San Juan (card game)

San Juan is a strategic card game created by Andreas Seyfarth, first published in 2004 in German by Alea and in English by Rio Grande Games, designed for two to four players using a dedicated deck of one hundred and ten cards over sessions of about forty five to sixty minutes. The game is derived from and named after the same setting as the board game Puerto Rico, taking its own name from that island's capital city, and it keeps that game's underlying economic structure of building structures and producing commodities to earn victory points while simplifying several of its systems for a faster, more portable card only experience. On a turn a player selects one of several available roles, such as Builder, and every player may then take the action tied to that role, with the player who selected the role typically receiving a discount or other bonus, while goods in San Juan can only be sold for money rather than shipped for points as in Puerto Rico, and colonist tokens and the Mayor role are removed entirely in favor of a new Councillor role that lets players draw additional cards. Because cards in San Juan simultaneously function as money, buildings and goods, the game avoids extra tokens altogether, and its role selection system rewards choosing roles at moments that are least convenient for one's opponents.