San Juan is a nice iOS port, shame about the game

Posted by on August 23, 2012 in Reviews

One of the great things about all these board games being ported over to the iOS is that you can see with fresh eyes how well games have held up. Or haven’t held up, in some cases. San Juan, for instance. It’s a card-based lightweight version of Puerto Rico, a classic board game. Both games share the same 17th century Caribbean motif and the same gimmick of players taking turns selecting roles. But whereas Puerto Rico is still a lean mean resource management Euro-machine, San Juan is a relic of the days before games like Race to the Galaxy, Dominion, and Ascension. I have no idea why anyone would still play it.

But don’t necessarily hold that against Ravensburger’s competent iOS port. It’s a convenient and effective way to get your San Juan on in under ten minutes. It’s a bit surprising that Ravensburger so rotely ported it from the card game, especially given how they completely revamped the playing pieces for their iPad version of Puerto Rico. No such thing happens with San Juan, which is just a straight-up reproduction of the card game, right down to the artwork on the roles. This means you have to learn which card art means which purple building. Is that an archive or a poor house? Better tap on it to find out. Or not, since the game so conveniently flags everything you can do when you can do it. It’s particularly helpful how cards light up when their abilities kick in, and how the little tags representing resources are visible in the corner when the rest of the card is obscured.

Maybe San Juan is too simple not to do well, but Ravensburger has done well with their just-the-cards-ma’am approach. Cards are constantly moving around the screen to show who’s doing what. You literally finger through your fanned out cards when you refer to them. The discard pile is a little messy.

The AI is fine, which is again probably a matter of the game being too simple to not do well. But a central fact about San Juan is that you’re playing against the shuffle more than you’re playing against the other players. If you’re willing to draw out a ten-minute solitaire game into however long your asynchronous matches take, San Juan has multiplayer support. And even if you’re not into multiplayer, it has a nifty take on leaderboards. Gamecenter tracks the points you’ve earned across all your matches and compares your total to your friends’ totals. You may not be better than them at San Juan, but you can beat them by just playing more.

3 stars
iOS

  • Nightgaunt

    Race for the Galaxy was originally designed to be a Puerto Rico card game, and submitted to the publisher at around the same time as the San Juan design. They went with San Juan (by PR’s original designer), so Race was rethemed into space.

    I think I’ve only played San Juan once or twice, but the two felt like pretty similar games. Race is slightly more complicated and nuanced, I guess. But the core concepts of role choosing and using cards as currency are the same in both, right?

  • tomchick

    Exactly right, Nightgaunt. That’s actually part of why I’m not that crazy about San Juan as a tabletop game. I just feel that Race for the Galaxy does San Juan much better.

  • BLAM!

    Isn’t Dominion just another play against the shuffle multiplayer solitaire game?
    Felt the same about Race for the Galaxy. Once you get basic leeching strategies down (always try to explore and consume, let others settle and produce), games are decided pretty much entirely on luck of the draw. My group of hardcore players – who can instantly spot the ideal Dominion combo in any given game – has yet to find any way of getting better at the game. The open source PC version has AI that routinely stomps human players, but there’s no rhyme or reason to how it plays; it just plays whatever cards it can.
    If you thought Race for the Galaxy made San Juan obsolete, then I highly recommend 7 Wonders which makes Race for the Galaxy obsolete. It might have different mechanics, but it scratches the same itch, moves a lot quicker, and features more interaction with other players.

  • Barac Wiley

    Race for the Galaxy has significantly more strategic depth and variety than 7 Wonders, imho. And it hardly takes very long – it’s the shortest game I actually enjoy, rarely clocking in at over half an hour.

    PS: Exploring is a very bad leech strategy, since it gives everyone free cards first thing in their turn, and there are plenty of explore bonuses that don’t care if you chose the phase. My most successful games are invariably the ones where I explore as little as possible. Trading is a much more efficient source of cards (unless you’re looking for something in particular), and it doesn’t let anyone else in on it.

    That said, 7 Wonders is still pretty good, and definitely supports more players.

  • BLAM!

    It’s been a while since I played, but don’t you need specific cards already in play for trading to work? And you have to choose the consume phase for it to work and use up your resources?

    The bonus for choosing explore is deceptively large. You either keep twice (triple?) the cards as everyone else or you choose from twice (triple?) the pool. Making it more likely you’ll draw that “something in particular” is HUGE. Explore and Consume are definitely the top two actions that benefit the player who chooses them. The bonuses for settle, build, and produce are piddling in comparison.

    You can limit how much exploring helps other players by doing it when their hands are almost full. That’s kind of the general strategy: explore when they have large hands, only build/settle when they don’t. You usually want to go with the explore option that gives you a bigger selection of cards to choose from. Getting the right card almost always trumps keeping more cards. From there just play high value cards and Consume x2 whenever you can.

    That’s kind of it for RftG’s skill ceiling. I have friends who can reverse engineer optimal moves for almost any euro game, but all were stumped on how to improve their RftG game. The computer wipes the floor with all of us and there’s never any discernible strategy to its play.

  • Barac Wiley

    You need goods, which are available immediately on windfall worlds (which are probably 50% or more of the planets in the game) and on production worlds whenever anyone picks produce. You might have to explore a time or two to have enough cards to afford/draw an appropriate world (if you didn’t start with one), but a Consume – Trade action with the better class of goods (genetic or alien), or with appropriate trade bonuses will get you nearly as many cards as a +5 explore action, you’ll get to keep all of them, and no one else will get to piggyback on your draw, nor will their card bonuses avail them any. You can also potentially force other players to consume goods before they’re ready or instead of trading them, since consume actions on cards are mandatory.

    Exploring certainly gives you a bigger benefit than people that didn’t choose it, by default, but like I say there are a lot of cards that grant additional draws, additional keeps, or the ability to mix explore cards into the hand before discarding in addition to other benefits, and it doesn’t take very much of that to even things out. And it gives them -some- benefit even by default, which is considerably less true of consumption.

  • BLAM!

    I guess my problem with RftG’s depth was that it required keeping track of too many individual card effects, not only your cards but also your opponent’s. I love 7 Wonders being able to tell what your opponent is doing with a one second glance.

    From what I remember of San Juan, it was set up to base your economy and scoring off of producing buildings with a couple special purple cards, but most of the winners were people who realized going all in on purple cards was the way to go, riding their insane combos into the sunset.

  • dennox

    Bit of a generalization on San Juan. I think its a great game not too deep and i like the theme.