Christmas Gaming in Gersthofen

One of the great gifts I received this year was the very fun game San Juan. My mother included this in her Christmas package this year, she had seen it on my list of games I would like to try out sometime earlier in the year. It was unexpected to say the least.
This is a card game for 2-4 people and the idea is that each player is establishing a colony in San Juan, on the newly settled island of Puerto Rico. Once per round(which we called a year for the sake of understanding) each player must choose a job from five available, beginning with the governor for that year (governor rotates clockwise each year.)

Once a job is chosen, ALL players take the action associated with that job, building, trading, etc, and the player who selected the job gets some sort of special extra benefit.

It has some neat mechanics, where the same cards are used as buildings, currency, or commodities, depending on where they are placed, and you have to make some neat decisions... is making a 4-cost building worth throwing away 4 cards from your hand?? do you have 4 cards you want to throw?? I thought it was good fun.

Here is a layout of the board after a few rounds of play.
Like I said, there were tough decisions to be made and they required some thought. Part of this was also a factor of the games new-ness. Since it was the first play for all of us, we had to grapple with the new rules and try to figure out strategy at the same time. Here you can see that it was taxing the brains of Claudia and Doris to the maximum. Claudia glances over at me and Doris is lost deep in thought.
I thought it was a fairly even, hard fought battle... but I was wrong. When Ryan declared he had placed his 12th building, ending the game we added up the scores and it looked like he had certainly figured out something that the rest of us had not.

You can see from my scribbles that I had to re-do the scoring a bit as I was still learning it myself. I think that the rules folks could have made that even more clear for me. They have to remember that I am a slow thinker at times...
Claudia in desparation for some winning feeling, asked me to add together the married couples scores, to see if one family had out-scored the other, but this was in vain. The Jones's total was 53 to the Anderson's 52 points. An out and out Ryan-led Jones domination.

Here is the winning portrait of Governor Ryan to hang on the wall of his palace in San Juan. (to reference a long ago post about Ryan, notice once again he is wearing a shirt with orange on it. this did not occur to me until I just posted it.)