. After you have built, each player in turn around the table also gets a chance to build - but at full price.

Now the next player gets to choose a role, but they can’t be the Builder since you have already taken that role. The next player could be the Producer (put face-down cards as “goods” on your production buildings), Trader (turn in the cards from your production buildings in exchange for more cards from the draw pile as “payment”), Councillor (draw several cards from the deck but keep only one) or Prospector (draw one card from the deck - and no one else can do that in this phase). Play moves in this way around the table until each player has had a turn to choose a role and start a phase. Then, the Governor card (which indicates who starts the round) moves to the next player and a new round begins.

What’s interesting to me about this game is the way in which the one deck of cards works as buildings, money, and goods. I love that. The original game, Puerto Rico, plays in a similar way but uses a board, tiles for buildings, wooden markers for goods, cardboard coins, boats for trading houses, and so on. There are so many pieces that set-up and tear-down takes a long time. In San Juan, it’s fast and easy.

JediBoy enjoyed the game too - he’s never played Puerto Rico, so I had to explain the whole game from scratch. As with most grown-up games, he had a hard time figuring out a strategy at first, and asked my advice for several rounds. He wound up deciding to build as many high victory point cards as he could - and it worked, as he beat me by one point in the end!

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Thanks to the sharing folks at BoardGameGeek for the images.