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!