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.