San Juan: Conclusions

Putting everything together from this week's posts, what should your goals be when trying to win at San Juan?

Well, I think there are two optimal building paths to victory with a third that's pretty good. Just building randomly with no long term goal in mind will rarely if ever beat one of the focused strategies. Those two optimal strategies are to focus on production buildings, or to focus on purple buildings.

The production building strategy revolves entirely around getting a Guild Hall into play and building lots of production buildings for big points. This strategy tends to get into a Producer/Trader cycle since it has even more incentive to build Silver Smelters than other strategies do. Despite that the Library is still the best card for this strategy and I wouldn't build more than 1 or 2 purple cards focusing on the Producer/Trader cycle if any at all. Black Market can actually work out reasonably well here, especially if you have more Indigo than Silver early on. Smithy is great as well, and a build path of Smithy, Indigo, Black Market can really take the game by storm if your opponent is slow getting rolling himself. Your goal is then to build the game out very fast with Indigo/Sugar/Tobacco but still have time to bust out the Guild Hall.

The purple building strategy revolves around getting all the monuments built late in the game along with at least one of the City Hall and Triumph Arch. Preferably both. These cards are all pretty expensive, so you need a good source of cards to pull it off. Typically this will be via the Quarry/Carpenter/Library/Prefecture which are all purple buildings and thus feed off each other and the City Hall. Alternatively you can actually pull this off with a Producer/Trader focus by just getting 1 or 2 Silvers to go with your purple buildings. You won't get a perfect score but it'll still be bigger than almost anyone else. A very important card for this strategy (at least the version with the Quarry/Carpenter focus) that many people overlook is the Market Hall. This lets you leverage your starting Indigo into enough cards to keep control of the Trader phase. You'll likely never be calling it yourself, but it means if your opponent focuses on it you're not losing ground. The Crane can come home here as well even going so far as to let you replace your starting Indigo with something worth big points.

The third strategy is to develop a source of cards and then build a Chapel. From here you want to focus solely on generating card advantage and never calling Builder. Stick a card in the Chapel every turn and use the rest of your cards to score points some other way, likely building a couple monuments and the Palace. Everyone wants a Palace but for the above strategies it's worse than at least one other big building so they won't always have the cards to fit it in. The Chapel player has to have it. It should be worth more than any other large building and therefore should be in your sights.


How do you get enough cards to pull off one of the above strategies? By focusing on card advantage with every action you take and every card you build. Many buildings merely provide utility instead of sheer card advantage power and in this game more than most utility just isn't worth enough. It's not 100% written in stone but in general I prefer raw power almost every time. This means the best buildings to go for early game, to me, are the Library, Prefecture, Silver Smelter, Gold Mine, Quarry, Carpenter, Coffee, and Market Hall. Tobacco, Smithy, and Poor House are reasonable substitutions but no other building actually provides raw power in the early game and therefore should be avoided, I think.

There are a lot of cute combos that can eventually build up to being quite powerful, but you need to consider how much you're giving up to get there. A board with Aqueduct/Well/Black Market/Indigo/Indigo/Coffee seems pretty good but you've probably been set back a few cards to get there and you're not well positioned to transition into any of the winning strategies. You'd probably be best off following up with Chapel, Guild Hall, and more Indigos and you'd get a reasonable score for sure, but you'll lose to anyone with a strong, consistent strategy that pulls it off.

Of course this is a card game, and there's no guarantee that they'll manage to pull it off, so doing the best you can with what you have at every stage of the game is important. Sometimes your opponent will draw perfect and you can't win, but this is a fairly luck filled game so you have to accept that it happens some of the time. All you can do is put yourself in a position to win if he doesn't get there or if he makes a mistake. If you haven't drawn a Library or a Prefecture but do have Aqueduct/Well/Indigo, well, build your combo. I'd throw it away in a heartbeat if I drew a Library but I wouldn't start calling Councillor just in the hopes of drawing a Library. Use what you have as best you can, but always keep in mind how you can transition from what you have to a high scoring board.

Good luck, and have fun!

San Juan: Gold Mine Math

When I was writing up the post on Prospector related cards I wanted to quantify just how good the Gold Mine was but I didn't feel like I had time to really get the 'right' answer so I floated out a good enough answer by just ignoring the fact that cards were in play and that once a card was flipped up it couldn't be flipped up again. (A different copy of the same card, sure, but not the same card itself.) So I just worked out the odds of all different from a 110 card deck with no replacement and got:

• 24% chance of getting any card
• 15% chance of getting any 5
• 11% chance of getting any 6
• 20% chance of getting a 5 or a 6
• 85% of the time when you get anything, you get a 5 or a 6

The way I obtained these numbers was to build a spreadsheet with every possible combination of the numbers 1 through 6. This gave me 1296 rows. I also counted how many of each cost exist in a fresh deck and used a vlookup command to bring those values over. Then it was a simple matter of multiplying the odds for each cost on each row to determine how many of those specific combinations existed. Sum all those numbers up to get 146,410,000 which is 110^4. Then it was a simple matter to write a couple formulae checking to see if that row matched any of my above criteria and summing the rows which did and dividing by the total number.

Now, part of my knows there's some way to do this with nPrs and nCrs and factorials. Knowing that such things exist is what made me think it would be hard/fun to work out preciser values taking account of the fact we don't have replacement and that order doesn't matter. However I had an idea while I was trying to go to sleep last night which I tried this morning and it seemed to have worked, giving the following numbers:

• 25% chance of getting any card
• 16% chance of getting any 5
• 11% chance of getting any 6
• 21% chance of getting a 5 or a 6
• 86% of the time when you get anything, you get a 5 or a 6

The first thing I did was subtract 3 from my number of 1s in the deck. Each player starts with an Indigo and you've already built a Gold Mine. I'm ignoring any other possible buildings though if you cared about the odds from a given game state you could take that into account. For the general case this should work. I then slightly modified my vlookup formulae. Without loss of generality I assumed the card in the first column was pulled first. The second column then checked to see if it was pulling the same value as the first or not. If it was then I subtracted 1 from the count of such cards in the deck. The third column checked the first 2 for doubles. The fourth column checked all others for doubles.

The effect of doing this on the numbers is it didn't reduce the quantity of any of the good rows (they already had no duplicates so they could never have pulled the same card twice with replacement) but did decrease the chance of a given 'bad' row from occurring. (For example, the old table said pulling 4 6s at once happened 4096 times while the new one says 1680.) Doing this decreases our overall sum of possible outcomes down to 123,854,640. (107*106*105*104) Then it was a simple matter of redividing by the new denominator to get the new odds. I made the two changes, of course, but if I'd just made the replacement change then the odds of everything good happening would have gone up by 110*110*110/(109*108*107) or up by about 5.7%. 

What does this mean for how good Gold Mine actually is? Well, it'll hit a quarter of the time, so if you build it early you'll probably get 4 cards out of it. Of those 4 cards you can expect 3 of them to be very good (but possibly duplicating previous good pulls). You have no way to influence if you'll get those cards on the first pulls, or on the last ones, or every time, or never. But the cost is actually pretty small to build it and you have actually a pretty reasonable chance of winning the game from it as a result. Low risk, high reward? I think you have to go for that, sadly. Is it worth delaying a Library to build it? If you think your opponent is better than you then I think you have to. If you don't then maybe not.

San Juan: The Rest

I've already covered the cards related to the 5 jobs, now it's time to go over the rest of the cards.

Governor

Card: Tower

Cost: 3

Value: 2

Quantity: 3

Ability: Increasing maximum hand size to 12 instead of 7.

Ability Power: Very Low. Generally speaking you'll go most games without having to discard or even having to worry about having to discard. You draw cards 1 or 2 at a time and can spend up to 7 at once so it's pretty rare to spike up over 7 cards. However, some games you end up putting together a powerful setup and then you have to start thinking about discarding. If you have two Silver Mines, for example, you can draw 6 cards in an action. If you had a couple cards in hand before that and Trader as your last action you're going to have to discard. You can get around this by only calling Trader when you're going first to ensure you can call Builder after that. Or you can moderate your trade, by Trading say Silver + Indigo at the end of the turn. This way you don't have to discard and you keep a Silver to Trader again after you Builder. You may have to focus harder on the order you call your jobs and may lose a little bit as a result, but you still won't really have to discard. However, getting a Tower into play does mean you can pretty much ignore hand size as a thing and can just generate cards and spend them when your opponent Builders, which he will have to do since he will fill his hand before you do. It's also one of the two ways to really play multiple expensive things in quick succession (the other being the Crane). I don't like it since I think if you're playing well it doesn't do anything but it does open up potential plays on the right board so it's not as useless as, say, the Archive.

Scoring Power: Low. It is worth 2 points so it's better than some other cards.

Card: Chapel

Cost: 3

Value: 2

Quantity: 3

Ability: During the Governor phase you can remove a card in your hand from the game and put it under the Chapel. Each such card is worth 1 point at game end.

Ability Power: Very Low. You do use the Chapel before discarding for maximum hand size, so you can end a turn with 8 cards in hand and not lose one to discarding but that's the only way to really gain any sort of card advantage by playing it. One thing to keep in mind is the cards you remove from the game are gone for good, so you can use this to try to deny your opponent cards he really wants. (In particular, sticking a Guild Hall under here instead of discarding it to build something could win you the game if he doesn't draw the other one and 'would have' drawn yours the next time through the deck.)

Scoring Power: Very High. Barring the 6 cost buildings this is the most point efficient building in the game. It also has the ability to warp the way the game is played. One of the games I played at WBC this year I built a Chapel pretty early. I then refused to call Builder for the rest of the game. I just sat around accumulating cards and using the Chapel. My opponent was often stuck in a very bad spot as a result. For example, if I was Governor, what is he supposed to do with his choice when he has a mediocre hand? He can Builder and play something not great or he can pick up some cards, but then I just made him pick up more and he had to discard. During this game I took basically null actions at a couple different points in order to not Builder. (Things like Producering when we had no empty production buildings or Tradering when we both had 8+ cards in hand.) It is important to note that you need a way of getting cards to really have the Chapel work for you, since if all you do is Prospector for 1 card and put it in the Chapel you're going to lose. You still need to be able to build reasonable buildings and score points with a 6 coster or two. The Chapel is just a good way of turning extra cards into points.

All

Card: Library

Cost: 5

Value: 3

Quantity: 3

Ability: Once per round when you choose a job you get the bonus twice.
Ability Power: Very Very High. This is the most powerful card in the deck in a 2 player game by a wide margin. It's very close to Prefecture in a larger game. Consider what it does for the given jobs... Prospector is an extra card every turn. Builder (assuming you can build something reasonable and it wasn't already free) is an extra card every turn. Councillor lets you see 3 more cards. Producer lets you make a third good if you have room for it. Trader lets you sell a third good if you have it. So, if you can Prospector or Builder every turn then the Library is always a card every turn. And if you can't, well, you might get something useful out of it anyway. Prospecting for 2 cards is absurdly powerful. Think about what you'd have to set up to out card advantage that... If you have a Coffee and a Silver and your opponent only has an Indigo then you can spend 2 actions for 4.8 cards to your opponent's 1 card. That's 1.9 card advantage per action which is still worse than just Prospecting! If he builds so much as a Sugar you can't beat him by Producer/Trading without having even more going on than two Silver! If my opponent builds a Library then I call Prospector every turn. You have to deny it or you can't win. He'll probably still beat you by Buildering a lot but maybe he won't have something to build every now and then to try to mitigate it. Build this every game if you can. Do whatever it takes to get it into play. The only thing I might possibly build first if I have a Library in hand is a Prefecture, and then only if I'd have to discard it to build the Library. And then I'd call Councillor to make sure I could get the Library out as fast as I could after that. I harp on card advantage a lot, but when it comes to building a Library all that matters is card quantity. Get the cards you need to build it as fast as you can and then its card advantage will carry you from there.

Scoring Power: Medium. On top of being awesome it's worth 3 points. That's still just a fair cost for the points so it's not spectacular, but it's as good as it gets other than the actual scoring cards.

Scoring

Card: Statue

Cost: 3

Value: 3

Quantity: 3

Ability: None.

Ability Power: Not Applicable.

Scoring Power: High. 4 cards for 3 points is better than every card discussed so far except the Chapel after you've used it two or more times.

Card: Victory Column

Cost: 4

Value: 4

Quantity: 3

Ability: None.

Ability Power: Not Applicable.

Scoring Power: High. 5 cards for 4 points is better than every card discussed so far except the Chapel after you've used it three or more times.

Card: Hero

Cost: 5

Value: 5

Quantity: 3

Ability: None.

Ability Power: Not Applicable.

Scoring Power: Very High. 6 cards for 5 points is better than every card discussed so far except the Chapel after you've used it four or more times.

Card: Triumph Arch

Cost: 6

Value: ???

Quantity: 2

Ability: None.

Ability Power: Not Applicable.

Scoring Power: Very High. This card is worth 4 points if you've built one of the 'monument' cards which are the Statue, Victory Column, and Hero. It's worth 6 if you've built two of them. It's worth 8 if you've built all 3. With only one monument in play this is still better than every normal card. With two it's more efficient than even the Hero. With all three it's amazing, especially since you also have three very high scoring cards in play. You've made a very efficient use of your cards to score points, so you're well positioned to win unless your opponent has massive card advantage on you or a similarly strong scoring combo.

Card: City Hall

Cost: 6

Value: ???

Quantity: 2

Ability: None.

Ability Power: Not Applicable.

Scoring Power: Very Very High. This card is worth 1 point for every purple building you've built, which does count itself. So, in order for it to be better than a normal card you just need 3 other purple buildings. That's really not hard to come by. The monuments above are also all purple, so chance are this is at least as good as the Triumph Arch and probably even better if you've built a lot of purples. This card is key to one of the two big strategies, which is basically to build Quarry/Carpenter and then power out monuments and anything else purple on the cheap. The 'perfect' game goes along this strategy and if you pull it off you will win.

Card: Guild Hall

Cost: 6

Value: ???

Quantity: 2

Ability: None.

Ability Power: Not Applicable.

Scoring Power: Very Very High. Other than a Chapel in a silly game this is the card with the highest point potential in the game. It's worth 2 points for every production building you've built. It's not unheard of for this to be 18 or 20 points (City Hall caps at 11 in a normal game, 12 if you Crane over your starting Indigo.) With this in play you can pump out Indigo for 3 points and Silver for 5. It's pretty absurd if you get it going, and the key is that it's pretty easy to get going. Other than needing to have the Guild Hall itself you really only need one card advantage to get rolling and then the Silvers you build will feed themselves in a Producer/Trader cycle. An early Library or Smithy is really all you need, and you can do it with a Poor House or a Prefecture too. Contrast with the City Hall plan above, which really needs Quarry/Carpenter and to draw all the monuments to pull off. Guild Hall loses to City Hall when they both work optimally but I think Guild Hall works more often. Anything else (except maybe some sort of bizarre Chapel game) loses to either one. You don't need to have a Guild Hall or City Hall in hand to start down either path but you better hope you draw one eventually and you'd better hold onto it for dear life if you do draw one.

Card: Palace

Cost: 6

Value: ???

Quantity: 2

Ability: None.

Ability Power: Not Applicable.

Scoring Power: Very High. This card is worth 25% of your other points (rounded down). So if you would score 31 before counting the Palace, you get 7 more points. There's not really anything special to talk about here, it's just good. Unless your other 11 buildings are worth 15 or fewer points then it's a decent build, and if your board is that bad you're probably losing by a mile. The Palace is particularly important though if you're going a Chapel plan, since you're probably building fewer buildings than your opponent (decreasing the value of the other 6 costers) but you're hoping to outscore them with a lot of Chapel points which will count for the Palace.

San Juan: Builder, Councillor, and Prospector

Last time I went over the cards relating to the Producer and Trader jobs. Here I'll go over those relating to the Builder, Councillor, and Prospector jobs.

Builder

Card: Smithy

Cost: 1

Value: 1

Quantity: 3

Ability: Reduces the cost of production buildings by 1.

Ability Power: Low to High. Assuming you build this reasonably early in the game you're likely to gain at least 2 cards from it, paying itself off and leaving you with a building slot occupied and a point. That's decent. However, some games you'll build a lot of production buildings (to score big points with the Guild Hall) and then this card really shines. It'll get you 8 cards for the cost of 2. One thing we've sort of glazed over so far is how in order to get the card advantage out of calling Builder you need to actually have a building to build. As a building that costs 1 you can always toss it out for no cost when you call Builder. This is particularly powerful when your opponent is low and cards and can't build as you get the Builder card advantage, an extra building slot, and a reasonably powerful building.

Scoring Power: Low. It might combo well with the Guild Hall but in itself it's not very point effective.

Card: Quarry

Cost: 4

Value: 2

Quantity: 3

Ability: Reduces the cost of purple buildings by 1.

Ability Power: High. It may seem a little weird that Quarry costs 3 more than Smithy, has about the same effect, and is more powerful but it's true. The reason is in most games you'll build more purple buildings (all the big point buildings are purple) as there are just more purple buildings in the deck. Also, Quarry combos very well with other powerful buildings while Smithy doesn't really combo with anything except Guild Hall. Some games the Smithy will definitely be better but in the average game I think the Quarry will be better. 

Scoring Power: Medium. It's worth 2 points on its own and helps power out every high point building in the game. 

Card: Carpenter

Cost: 3

Value: 2

Quantity: 3

Ability: After building a purple building, draw a card. 

Ability Power: High. This is very similar to the Quarry. It costs one less to build than the Quarry but has the disadvantage that it works after building instead of before. This means you need an extra card in your hand to get the effect which sometimes doesn't matter at all and sometimes means you have to skip a Builder phase. On the plus side it does let you cycle a card and dig deeper into the deck for a little extra selection so any time you have extra cards in hand it's better than the Quarry. Even better? Get both of them into play. I don't know if it's been mentioned yet but while you can build any number of copies of the production buildings you can only build one of each purple buildings. Getting 2 Quarrys into play would be awesome but it's not legal. Quarry+Carpenter is the next best thing. 

Scoring Power: Medium. It costs one less than Quarry and basically has the same scoring impact on every turn but the very last.

Card: Poor House

Cost: 2

Value: 1

Quantity: 3

Ability: After building any building if you have 0 or 1 card left in hand, draw a card.

Ability Power: High. Compare this to the Carpenter above. Poor House is cheaper to build and gives you the extra card after building any building instead of just purple buildings. On the downside it won't always proc. I've played with this card an awful lot and I've found that in general you can control your hand size well enough to get a card almost every time. It has the downside that setting it up means you can't keep many good cards in your hand and you often end up living off the top of the deck instead of having a smooth plan. One thing to point out is if you have both the Poor House and the Carpenter then you have to use the Carpenter first. As such you can only draw 2 cards after building a purple building by emptying your hand. A final point to consider is how good this is in a Guild Hall setup. You don't tend to care what production buildings you're building and the deck is full of them so you'll probably pull one to keep going.

Scoring Power: Very Low. 2 cost buildings are not efficient for earning points.

Card: Black Market

Cost: 2

Value: 1

Quantity: 3

Ability: When building you can discard up to 2 goods from your production buildings.For each good discarded, pay 1 less to build a building.

Ability Power: Low to Medium. I've never been a big fan of this card but it can fundamentally change games. This card allows you to drop Trader from a Producer/Trader cycle. Especially if you have 2 Indigo, you could sell them for 2 cards or you could just discard them for a 2 card discount and skip picking the Trader job at all. Then, assuming your opponent hasn't Tradered himself you can Produce again for no benefit to your opponent but still 2 cards for you. It's pretty easy to counter (build a high value good and actually call Trader after your opponent Produces) and tends to require building subpar cards to pull off. It combos well with cards like Aqueduct and Well and can work out ok in a Smithy/Guild Hall deck as well. It's one of the better pieces of the bad combo pieces for sure, but it's not great.

Scoring Power: Very Low. It, again, is a 1 point for 3 card building.

Card: Crane

Cost: 2

Value: 1

Quantity: 3

Ability: When building a building you can build on top of a previously built building. If you do so then you pay X fewer cards where X is the cost of the old building. You lose any abilities from the overwritten building except the Chapel.

Ability Power: Medium. I don't think I've ever made good use of this building but I have seen it done. The important thing to recognize here is that there are 4 different buildings that cost 6 and are worth big points. Actually getting enough cards to build them all can be hard, but using a Coffee Roaster for most of the game and then turning it into a big point building for 2 more cards is very powerful. This also works well with the Quarry, since you can pay 1 less when you build the first building and then another 1 less when you overwrite it. Also, you can overwrite the Crane itself so if you have the Quarry+Carpenter combo going you can spend 2 Builder phases to essentially pay 4 less for a big building. If you have the tempo to do it, that's pretty sweet.

Scoring Power: Very High. Using this card for anything other than points is pretty silly, but it can let you pump out a lot of points in a very short period of time.

Councillor

Card: Archive

Cost: 1

Value: 1

Quantity: 3

Ability: Put every card drawn from the Councillor into your hand and then discard the proper number of cards from your hand. 

Ability Power: Very Low. This card can never, ever give you any cards at all. Card advantage is the name of the game and no matter what your combo is, this card cannot provide it. At best if you have a card full of terrible cards you can use this to snag a couple good cards to build, but that's not all that likely. I did have it work once, where I got 3 of the 6 cost buildings off a single Councillor, but I only built it because I had both the Quarry and the Carpenter in play and therefore it was better than free to build.

Scoring Power: Low. It's only worth the 1 point and can't really help you get any more.

Card: Prefecture

Cost: 3

Value: 2

Quantity: 3

Ability: Keep an extra card during the Councillor phase.

Ability Power: Very High. This is one of the 3 most powerful cards in the game by far. In a 4 player game I think it's actually the best card in the deck. Why? Well, if you have one and your opponent doesn't then suddenly Councillor is +1 card advantage and +3 card selection which is a pretty sweet deal. Perhaps more importantly your opponent can never call Councillor again unless he wants to lose. Taking an action to get -1 card is really terrible and yet people keep doing it. I like building the Prefecture and then refusing to Councillor myself. Prospector is almost as good and it opens the door for my opponent to throw the game and sometimes they do. Also, after you block Councillor with a Prefecture what is your opponent going to do if you build a Silver? He can't get an advantage by calling anything but Prospector or Builder and as long as you focus on calling those he's screwed. And if you do ever need selection you get an extra card when you go for it. You should build this every game if you can. 

Scoring Power: Medium. In addition to being powerful it's in a sweet spot for points as well. It can never be worth the big points but it should get you to the things that are.

Prospector

Card: Gold Mine

Cost: 1

Value: 1

Quantity: 3

Ability: When anyone calls Prospector reveal the top 4 cards of the deck. If they all cost a different amount put one of them of your choice into your hand. Discard all other revealed cards.

Ability Power: Extremely Variable. This is the most frustrating part of the game for me. Some games it will do nothing at all. In other games it will gain you a card every single turn for the cost of 1. More likely it'll get you a few cards and be a good buy. Also, chances are pretty reasonable that if you're getting a card off of this that it'll be awesome. (Every 5 or 6 cost building is either very powerful or worth big points, and it's hard to get 4 different numbers from 1-6 without having a 5 or a 6.) I did a terrible job of trying to work out the odds and will likely make a detailed post later doing it properly but assuming replacement then 24% of the time you'll get a card. 11% of the time you'll get a 6 cost building. 20% of the time you'll get a 5 or a 6, which means 85% of the time which you get a card you get an awesome card. My big issue with this card is many games it won't do anything soon after you build it (fair for a 1 cost building I guess) but some games it'll net you something awesome right away which is overpowered.

Scoring Power: High. It's only worth the 1 point itself, but it's got a pretty good chance of flipping you a big point building over the course of the game and those can be hard to come by.

San Juan: Producer and Trader

Last time I went over a brief summary of the game San Juan and a quick breakdown of my general philosophy for playing the game. In this post I'm going to cover the cards related to the Producer and Trader jobs. The next post will cover the cards related to Builder, Councillor, and Prospector. Finally I'll go over the rest of the deck which mostly covers big point buildings. 

Producer

Card: Indigo Plant

Cost: 1

Value: 1

Quantity: 10

Ability: Can receive 1 good during production phase. That good sells for 1 always.

Note: Each player starts the game with one of these cards in play.

Ability Power: Low. Selling for 1 is an ok add-on when you're selling something bigger and a decent consolation prize when your opponent sells (it's better than nothing!) but you're never building more of these for the goods.

Scoring Power: Low or Very High. There is a scoring building which makes this worth 3 points instead of 1. If you've built or plan on building that building (the Guild Hall) then these become incredibly efficient sources of points.

Card: Sugar Mill

Cost: 2

Value: 1

Quantity: 8

Ability: Can receive 1 good during production phase. That good sells for 1.4 on average.

Ability Power: Very Low. It may seem odd to give this a worse score than Indigo when this sells for more, but there are a couple factors at work here. For one, you don't start with one for free. It also costs one more but doesn't return enough extra to be worth that card. Running a Produce/Trade cycle to sell a Silver can be good. Running it to sell a Sugar is terrible.

Scoring Power: Very Low or High. The Guild Hall also makes this worth 3 points instead of 1. If you've built or plan on building it then these become reasonably efficient sources of points. Just worse than Indigo though, since it costs 1 more for no extra points.

Card: Tobacco Storage

Cost: 3

Value: 2

Quantity: 8

Ability: Can receive 1 good during production phase. That good sells for 1.8 on average.

Ability Power: Medium. On the first round you start with enough cards in hand to build one of these if your opponent first picks Builder, and it's a very reasonable build. You don't want to base your game plan around Tobacco since it isn't that good but it is a decent counter to your opponent trying to sell a lot and is also a decent fall back yourself for when you don't have a good job to pick.

Scoring Power: Low or Very High. The Guild Hall makes this worth 4 points instead of 2. It's less efficient cardwise than Indigo is but more efficient per building slot. 

Card: Coffee Roaster

Cost: 4

Value: 2

Quantity: 8

Ability: Can receive 1 good during production phase. That good sells for 2.2 on average.

Ability Power: High. Coffee is always worth at least 2 which is the sweet spot as far as making Produce/Trade bigger card advantage than just Prospector. You start with enough cards in hand to build this on the very first round when you go first, and if your opponent can't counter you can get a big advantage out of it. One thing I like to do when going first is to Prospector anyway. This way, should my opponent build, I get to throw the Coffee out second. This doesn't give him a chance to respond at all, and I can immediately Produce with my second action for the round. (And if he doesn't build I get both card advantage jobs in the first turn which is awesome in its own way.)

Scoring Power: Low or High. The Guild Hall also makes this worth 4 points instead of 2. It is again just worse than Tobacco points wise. It's a lot less efficient than Indigo for cards but it is better per building slot.

Card: Silver Smelter

Cost: 5

Value: 3

Quantity: 8

Ability: Can receive 1 good during production phase. That good sells for 2.6 on average.

Ability Power: Very High. Now we're talking. This is one of the few ways to consistently draw many cards at once, and I think it's the third most powerful card in the game. It has the downside that it's reasonably easy to counter on its own (just building a Tobacco cuts into the power of your opponent's Silver) but it has the upside that you're allowed to build more than one of them. Getting into a situation where you have 2 Silver is very dominanting, and difficult to counter. You do have to worry about hand size limits when you get to that point (mostly that means you have to trade as your first action when you're Governor) but it's a small price to pay for the massive numbers of cards. This is a situation where Prospector starts to look pretty bad, and that's hard to do.

Scoring Power: High or Very High. On it's own a 3 point building is pretty decent, even with that cost. 

The Guild Hall makes this worth 5 points instead of 3 which is just awesome in terms of space. Still worse than Indigo in a strict cards->points conversion but if you have any extra cards lying around at all you want to pump these bad boys out.

Card: Aqueduct

Cost: 3

Value: 2

Quantity: 3

Ability: You can produce an extra good during the Producer phase.

Ability Power: Very Low to Medium. This card is a combo piece. On it's own it does pretty much nothing at all. If you're the one doing the Produce/Trade cycle then you can't use the extra good right away. At best you can leave it lying around for a future Trader phase, but then it's going to be your 3rd best good. It's possible to build a board with enough specific cards to make the Aqueduct reasonably powerful but the game as you build to that point is going to be pretty weak. It's going to require a good mix of both production and purple buildings as well, which tends to be bad for scoring as we will go over in the points post. One time when it's reasonable is when you've built two Silver as has your opponent and you want control of Producer. This way you always end up with 2 Silver no matter who calls the job.

Scoring Power: Low or Medium. 2 points for 4 cards is baseline mediocre. City Hall makes this worth 3 instead of 2 which is ok but not awesome.

Card: Well

Cost: 2

Value: 1

Quantity: 3

Ability: If you produce 2 goods during the Producer phase then you draw a card.

Ability Power: Low to High. This card combos very well with the Aqueduct above since it lets you draw the card even if your opponent calls Producer. Even with as little as 2 Indigo this is a decent counter to your opponent trying to go a selling strategy. Even better is when you include it (without the Aqueduct) in your own selling strategy. The Well alone takes selling 2 Indigo from mediocre to on par with Prospector. It can be countered by the opponent calling Producer more aggressively (where the Aqueduct helps) or actually by calling Trader and stranding you with only 1 open production building. In general it's not good defensively but if your plan is to Produce/Trade and you don't have a lot of competition then this is a good addition. Note that it's harder to be the Producer in a 3 or 4 player game so it gets worse there.

Scoring Power: Very Low. 3 cards for 1 point is the worst deal in the game and unlike Sugar there's no building to increase the value by 2 here. 

Trader

Card: Trading Post

Cost: 2

Value: 1

Quantity: 3

Ability: You can sell an extra good each Trader phase.

Ability Power: Very Low. You need to have an extra good to sell which either means you're Producing and your opponent is Trading or you've built an Aqueduct. This is one of the cards needed to make Aqueduct any good at all and it's truly terrible itself. The Well above likely gains you a card every turn or two when it's up and running. What is this actually going to gain you? The answer is not much.

Scoring Power: Very Low. In addition to being terrible it's 3 cards for 1 point which is still the worst deal in the game.

Card: Market Stand

Cost: 2

Value: 1

Quantity: 3

Ability: If you sell at least 2 goods during the Trader phase you draw an extra card.

Ability Power: Low to Medium. This card is very similar to the Well when it's up and running but it's easier to disrupt. If you're the guy who wants to Produce/Trade and someone jumps in with a Trade you either have to skip the whole Trader phase or turn off the Market Stand for a couple turns. It combos with Trading Post, Aqueduct, and Well and comes out not half bad when you've got them all together other than the fact that you still need several production building and you have a bunch of low point buildings to show for it.

Scoring Power: Very Low. Still terrible point efficiency but at least this one is going to recoup some cards along the way unlike the Trading Post.

Card: Market Hall

Cost: 4

Value: 2

Quantity: 3

Ability: If you sell at least 1 good during the Trader phase you draw an extra card.

Ability Power: High. This card is not the best offensively but is excellent defensively. It alone is enough to turn a bad Producer/Trader cycle into a win for you. Silver/Indigo from your opponent is 3.6 cards, your Indigo alone is 2, so he's back below the Prospector line. And if you ever end up building production buildings yourself or get stuck needing to Trader once you're not going to lose out as much. It's still quite good if you're the Producer/Trader as it's always the extra card no matter what is going on, but it does cost a little more to lock in that consistency.

Scoring Power: Low or Medium. 5 cards for 2 points is not very good. 5 cards for 3 points is decent, which is where you'll be if you build City Hall.

San Juan: Introduction

San Juan is an Alea produced board game which came out in 2004. It plays with anywhere from 2 to 4 players and lasts about half an hour. It's a card game which makes use of the 'pick a job' mechanic similar to Puerto Rico (which makes sense, since San Juan is a spin-off of Puerto Rico). It's a skill based game without a lot of depth which makes it ideal for analyzing, which will be the focus here this week. I'd like to think I've got a good handle on the strategy of the game, at any rate, and certainly feel like I can share what I know. San Juan is a game you can play on Brettspielwelt and is pretty easy to pick up. As such I'll start off with an overview of the game and the rules so anyone who hasn't played before can give it a try. Future posts will go into the specific cards and talk about when you might or might not want to play them.

Overview
San Juan has slightly different rules and strategies depending on if you're playing it with only 2 people or if you're playing it with 3 or 4. The game is played 2 players at the World Boardgaming Championships and is mostly played 2 players on BSW as well, so I'm going to assume a 2 player game here on out. When something is particularly different from a 3+ player game I'll comment on it.

The basic idea of the game is you're trying to have the most victory points when the game ends. You pretty much earn victory points in only one way - by putting cards into play face up in front of you which are worth points. Each such card has a cost associated with it and this cost is paid by discarding an equal number of cards from your hand. In general the more cards you have in your hand the better cards you can afford to play so how many points you can earn is based on how many cards you can accumulate. There aren't any other resources to try to balance out, either. All you're doing all game is taking actions designed to get you more cards or taking actions to turn those cards into points. There's certainly a little more to the game than that, but really when you peel all the layers back all you're trying to do is get more cards and then buy good things with those cards.

Oh, and cards in play face-up like this are called buildings. Most of the buildings have extra rules written on them that modify how you play the game compared to your opponents. I am not going to go over rules surrounding individual cards today but will explain them when I go over the cards themselves.

Rules Summary
The game starts with each player having 4 cards in their hand. One player will have the 'Governor' token which means they'll take the first turn of the current round. At the end of the round the Governor will pass to the left so everyone gets a chance to go first. When this happens each player will also have to discard down to a maximum of 7 cards in their hand.

During the round each player will, in turn, pick one of the unchosen jobs. Each job has an action associated with it that ALL the players get to take. In addition, each job has a small bonus that only the player who chose the job gets to use. Once everyone has chosen a job the round will end. Pass the governor and return all the jobs to the pool so they're available to be chosen next round. (EXCEPTION: In a 2 player game the Governor gets two turns instead of one - the first and third of the round. Since the chosen jobs aren't returned to the pool until the end of the round they will by necessity be two different jobs chosen on these two turns.)

The game will continue with that simple sequence until someone builds their 12th building at which point the game will end at the end of the current turn.

Also, each player starts the game with an Indigo Plant card in play.


There are 5 different jobs that can be chosen. Those jobs are:

Job: Prospector
Action: No action
Bonus: Draw 1 card

Job: Builder
Action: Each player, in turn, may play a card from their hand. To do so they have to discard a number of cards equal to it's cost.
Bonus: Pay 1 card fewer

Job: Councillor
Action: Each player takes two cards off the top of the deck and looks at them. They add one of those cards to their hand and discard the other.
Bonus: Look at 3 more cards (so you get to see 5 cards but still only keep 1)

Job: Producer
Action: Each player picks an unoccupied production building they own and puts a card face-down on top of that building. This card represents a good of the type produced by the building and is used by the next job. Any building that is NOT purple is a production building. There are 5 of these in total: Indigo, Sugar, Tobacco, Coffee, and Silver.
Bonus: Pick another unoccupied production building you own and put a card face-down on it, too.

Job: Trader
Action: Reveal the top tile of the trader deck to show the current value of all goods. Then all players can, in turn order, discard one good from a production building they own and draw cards equal to that good's current value.
Bonus: You can discard a second good if you choose and draw cards equal to it's current value.
Note: There are 5 tiles in the trader deck. These are shuffled at the start of the game but are recycled without shuffling should trader get called more than 5 times over the course of the game. The values of each good on those tiles are listed below for reference.

Indigo	1	1	1	1	1
Sugar	1	1	1	2	2
Tobacco	1	2	2	2	2
Coffee	2	2	2	2	3
Silver	2	2	3	3	3

So, Indigo is always worth 1 card and Silver is worth 2 cards twice and 3 cards thrice. (Or, if you will, 2.6 cards on average.) Also note that on any given tile the goods are in increasing value. Silver is always worth at least as much as Coffee is, and so on.

General Strategy

As discussed in the overview your goal is to take actions which get you cards and then take actions which allow you to turn those cards into points. It's a little less true in a 3+ player game but in general what I try to look at is not so much how to maximize my own cards as much as it is to maximize the difference in my cards compared to my opponent. For example, compare the Prospector job with the Councillor job. Prospector gets you 1 card, Councillor lets you look at 5 cards and keep 1. In a vacuum looking only at yourself the Councillor seems better. They both result in you getting a card but the Councillor gives you a lot of selection. I've played against many people who have looked at the jobs this way and who often choose Councillor over Prospector. I think this is a huge mistake. Consider what happens if your opponent immediately chooses the other one.

You choose Councillor: You look at 5 cards and keep 1. He looks at 2 cards, keeps 1, and then gets another card. You've looked at 2 more cards total but he has 1 more card in his hand. The reverse is true if you start with Prospector. So the question then is what's better: 2 cards looked at or 1 card kept? This is a no-brainer to me since most of the cards you pick up over the course of the game just get discarded to build other cards. You don't need to build a hand full of awesome cards (like you might if you were building a hand for Whist, for example) you need to build a hand with 1 awesome card and a bunch of anything else to discard to pay for the awesome card. Looking at the extra 2 cards only really has utility when your hand is filled with bad cards and you really need to find an awesome card right now. I know a lot of people who really prioritize searching for the awesome card but personally I favor the raw power of just having more cards.

Now think about the Trader job. For this job to be of any use at all you need goods, so you have to have Produced first. (Or someone else could have produced earlier... Bottom line, you need a good.) Everyone starts the game with an Indigo, so you can always make some use of these jobs. Assume you haven't built any other buildings yet and sell. You take 2 actions (Producer and then Trader) to draw 1 card. Your opponent also gets to draw 1 card. I hope it's painfully obvious that this is terrible compared to either Councillor or Prospector. But what if you've built a Tobacco and your opponent has nothing extra? In this case you get to take 2 actions to sell Tobacco and Indigo vs his Indigo. 4/5ths of the time you get 3 cards to his 1 and 1/5th of the time you get 2 cards to his 1. This seems pretty good, right? Well, what if you instead spend those two actions on Prospector? Instead of being up 1.8 cards on your opponent you'd be up 2 cards on him. 

Prospector won't always be there to be taken, of course, so slowly building up to selling your Tobacco is still a reasonable thing to do. But time after time I see people think about getting 3 cards and picking Producer or Trader over Prospector because they're looking at things from their point of view (3 is bigger than 2!) instead of from the net gain point of view (2 is bigger than 1.8!). It gets even worse if the opponent builds Tobacco (or bigger) themselves because the purely selfish player will still Produce/Trade for them even if it's losing them cards!

How about Builder? Well, if you have something you both want to build and can afford to build then it's the same card advantage as Prospector. In both cases you're up 1 card (either by drawing it straight up or by paying 1 fewer when you build). Prospector gives you a little extra selection since you actually get to look at an extra card so it's marginally better in general. One thing to consider, again, is how your choice affects your opponent. If they have no cards in their hand you can call builder when they can't build anything and get an extra card into play over them which can be huge. Or if they have a full hand you can be pretty certain they'll call builder themselves and you can Prospector for the extra selection.

Overall, before the buildings you build are taken into account, I think the jobs are in order of power: Prospector, Builder, Councillor, Trader, Producer. But you'll soon be building different buildings that alter how good the jobs are for you which is where the interesting decisions in the game come. But it isn't good enough to consider how your buildings change the jobs for you... You need to consider how your opponent's buildings change the jobs for them. Often you can force them into situations where you can make them pick what you want them to pick and set up huge card margins on them, but only if you're paying attention.

What are some examples of those situations? Stay tuned for next time when we'll go over individual cards and talk about some such situations. Then after we've covered all the cards we'll go over how to turn our card advantage into a winning score.