Shallow Sea is the next game to arrive from South Korean designer Yeom Cheolwoong, who was responsible for the award-winning Wondrous Creatures. The games also share the same artist, Sophia Kang, as well as publisher, Bad Comet.
Bad Comet describes the game as suitable for 1–4 players age 10 and up, with an estimated play time of 30–45 minutes, and says: ‘Dive into the vibrant world of Shallow Sea, a puzzle board game inspired by the breath-taking beauty of the Great Barrier Reef. In Shallow Sea, players will create their very own vivid ocean landscapes by strategically arranging an array of marine life, colourful fish, and corals. What makes Shallow Sea truly unique is its fresh take on a multi-layered puzzle system. Unlike typical puzzle games where pieces merely stack up, the elements in Shallow Sea can activate, deactivate, and even move, creating exciting combos and thought-provoking dilemmas that keep you on your toes.’ I’ll come back to ‘fresh take’ after giving a brief outline of the game. 
The aim of the game is to populate a reef playing board’s 22 spaces with square coral and sea life tiles, as well as cute little fish tokens in between. The coral tiles have colours on two to four corners, and are designated ‘completed’ when all those colours are matched by adjacent fish (similar to forming designs in Calico; when completed, the tile is turned over and a fish placed on top. The sea life tiles indicate patterns based on the arrangement of adjacent tiles (somewhat like the mechanism for placing cats in Calico): for example, a sea life tile could be completed when three turned-over coral tiles in a row along one side are all the same colour, or when the fish tokens on a specified number of tiles in a certain direction from this sea life tile are of a different colour to each other.
On each turn, a player selects a fish token and either a coral tile or a sea life tile from shared pools, picking from the same column, but you can ‘spend’ a shell to break that rule. Pretty much the only interaction between players is selecting components from the pools – after that, it’s more or less side-by-side solo gaming. If the completion condition of any tile is met as a result of placing the fish and new tile, that tile is flipped and the player receives an extra shell. During their turn, players can spend shells to move fish or reset one of the pools.
The game ends when there are only four empty spaces in the players’ reefs, and final scores are made up from the numbers on completed tiles, extra points depending on how many different sea life tiles are on the board (biodiversity!), and a bonus from fish beside coral tiles; as well as that, a pair of ‘ecosystem cards,’ which are chosen at the start, offer additional scoring opportunities.
The ‘fresh take’ in the game is the ability to change the board after tiles have been placed. In most similar games, once something’s on the board, that’s where it stays. With Shallow Sea, placing a fish token on a completed coral frees up the space previously occupied by that fish, offering an opportunity to reuse the space for additional scoring; and as mentioned earlier, one of the optional actions is to move a fish to a better scoring position. It’s possible for a player to create a small chain reaction by completing tiles, then using the gained shells to move fish, completing more tiles.
Comparisons
I’ve already mentioned Calico, in which players place tiles on a quilt board, aiming to form patterns of various types. Shallow Sea’s fish tokens, placed between tiles, add to the game’s strategic complexity, but also offer flexibility, in that they can be moved into better scoring locations after they’ve done their job. Calico is more abstract, but the quiet quilting theme (and cats, don’t forget the cats!) might appeal to some people more than fish do. Shallow Sea can also be compared to Cascadia. It’s certainly true the games are similar, with constrained tile and token placement, and scoring based on completed patterns. In Cascadia, you’re stuck with the luck of the draw, whereas in Shallow Sea, players can spend shells to manipulate the initial choice or to move tokens after placement, making the game more forgiving. On the other hand, Cascadia’s ‘map’ grows as tiles are played, which I find more aesthetically pleasing than being limited to a fixed-size play area. The final choice between these two games might boil down to whether you prefer pictures of North American animals or of sea life from the Great Barrier Reef.
Before moving on, I have to mention Bad Comet’s Life of the Amazonia. This has been described as a turbo-charged Cascadia; yes, a huge part of the game is strategic tile and token placement, but there’s so much more on top. If you want more than Shallow Sea offers, Amazonia might be more to your taste.
Wrap Up
The game is certainly attractive, a pretty addition to the many nature-themed games, with a high production quality that will look good on any game table.
If you already own Calico or Cascadia, you probably don’t need Shallow Sea, but if like me, you have a strategic tile placement gap in your game collection, you might well want one of the three. I prefer the nature theming of Cascadia and Shallow Sea over the cosiness of Calico, but which one? I think the extra flexibility built into Shallow Sea through its novel shell-based economy pips the possibilities of the more variable map in Cascadia, so that most likely the one for me.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts. There have also been papers in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, which are probably somewhat less relevant and definitely less entertaining. L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
