BENGALURU: San Juan is, for all intents and purposes, a blood relative of Race for the Galaxy. The foundation of both games was developed together before Andreas Seyfarth and Tom Lehmann decided to go their separate ways with the design.
Race wound up being one of the most highly-rated card games around, but San Juan is certainly worth your time as well; and here’s why.
In San Juan, you are responsible for developing the titular city by constructing a variety of plantations and urban buildings. Like Puerto Rico before it (and New Frontiers since), every turn a role is selected and all players get to perform the action of that role; however, the person who selected the role will get a bonus of some sort. You carry on doing this until someone’s constructed their 12th building and whoever has the most points wins.
San Juan’s role selection is a brilliant system that was at the heart of Puerto Rico’s popularity, and it hasn’t aged badly at all. The constant push and pull is phenomenal — do you pick a particular role because you need the bonus, or do you count on someone else selecting it and doing something that sets you up first?
The need to constantly evaluate the timing of everything you need is absolutely wonderful.
The other bit of excellence at San Juan’s core is in the DNA it shares with Race for the Galaxy every card you want to play is going to cost you, and that cost can only be paid by discarding other cards from your hand. Each and every card you discard is an opportunity that you might never see again, so that choice is almost always an agonising one. However, you’ve got to spend cards to build cards and so you’re forced to constantly adapt to whatever the game throws your way.
The cards themselves are just varied enough to keep every game feeling fresh without making you feel like you’re drowning under the weight of too many options; something Race for the Galaxy, as much as I love it, is occasionally guilty of doing. Overall, San Juan feels like a sleek and streamlined game — looking at your initial hand of cards, you may be able to see your path to victory but, if not, you’ll certainly be able to identify something to go after in the short-term.
San Juan deserves more acclaim than it’s received. It’s a wonderful game in its own right, but more than that, it’s wonderfully accessible. There are many games that share its mechanics, and many of them are extremely good; but when it comes to this genre of clever card game, San Juan could and should be anybody’s first port of call.
What’s New?
Stroganov
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Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition
Ares Expedition just launched on Kickstarter and it looks to be the love child of Terraforming Mars and Race for the Galaxy both names to conjure with when it comes to boardgaming references, so no surprise that it’s doing incredibly well.
Arjun Sukumaran
(Arjun is a gamer, book lover and an all-round renaissance man)