San Juan

Addicted to this game! I mostly play the single player game type. The AI for San Juan is solid. The translation to the iPhone has very few frills, but it's extremely loyal to the card game version. I love the automatic scoring (really hard to do that when playing cards). If I would improve anything, it would be to make the table cards identifiable for opponents without requiring a separate view. **Update** the iPad version of the game makes the cards on the table visible at all times.

This is the original, not the expansion, so it's missing a bunch of cards, and it's less balanced. The Guild Hall is massively overpowered here, the prefecture costs 3, the Gold Mine is more powerful, but without the Gold Smith, it's much harder to take a prospector strategy. In fact, you seem to need to take a producer oriented strategy due to the Guild Hall being so powerful. It even makes the monuments barely viable because building an Indigo Plant with the Guild hall is worth the same as a statue. Also the multiplayer is broken, which is why I installed it. The game itself is done pretty well, but the screen is small enough that you can only look at a portion at a time, so I wind up playing my own strategy much more, whereas I play mostly based on my opponents in person.

This is a very faithful port of the card game to iPhone and iPad. This was very fun on the phone, but the font is almost too small to read at the end of a long day. It was a strain. Happily, the iPad version is very easy to read, and the layout is even better. Outstanding card game!