25th September 2022 Sunday is here again and we're logged into Board Game Arena for some gaming goodness. Sea Salt & Paper is a pun that plays on sea salt & pepper in this quirkily ocean and err... origami themed set collecting card game. Caveat: We've only ever played Sea Salt & Paper digitally. What's in a game?
Sea Salt & Paper makes use of a genuinely unique art style which looks like the creators constructed origami models themed after the game such as mermaids, crabs or penguins etc and then photographed them. Or perhaps high quality renders have been produced in a computer art program. Either way, the game has what I think a fantastic, eye catching theme, colourful and of course, they get to use the Sea Salt & Paper gag. The game uses 10 colours for cards - and that's a lot. Fortunately each colour has a unique icon associated with it which a handy and welcome accessibility aid. The downside is that Sea Salt & Paper has quite a lot of icons, there's about 4 icons for each type of card. Luckily most of them are intuitive or fairly obvious. I don't think it's too difficult to learn may be off putting during early plays. How's it play? Setup
On to play Sea Salt & Paper is played over a varying number of rounds until a scoring target has been met. Furthermore, rounds will have a varying length and after a certain point, each round can be ended by any player. The game follows the usual turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play progress to the person on their left. There are 3 actions a player can perform in their turn.
Endgame There are 2 ways Sea Salt & Paper can end. Firstly and least likely, if a player manages to acquire 4 mermaid cards... they win! Otherwise, the game has a endgame scoring target, which is 30-40 VPs depending on player count. When this target is reached during scoring it triggers the game end and players calculate their final total VPs. Points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
Broadly speaking, Sea Salt & Paper is fairly straightforward; collect sets and play duos. There are several ways to collect sets, including based on colours. Players will often be faced with various on which card to take and optimisation is key here. Although players will also need to adapt to circumstances as they may need to deal with cards they might not initially want. Sea Salt & Paper however, puts some quite unusual and unique mechanics into play that have unusual impact on the game and the way some of these mechanics synch up is interesting. I'm struggling to recall another card game in which cards that are played and cards in hand score equally. It's very important here though since it ties in with the mechanic that allows players to bet on 'winning' the round. When a player chooses to announce 'last chance', they'll know what cards other players have played but they won't know what they've kept in their hand. This means there's always an element of push-your-luck because the announcer will never know what others have kept back. Canny players may decide to not play duo cards in an attempt to lure others into a false sense of security but the trade off is that they won't get utilise those cards' benefits. There's also a higher level of play about noting what cards other players take and responding. Drawing cards blindly gives the player a useful ability of using one of them to cover a card in one of the discard piles, potentially denying it to another player if you think they want it. While Sea Salt & Paper players has a moderately quick playtime and is mostly easy to learn, it's a bit fiddly when it comes to scoring. Not only do players have to score both played cards and ones in hand but sometimes they need to discard their scoring and score again... but differently thanks to someone triggering 'Last Chance'. I'm not sure the the gameplay this push-your-luck mechanic adds to the game is worth the extra hassle it causes with scoring. Sea Salt & Paper is also seems like something of a slow burn when it comes to gameplay which boils down to choosing which card to take and whether to play duos or not. It can feel a little unexciting or unengaging. Mechanically, there's some fun things going on with Sea Salt & Paper but the game didn't quite grab me in the times that we played it but as I said, it could just be a slow burn that requires a few more plays to grasp. I wouldn't object to trying it again.
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