Dive into the World of Flotilla with Seastead

In August 2020, Eric Meyers from WizKids demoed a couple of its upcoming 2020 releases for me on Tabletop Simulator. I had the pleasure of playing a full game of Ian Cooper and Jan Gonzalez's Seastead which had a really awesome and thematic ocean tabletop in the TTS mod. I got whooped, but I walked away from my laptop really excited to play it again. It felt like a refreshing design and resonated with my love of meaty little two-player games that can be taught in a few minutes, played in less than 45 minutes, and are packed with tough and interesting decisions.

Seastead TTS mod

I was stoked when I received a physical copy of Seastead from WizKids so that I could play it more and see whether my initial impressions carried through after multiple plays — and without that sweet ocean tabletop. After playing it several times, it's definitely a game I want to let people know about since it might float your boat, too.

Seastead is a 1-2 player game set in an ocean world in which players compete for control of four different flotillas. Fun fact: The game shares the same nautical, post-apocalyptic world that WizKids introduced to us in 2019 with J.B. Howell and Michael Mihealsick's Flotilla, which is pretty much Seastead's heavier, more complex, yet equally interesting, older distant cousin. If you've played Flotilla, the theme and art in Seastead will strike you as familiar, but beyond that, it's like comparing a golf ball to a bowl of spaghetti.

The gameplay of Seastead is centered around four double-sided flotilla tiles representing the last remnants of civilization. Your goal is to be the best seasteader by diving below the surface to salvage in-demand resources and use them to build new structures for the growing colony, while cleaning up toxins that are polluting the water.

Seastead is played over a series of rounds with players alternating turns, taking a single action at a time until the end of the game is triggered. On your turn, you either dive to gain resources or build one of your buildings. Simple, right? Of course it sounds very simple, and in some respects it is, but with each turn you take comes a layered sea of tough decisions from your first turn until your last.

When you take the dive action, you draw a dive card and in an "I cut, you choose" fashion, you have to decide which way to orient the card because this — like many things you'll do in Seastead — helps not only you, but also your opponent.

Each dive card is split into two sides with different resources (fish, artifacts, kelp and metal) on each side. While you'll get dibs on which side you want for yourself, your opponent will not be walking away empty handed. The idea is to minimize the amount of help you give your opponent when diving, but sometimes it's tough because you might need something that will end up helping them more than you'd like due to what you left behind. This action lends itself to many cringe-worthy moments, and for such a simple action, you'll have much to mull over at times, especially later on when you're deeper into the game. Sometimes all you can do is hope your opponent has to dive before you do so that perhaps you'll end up with the right resources you need to build your next building — which leads me to the second action in Seastead.

When you take the build action, there's a bit more to unpack and weigh your brain down. Each flotilla tile is randomly assigned a demand token during set-up to indicate which resource you'll need to spend to build. The flotilla tiles each have six different locations that range in cost (2-6 resources) and that have their own location effects. To build, you pick a location on one of the flotilla tiles, pay the resource cost, and choose one of your buildings to place on the corresponding location.

Not only are there four different flotilla tiles with six different locations that have various effects to consider, but there are also three different types of buildings, and each of those comes with its own effect. On top of that, when you've cleared a row or column of buildings, you can activate bonuses that can be very powerful, especially when timed right.

During set-up, you place your wooden buildings (ports, academies and shipyards) on your sturdy little player board in their recessed slots with your four wooden ships beside it. I was pleasantly surprised with how nice the components are, and the insert tray and rulebook are great, too. It seems like WizKids went the extra mile to create a smooth Seastead experience whether you're setting up the game, learning the game, playing the game, or packing it up.

When you build a port, you choose one of the dock tiles from the face-up display and place it on the flotilla connected to the port you just built. Each dock tile is scored at the end of the game and has a resource type that the port owner can score by spending matching resources at the end of the game, and also opportunities for either player to score buildings placed relative to the dock tile.

The ports are can be interesting because if you play them early on, you can plan ahead to try to build matching buildings in the right locations to score points from them, or you can place them later when other buildings are already on the flotilla so that you can pick the best dock tile for points while ideally minimizing or even preventing your opponent from scoring their buildings with your dock tiles. Of course, if you build them early, you do run the risk of your opponent taking advantage of the fruits of your labor.

Specialist cards posted by the publisher

When you build an academy, you choose one of the specialist cards from the display and place it face-up in your player area. You can use and exhaust any of your face-up specialist cards in any order on your turn, even immediately after you acquire one. Any face-up specialist cards at the end of the game are worth one point each. These cards are generally pretty juicy and when timed right, they can set you up for powerful plays. I also appreciate the diversity represented with the various characters on the cards, which is something I also loved about Flotilla (among many other things).

Building shipyards is where things get even juicier. When you build a shipyard, you get to take a ship from beside your player board and place it on the cheapest empty location (i.e., no buildings or ships) on any one of the four flotilla tiles. Ships provide building discounts to both you and your opponents. If your opponent builds on a location with one of your ships, they pay one fewer resource and you get to take a resource of your choice from the supply as a bonus. You also get a discount of one resource when you build on a location with one of your own ships, but in that case you don't get a bonus resource.

After a building is placed where a ship is, the ship's owner moves that ship after the build action is complete following the same ship placement rules as building shipyards. Getting shipyards built early on can be extremely beneficial, helping you build more efficiently, and granting you a bonus resource when your opponents get a discount from your ships. That extra bonus resource could prolong you from needing to take a dive action and might help you get another building out in a prime location on your next turn. It's also awesome that you typically have some choices for where you'll move your ship next.

Almost all flotilla locations have a location effect that you can take advantage of when you build there, and some even offer a one-resource discount if you build a particular type of building at that location. Some location effects include gaining resources or clean-up tokens, converting resources, and even resolving the effect of a different location that has one of your buildings. So many interesting choices here, but sometimes you are limited with whatever you can afford to build, especially if you're trying to avoid diving for resources.

Looking for some more Seastead spice? When you clear an entire column on your player board as a result of building one of each type of building, you trigger a column bonus that lets you swap the positions of two demand tokens. Remember, demand tokens are what dictates the type of resource you need to spend to build on each flotilla. At the beginning of the game, the initial dive card you draw indicates one demand token that starts locked, which means it can't be swapped when a column bonus is triggered. Therefore, you'll always have three choices for demand tokens that you can swap and one that you can't. Swapping demand tokens at the right time can be huge offensively and defensively, so timing is everything if you're seeking a powerplay.

Flotilla tile detail posted by the publisher

On the defensive side, let's say your opponent has only a couple of fish, and you can tell they're planning to build on a specific location where the fish demand token currently is, then you unlock the column bonus from placing a building and swap that fish demand token to a different flotilla where your opponent can no longer build on their next turn. I guess it sounds pretty mean, but it doesn't feel like "take that"; it feels more like a clever chess move. Players having the ability to shift the demand tokens is one of my favorite aspects of Seastead. It keeps you on your toes and forces you to pay attention to the board and your opponent in order to stay afloat.

Players continue alternating turns until the end of the game is triggered by one of the following conditions: (1) when all locations on any one flotilla have buildings on them, (2) a player has only one building left on their player board, (3) a depths dive card back is visible, or (4) the clean-up tokens in the supply run out. When any of these conditions is met, you finish the current round, play one more round, then score everything: resources matching docks, buildings matching docks, locations, specialists, and clean-up tokens. I haven't mentioned it yet, but clean-up tokens are straight up victory points, and you can primarily earn them from building on various locations and from specialist cards. After tallying up your scores, the player with the most points wins.

The flotilla tiles are double-sided to add a bit of variety to Seastead. The "A" side is the best place to start, but after you play a game or two, it's fun to play with the "B" side of the flotilla tiles, then if you want to get even wilder, play with some "A" and some "B" for an advanced variant. The "B" side also adds decree cards to the mix, which are new rules that apply to both players at all times which add some more twists to Seastead.

In the solo mode for Seastead, you compete against a wealthy, powerful Boss. The Boss is not a player, so you'll be taking back-to-back turns until the game end is triggered. There are a couple minor set-up tweaks, but the idea is that when you take a dive action, whichever resources the Boss ends up with get placed on the flotillas with matching demand tokens in the cheapest location that doesn't have a building. When a location receives its second resource from the Boss, you have to place one of the Boss' buildings at that location. You're trying to maximize your score, while also doing what you can to prevent the Boss from placing buildings because the Boss' final score will be 20 points, plus 3 points for each building they build.

My only gripe with the solo mode is that you can't vary the level of difficulty, although I'm sure someone will post ideas for this on BGG. I did like that it's quick, fun, and puzzly, with you trying to prevent the Boss from building while also trying to take actions that optimize your strategy, but I prefer all the tension and player interaction from playing with a human opponent.

While the gameplay is completely different, Seastead gives me similar feelings to when I play 7 Wonders Duel. They're both relatively simple and pack interesting decisions and tense moments for a 45-minute game in a small box. I love how the dive action works, with an easy mechanism turning into a tough decision almost every time. Then of course, when you get into the build action, there's so much to think about with the effects of different buildings and locations, the row and column bonuses, and the state of the board. All of this lends itself to many different strategies, and you always have to pay attention to what your opponent is up to. I'm a fan, and I recommend checking it out if you're looking for a solid and unique two-player game with plenty of strategic choices.