Over the past couple of years, I’ve started to realise one of my favourite mechanisms in games is dice drafting. I’ve played and owned some great games with this mechanism with highlights for me being The White Castle, Coimbra, Rajas of the Ganges and Wayfarers of the South Tigris. Along comes Saltfjord, a game about 19th Century Norwegian fishing with dice drafting as a central mechanism. I have to say I’m also a bit of a sucker for games with boats, so I was really interested to try this one. How does Saltfjord compete against the other games I’ve mentioned? Well I’ll let you know now I’ve wanted to play it every night this week which is a positive sign!
Saltfjord is a reskin or sorts, I believe with a few tweaks and changes, of Santa Maria which came out to some positive acclaim back in 2017, however it was a game that passed me by and I mostly dismissed due to the art style and theme not grabbing me! It plays in about 90 minutes and plays from 1 to 4 players.
How does it play?
In Saltfjord, your goal is to accumulate as many points as possible after 3 rounds of play. On your turn you will take 1 or 3 possible main actions, and 1 possible additional action. The first and most used of these actions is to draft a dice, and the colour of dice which are limited each round will determine whether you activate the rows of columns of your village, moving the dice along the row and activating the buildings along the way which might give you resources or additional actions, such as adding new buildings, fishing, upgrading technology, building or trading goods.Oh, and you can spend a dice to gain a fish but this feels super weak and not worth it unless you absolutely can’t do anything else. Mitigation comes through spending fish, allowing you to change the pips on the dice you acquire to use it in a different section.
The second action involves spending resources for new larger buildings paying the resources which will then be placed on your board. The third is to retire for the round, allowing you to trigger an end of round bonus from the tavern and activating the crates you’ve acquired from trading to provide some more actions or points. You also have fisherman, you begin with 1 but can gain more during the game and these you can place in your village to take the action underneath as an additional action on your turn. You can also spend fish to upgrade resources, or downgrade resources into fish if you ever need to.
Final thoughts
At its core, this is not a complex game, but its decision space is wide, thinking about what to upgrade and trade away, when to push your boat further down the fjord in search of more points or greater catches or when and where to upgrade your village all come together to present a really interesting game.
The iconography is really clear but it would have been nice to have had a colour on the player boards to remind players what colour they are. Although the board is busy, once you’ve learned it, it is easy to navigate it.
The components are of great quality, with nice wooden boats and fisherman, alongside dual layer player boards which are used to hold the resources. I only had to check the rules again a couple of times during my first play through on the meanings of a couple of the ability tiles but everything else comes together really well.
Replayability is high, given the random scoring tiles on each of the top of each scoring track, drafted tiles at the beginning helping to give you some direction on what you can begin working towards. You can also add in the Wagons for an advanced game, which adds another system and layer of complexity once you feel comfortable with the core game.
What I really love about Saltfjord is the decision space, it is wide, and the options of what you could do to work towards end game points is up to you. It really feels like you don’t have to just concentrate on one strategy like fishing to win, with many routes open to achieving what you want. This obviously could be a challenge for some players but the systems the game implements are not complex but how you use them is up to you, with a strategy that works one game not necessarily working the next due to the changing scoring. The technologies feel satisfying, I really love it when it feels like a few things trigger off in one turn, and this game has this in spades.
As I mentioned in the beginning of this review, I really wanted to play Saltfjord on consecutive nights which was a sign of just how much I enjoyed my first plays of the game. I think it scales really well at all player counts with the game not running too long providing people aren’t too prone to agonising over their decisions. Saltfjord easily stands up alongside some of my favourites.
Overall, the dice system is excellent, the decisions feel meaningful and despite the overall complexity of the game, the game doesn’t last too long. I have thoroughly enjoyed my plays of Saltfjord so far, and with a solo mode that I haven’t yet explored plus further plays using the wagons, I feel like there are still many more plays to enjoy ahead.
