SPIEL '22 Preview: Sea Salt & Paper, and Look at the Stars

To follow up my preview of Splendor Duel, I'll now detail the other Bruno Cathala co-design that captivated me at Gen Con 2022: Sea Salt & Paper, co-designed with Théo Rivière and due out from French publisher Bombyx at SPIEL '22.

Sea Salt & Paper is a pure card game that might seem overwhelming at first glance and will likely take more time than it should to explain given the multiple card types in the deck.

To get started, let's examine my holdings at the end of a round:

Note the ColorADD player aid in the upper right, which indicates the number of cards of each color in the deck. (Bombyx's Yann Droumaguet told me that the company intends to use the ColorADD symbols as much as possible in the future to make its games more accessible.) Card types can come in a range of colors, and the colors matter for two purposes that I'll explain in a bit.

In the top row you see four pairs of cards: ships, crabs, fish, and the swimmer/shark duo. When you collect one of these pairs in your hand, you can play it in your holding area for 1 point and the special power of that pair, which from left to right are:

• Taking another turn.
• Picking the card of your choice from one of the two discard piles.
• Drawing a card from the deck.
• Stealing a random card from an opponent.

The four cards in the bottom row were in my hand until the end of the round. A mermaid is worth 1 point per card in your collection that's a color of your choice; if you have multiple mermaids, you must choose different colors. I chose yellow and dark blue, so that's worth 7 points on top of the 4 points for my pairs. (The other two cards are worthless, but if they had been yellow or dark blue, the mermaids would have counted them.) If you manage to collect all four mermaids in your hand, you win the game instantly!

Now let's consider a pic from a different round:

Other cards score points as sets, so I have 3 points of octopuses in hand and 0 points of shells. Alternatively you could collect penguins or sailors. Each card has a number at the lower-right indicating how many cards of that type are in the deck. Finally, some cards score points based on other card types: the lone lighthouse is worth 1 point per ship in your collection; the school 1 point per fish; the colony 2 points per penguin; and the captain 3 points per sailor.

Okay, with that background out of the way, how do you play the game? Shuffle the deck, then deal one card into each of the two discard piles. On a turn, take the top card of a discard pile into your hand or draw two cards from the deck, keep one, and discard the other. If you have a pair, you can choose to play it.

When you have at least 7 points — whether in hand, on the table, or in a combination of both places — you can choose to end the round immediately, at which point everyone reveals their hand and scores for all their stuff. Alternatively, if you have at least 7 points and think you have more than anyone else, you can reveal how many points you have and call "Last round", after which everyone else gets a final turn. If no one manages to have more points than you, then you score those points as well as a bonus for the color most present in your collection, whereas everyone else scores only for the color most present in their collection. If someone does top you, however, then you score only for your best color, while they scores their points and a bonus.

Play multiple rounds until someone hits the 40/35/30 point threshold depending upon whether you have two, three, or four players.

"I always feel like somebody's watching me..."

Droumaguet ran me through an overview of the game, which seemed overloaded with too many card types and choices, then we played a sample round...then another and another and another and everything flowed smoothly and I stopped only because I had another appointment.

Yes, the game might have a lot going on, but that's okay because you're building up a hand only one card at a time. Not everything will show up in a round, so the value of any particular card is relative only to what you have and what's been discarded, which means you need to be flexible to piece together points.

The action of a turn is simple and takes only a few seconds, yet it generates all the uncertainty that good card games do: Are you making the right choice? Are you giving the opponent something they want? Are you covering the right pile, or leaving exposed something they want? Every little choice shapes the flow of the round, and the effect of those choices builds over time. With more players, more cards would be buried in the discard piles between turns, giving additional information of what's out of play.

The gamble available to you regarding the end of a round is a great touch. How confident are you? What does the opponent have on the table, and how many cards do they have in hand? Have you been tracking what they picked up? What's the most they could have? If you gamble correctly, you can get a huge leg up in the score since you add on a bonus, while others get only a bonus, swinging a round that might have ended 8-7 in your favor to something like 11-3.

Sea Salt & Paper doesn't feel innovative in terms of scoring choices or gameplay, yet the game was incredibly compelling, combining the double mystery of the card draw with the satisfying bump from a pair power and the thrill that comes from holding valuable cards that will snakebite the opponent should they call last round. The final package will be on the scale of an Oink Games release, perfect for every purse, backpack, overnight bag, and airplane tray on the way home from SPIEL '22.

•••

While at Gen Con 2022, I also tried Bombyx' other SPIEL '22 release, a flip-and-write game for 2-8 players from Romain Caterdjian titled Look at the Stars.

Each player gets a board with a couple of constellation-style images on it, a few ringed planets, and a grid of stars (dots), giving everyone a slightly different view of the night sky. (Imagine we're at different points on the meridian.) In each round, six cards are revealed, with a card showing a pattern of two lines or (rarely) a shooting star. When you see lines, you can choose to draw them on your board in that same arrangement or rotated, connecting two stars each time you draw a line. When you connect three or more lines, you have created a constellation, and ideally you'll make six constellations from size 3 to 8.

For a shooting star, you can draw a diagonal line 1-3 segments long that doesn't touch anything else on the board. Nothing else can be drawn later that touches this shooting star.

After the first round, you can no longer draw on the bottom two rows of your board. Imagine that the sun is starting to rise, making it harder to see stars at that level. After the second round, you can't draw in the bottom four rows, and after three rounds the game ends, and you score for the following:

• For a constellation of size 3-8, score 3-8 points, with no points scored for a second constellation of the same size.
• Score 1 point for each constellation that is orthogonally or diagonally adjacent to a planet.
• Score 1 point for each segment in a shooting star.
• Score the listed points each time you have created the shape revealed on a bonus card.

Bing, bang, boom — that's it! The game includes more than 18 cards, so you won't know which line patterns are being used in any particular game. As you can see from Yann's board on the right, constellation lines can cross, and you can make tightly nested patterns given the right cards and experience to see how to fit everything together.