History and Notes

Version history

• version 1.1:
• New AI: Bob AI.
  • Hard-coded AI
  • Exact analysis of card gain/loss when choosing roles, including calculating expected trade values inferred from trade cards already drawn
  • Better trading behavior: Will only trade over hand limit if in search for a card (i.e, has nothing good to build on hand)
  • Improved chapel behavior. Chapel will effectively increase hand limit by one, and big point buildings will be preferred to be put under it if it hurts the opponents
  • Improved councillor decision engine
  • Hard-coded card values, which will dynamically change during play depending on what cards will be played
  • Will play violet 1 cost cards for free if quarry/carpenter combo is present
• version 1.0:
• ties are now recognized correctly
• Market Hall bug fixed
• added game over dialog
• GUI look changed
• "Use library?" is only asked in two player games when player is governor and chooses role for the first time, otherwise it's used automatically
• During trader and producer phase, which goods to sell/produce are now proposed automatically even if player has other options, e.g. other goods to sell/produce
• new AI: Dawkins AI. Improvements:
  • if at 11 bldgs and next card would result in 3+ VP lead: Try to force builder
  • if at 11 bldgs and next card would result in <2 VP lead or loss: Prevent builder, try to force councillor instead
  • during builder phase: Don't build anything if building would end and lose the game, only build if a player afterwards might end the game (at 11 buildings, more than 3 cards in hand and less than 2 VPs behind)
  • use crane at 11 buildings if losing and game won't end
  • role choice: Take into account whether losing, roughly equal, or winning at the moment
  • role chouce: Better estimation of (potential) profit for producer/trader role, including knowing which trade values haven't been drawn yet
  • CardValue, BuildNothingValue: Take VPs (losing, equal, winning) into account
  • UseChapelValue: Take own cards, opp cards, hand cards, #hand cards, #turns to go, VPs into account
• greatly optimized for speed, for faster evolution
• removed "Intelligent Dialogs" option and non-intelligent code
• added extensive help pages
• if building last building in a game, don't build what normally would be built but maximize points instead

Known issues

• user can use black market to discard goods, then change his mind and don't build anything, thus illegally discard goods "for free"
• the player does not see which cards get drawn for AI's "Gold Mine" cards
• if the supply and discard pile combined drop below a total of 10 cards, the game just stops without telling the user why. (Shouldn't happen with the AI except if the player has a chapel, stores a card under it every turn, and the AI won't build because it would lose the game. What happens in the real San Juan game if players run out of cards?)

To do

• Improve GUI: Select roles with one click only, without the need to click okay; Mark governor with small icon
• Add hard-coded AI similar to Bob AI that tries to go for the guild hall
• New genetic AI which will incorporate all enhancements from the hard-coded AIs and then be trained against Bob, Guild Hall, and the other evolving AIs so that its play will be more variable than Darwin/Dawkins
• Implement San Juan variants, like playing without drawing and discarding additional cards at the beginning, playing with no or a weaker library in 2 player games, or nerfing the Guild Hall
• Save player statistics (games played/won/lost, cards played, ...)
• Add "cancel" during building phase, maybe ask crane/black market after selection of which card to build
• Deal with the known issues ;-)

Credits and thanks

• The original San Juan game was designed by Andreas Seyfarth and published by alea/Ravensburger.
• JSanJuan was designed and developed by André Wichmann in Java, using the excellent Eclipse SDK.
• The wood background of the main window is a texture created by Noctua Graphics.
• The scans of the English San Juan cards were found in the San Juan files section of BoardGameGeek and were originally made by Dick Ruck (crabro at BGG) for a different, buggy implementation of San Juan (see below).
• Thanks to Stefan Brück from alea games for providing a lot of constructive criticism!
• More thanks to Melanie Ludmann for playing countless games of San Juan with me and for playtesting the program and providing feedback!
• Thanks must also go to Guido Wegener for providing additional computing power to evolve my AIs.
• Additional thanks go to Günther Rosenbaum for creating an excellent PC version of St. Petersburg (http://www.westpark-gamers.de), Mark Haberman for doing a first, albeit buggy and abandoned implementation of San Juan (look at http://www.boardgamegeek.com in the San Juan files section), and Tony Mitten for creating an amazing MS Excel(!) genetic algorithm for Puerto Rico (to be found at http://www.boardgamegeek.com in the Puerto Rico files section) - all these have inspired me to do JSanJuan!