Product Details
San Juan is a card game based on the famous Puerto Rico. The 110-card deck consists of production buildings (indigo, sugar, tobacco, coffee, and silver) and "purple" buildings that grant special powers or additional victory points. The cards in a hand can then be "built" or used as money to build something else; the cards from the deck are used to represent the goods produced in the buildings, and in this case they are left face down. The hand, which has a maximum limit of seven cards, is then reset each round.At each round (or ruled), each player in turn chooses one of the available roles, activating an effect that generally affects all players, such as the production of goods or the construction of buildings. The player who has chosen the role is currently privileged, and has bonuses such as producing more goods or building buildings for less.
Although conceptually similar to Puerto Rico, the game has many different mechanics. Notably, San Juan has no settlers or goods to ship, and trade cannot be blocked. Victory points are earned exclusively for buildings, and the game ends as soon as one player has built twelve buildings.
The second edition of San Juan includes all the cards from the original base game plus the additional cards from the published Treasure Chest of Alea but not the event cards from that expansion. This edition also contains a new unreleased building card: “The Hut”, a building that awards a card when nothing is sold in the trade phase.