Sea, Salt, and Paper – First Thoughts
There are now thousands of games released each year. Games are funded on Kickstarter, only to never see the light of retail. A given game released to retail may shine briefly, then sink without trace. Sometimes it takes a light touch to float to the service and be spotted on the ocean of ‘this is fine’.
Sea, Salt, and Paper, caught the hotness recently, and it seemed that lots of folk were playing it. I heard it mentioned on podcasts, and reviewed by friends. Its an odd little box and maybe not quite what you expect.
First of all it is worth mentioning the art. Every card is unique and features a stylised photo of real origami art. It is absolutely gorgeous, with clean graphic design to help with picking up the game.
As a card game it has some instant weirdness to it. You don’t have a hand of cards from the start. You shuffle up the deck, deal a card to each of two different discard piles. Then you are off. On your turn you do one of the following
- draw two cards from the deck, keeping one and discarding the other.
- pick up a card from the top of one of the discard piles
In doing this you are looking to create pairs, for some reason the game calls them duos, of certain cards and sets of others. If you form a duo you can play it, getting a point and making a power fire. This effect might be to go through a discard pile and take any card into your hand, get another go, or pick up a card from the top of the deck.
Duos are also worth a point and in playing them you get a little closer to being able to close out the round. I played at 4 and a round wound down quickly leaving you not many decisions to try and win. The sets you collect of octopuses, penguins, sailors, and shells give you points based on how many you have. There are a few other cards that give you points in other ways.
How do you win though? Well this is where things get weird again. When you have reached at least 7 points in hand and on the table you can close out the round. If you just say STOP, then everyone scores the points they have. Simple. You might not have the most of course depending on what folk have in their hand.
You can instead say LAST CHANCE. Then everyone but you gets a chance to take another turn. Then you all score. If you have the most points you also get to add the highest number of cards of a single colour to your score. This is your colour bonus. Everyone else only scores their colour bonus. If the bet goes against you, then everyone scores their cards as normal but you only get the colour bonus. There is a key on all the cards for those who have colour vision deficiency.
It takes multiple rounds to get to the end of the game, with points being accumulated over each round. This gives you time to get a handle on the game a bit, even over the course of a single game. What I quickly realised was that what seems like an almost totally random game actually has an interesting core. The double discard piles give you options every turn, and you can cover cards that others may want. You can queue up combos, manipulate chance, and try and keep track of what others are up to.
Sea, Salt, and Paper totally charmed me. It has beautiful art, I’m unlikely to pick it up to play more due to the player count, but I would recommend checking it out if you get a chance.
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