Day 10 - Sea Salt & Paper

I'm always a fan of games trying a bold and distinctive art direction and in the case of Sea Salt & Paper that beautiful art is wrapped around a pretty fun game.

Sea Salt & Paper is a set collection game with a push your luck element where every card in the game depicts a sea creature made of photographed origami. The game is pretty simple, once you wrap your head around it's weird structure and scoring. But the esoteric gameplay can be a barrier to entry for new players and unseasoned gamers (see what I did there :))

On your turn you either pick up a card from the centre or draw two cards from the deck and discard one to either pile in the centre. So far so simple. However... Pretty much every card has a special power depicted on the card in hieroglyphics that will take several plays for players to fully grok. On top of that, some cards only have powers if they are part of a duo, i.e. two matching cards. Which is further complicated by cards that seem to match but don't, for example the fish shoal that scores 1 point for every fish but is not, itself, a fish.

The final wrinkle that really throws this game for a loop is how the round ends. Any player can declare the round over after they have 7 or more points. The can call stop, everyone scores and a new round begins or... they can call "Last Chance." When they do this they reveal their score, every player gets one more turn to beat their score, if they don't then the player who called last chance gets a bonus, but if any player beats them they lose all their points for the round, scoring only one point for each card in a colour of their choice.

And if that wasn't enough, there's also an instant win condition, collect all 4 mermaids in a single round and you win the game, regardless of the scores!

Sea Salt & Paper has become a firm favourite with us for travelling, however the slightly esoteric scoring and, often times, difficult to decipher iconography, has left others cold when they played with us. So, Sea Salt & Paper is an acquired taste but no-one can deny it's extremely beautiful to look at.