Party in San Juan!

One of the best parts (or at least the silliest parts) of the game Puerto Rico is the little space on your play mat marked 'San Juan'. When you have extra slaves with no fields or buildings to make them work they get to hang out in San Juan. It's a party!

A spin-off game named San Juan came out a while ago. It plays similar to Puerto Rico but with a lot more randomness, a lot less predicting opponent's moves, and a shorter play time. I played a few games with Mike before Games Day got kicked off yesterday and 3 more yesterday morning on BSW.

In one of the games yesterday my opponent managed to pull two different 6 cost buildings off of his gold mine. I hate the gold mine with a passion. Of all the randomness in the game, losing to lucky gold mines is the worst. As it turned out, however, I still won that game. And by a fair margin. Zumft Hall (Guild Hall for you non early or German BSWers) plus a whole lot of production buildings was just too much.

Which in and of itself is probably the second worst part of the game. Drawing an early Guild Hall and just holding on to it while you build any production buildings you draw just seems too strong.

But when games take like 15 minutes or so to play, I don't really mind so much that sometimes randomness is the deciding factor. Heck, I don't really play non-random games anyway, so I must like randomly winning games on some level. It's the randomly losing that isn't so nice. ;)


As an aside, I'm done disk 1 of FFIX. I still don't remember too much about what will come, but I am being reminded of how much I dislike or don't care for many of the characters. It's not like other games from the series... I mean, I wasn't a fan of Gau or Sabin or Strago... But when you have Locke, Celes, Setzer, Shadow, Edgar, Mog, and Terra (to name a few) it's a lot easier to ignore the ones you don't care for. So far in IX there isn't really a character that I want to latch onto. Quina is still funny, but is more annoying this time through for some reason. Steiner and Freya are both awful. Dagger and Zidane are rather shmeh. And while Vivi is amazing he just doesn't have the mana pool to be both fun to play and fun to have on screen.

Not from this game, but important to remind you nonetheless...

Kimahri wants EXPERIENCE!