Kelp: Shark Vs Octopus is a fantastic asymmetric hidden movement/ bluffing game where the shark builds a bag of dice to roll to catch and eat an octopus, which in turn builds a deck of cards which it uses to evade capture.
I had the pleasure of demoing Kelp at UKGE for Zatu Games and got to see how much fun people had with it. Despite its very deep asymmetry, it’s quite well balanced and the table presence, artwork and component quality are seriously high quality.
As the shark, you have to try and work out whether the tiles being moved around by the octopus are them setting up a turn where they can eat (the octopus’ win condition is to eat 4 foods but eating leaves it exposed), or if it’s a bluff to move you away from where they are in order to eat the following turn while the shark investigates the movement.
To do this, the shark has three types of dice, blues which allow the shark to place currents so they can move around the map more easily, yellows which allow the shark to search for the octopus behind a hidden tile if they roll high enough, and reds which allow the shark to attack where they think the octopus is.
Used dice go towards the growth tracker and lead to permanent buffs, while unused dice go to an energy tracker which lead to being able to buy permanent extra dice and one off abilities. The downside of buying these extra dice and one off ability cards is that it makes your shark hungrier and when your hunger tracker fills, you die of hunger and the octopus escapes and wins. Your hunger tracker also increases when you use a red dice and fail to kill and eat the octopus.
This creates a tension that permeates the game where you are trying to upgrade your shark, increase the dice in your dice bag and limit the octopus’ growth while trying to keep your hunger at a minimum. It keeps both players locked in as winning takes a lot of good strategy and a healthy dose of luck.
When the shark successfully attacks the tile with the octopus on it, a mini game is played with 6 cards: 3 octopus ones and 3 shark ones, each in one of 3 colours. If both players choose the same colour, the shark eats the octopus and wins. If they choose different colours, the game continues and a colour is removed, raising the odds of a shark victory from 33% to 50% to 100% with each subsequent successful strike.
I would recommend Kelp to anyone who likes beautiful artwork and well balanced medium complexity games, and anyone who has people who they can play 2 player games with as it only plays at that player count. This is Carl Robinson’s first game and one of the first titles from Wonderbow Games and I’m excited to see what both have in store for us in the future. Happy hunting!
