San Juan

Customer Reviews

A nice light card game that acts as a stepping stone to Race for the Galaxy Review by Matt

Price
Value
Quality

Product Review (submitted on July 8, 2010):
San Juan is the card game version of Puerto Rico. Borrowing from Puerto Rico's role selection mechanic, players focus on creating a balance between a card drawing engine and maximizing victory points.

Key Mechanics: Role Selection/Simultaneous Player Action

In turn order (which cycles through the game), every player selects a different Role. Then each player executes that Roles action with an advantage of selecting that role, and every other player in order has the chance to execute that action as well.

This simple mechanic drives San Juan. Roles are selected as needed, so the game play ebbs and flows nicely. Each role is related to the others, one feeding into the other. Simple and elegant.

There is no 'money' in San Juan. Cards (or buildings) are paid for by discarding other cards from your hand. If a building (card) costs 3 to play, you need 3 other additional cards in your hand to discard to get your building into play.

Player Interaction:

Like Puerto Rico, player interaction is in direct. Your choice of roles is what will impact other players, but all in all, its pretty light. Not that this is a bad thing.

Game Play/Complexity:

San Juan is a light weight game that is easy to teach and learn. Though not for small children, San Juan is easy enough to understand and enjoy. The only thing that is daunting is the hundreds of cards that come with the game!

After a few games, players will learn what cards are available and will have a better valuation of the worth of the cards. With the shear number of cards available, players will be able to experiment with the many different combination and strategies for winning.

An expansion is available for the game, something that I recommend for those whom wish to gain more mileage out of this game.

Conclusion:

A simple game with high replay value. This acts as a great stepping stone to Race for the Galaxy, its much more complicated child that followed after San Juan. This is a must by in my books. (Posted on 7/9/10)

A nice light card game that acts as a stepping stone to Race for the Galaxy Review by San Juan - Puerto Rico the card game!

Price
Value
Quality

San Juan is the card game version of Puerto Rico. Borrowing from Puerto Rico's role selection mechanic, players focus on creating a balance between a card drawing engine and maximizing victory points.

Key Mechanics: Role Selection/Simultaneous Player Action

In turn order (which cycles through the game), every player selects a different Role. Then each player executes that Roles action with an advantage of selecting that role, and every other player in order has the chance to execute that action as well.

This simple mechanic drives San Juan. Roles are selected as needed, so the game play ebbs and flows nicely. Each role is related to the others, one feeding into the other. Simple and elegant.

There is no 'money' in San Juan. Cards (or buildings) are paid for by discarding other cards from your hand. If a building (card) costs 3 to play, you need 3 other additional cards in your hand to discard to get your building into play.

Player Interaction:

Like Puerto Rico, player interaction is in direct. Your choice of roles is what will impact other players, but all in all, its pretty light. Not that this is a bad thing.

Game Play/Complexity:

San Juan is a light weight game that is easy to teach and learn. Though not for small children, San Juan is easy enough to understand and enjoy. The only thing that is daunting is the hundreds of cards that come with the game!

After a few games, players will learn what cards are available and will have a better valuation of the worth of the cards. With the shear number of cards available, players will be able to experiment with the many different combination and strategies for winning.

An expansion is available for the game, something that I recommend for those whom wish to gain more mileage out of this game.

Conclusion:

A simple game with high replay value. This acts as a great stepping stone to Race for the Galaxy, its much more complicated child that followed after San Juan. This is a must by in my books. (Posted on 7/8/10)

Close but not quite! Review by Curtis M

Price
Value
Quality

San Juan is very close to great but just a couple of steps short. San Juan is a card game based on the popular board game Puerto Rico. The object of the game is to have the most victory points after someone builds 12 buildings.

I felt that there could have been more pieces added to the game, such as more trading house tiles, and maybe some tokens to represent victory points and some to represent goods. There isn't a ton of strategy involved in the game and some of the cards feel useless to use.

In the end, San Juan is a great portable card game that will give you the feel of Puerto Rico, but it just slightly misses the mark as a great game. There are other card games out there that are quite a bit better than San Juan, but for the price it is okay. (Posted on 6/10/10)

A fairly sloppy card game Review by Jasmine

Price
Value
Quality

Board game collectors may be more interested a more succinct game like Citadels or a more polished game like Race for the Galaxy, both of which are also pure card games. San Juan is a card version of Puerto Rico and follows the theme of role selection and phase activity.

Having played lots of Citadels prior to playing San Juan, this game feels a bit sloppy as you can quickly create a very large pile of face up cards which means you need a pretty big play area. I'm not too much of a fan of the role selection as it gets quite obvious that some roles are better than others.

Overall, I wouldn't really recommend this game to people unless they are big Puerto Rico fans and want a more portable version of the game. Even then, RftG might be a better choice. (Posted on 12/20/08)