I was initially drawn to this for two reasons only – firstly, it’s a fairly inconspicuous-sized box, and secondly, it’s published by Devir, who I know manages to cram a tremendous amount into that exact size of box (see The White Castle as perhaps the best example). This one surprised me a lot – read on to find out why
Introduction
I had absolutely no idea what this one was about when I picked it up – I just trusted the process of Devir making great games and let the universe unfold in front of me. When I read it was about drilling for brine, I immediately (and naively) thought it was going to be some sardine farming game or something. It very much isn’t. What it is, however, is a microcosm of how games can actually teach you something about the world we live in. Specifically, in this case that Salton Sea is a relatively shallow and landlocked lake in Southern California that has an incredibly high saline concentration. The high levels of underground brine create high concentrations of lithium and also offer numerous opportunities to create geothermal energy.
So not at all sardines, in fact. I’ll go into the rest of the review by saying this wasn’t universally well received by everyone I’ve played it with, but I’ll use this platform (such as it is…) to tell you why I enjoyed it so much and hopefully help you see if this is the right thing for you.
I was initially drawn to this for two reasons only – firstly, it’s a fairly inconspicuous-sized box, and secondly, it’s published by Devir, who I know manages to cram a tremendous amount into that exact size of box (see The White Castle as perhaps the best example). This one surprised me a lot – read on to find out why
Introduction
I had absolutely no idea what this one was about when I picked it up – I just trusted the process of Devir making great games and let the universe unfold in front of me. When I read it was about drilling for brine, I immediately (and naively) thought it was going to be some sardine farming game or something. It very much isn’t. What it is, however, is a microcosm of how games can actually teach you something about the world we live in. Specifically, in this case that Salton Sea is a relatively shallow and landlocked lake in Southern California that has an incredibly high saline concentration. The high levels of underground brine create high concentrations of lithium and also offer numerous opportunities to create geothermal energy.
So not at all sardines, in fact. I’ll go into the rest of the review by saying this wasn’t universally well received by everyone I’ve played it with, but I’ll use this platform (such as it is…) to tell you why I enjoyed it so much and hopefully help you see if this is the right thing for you.
Let’s get drilling
Well… we should set everything up first. And it’s a fairly involved process so I’m not going to arduously cover every step in detail, but I’ll give an overview of the main sections you’ll be looking at throughout the game.
Firstly, your player board. This holds the majority of your action spaces and your pool of workers, which is brilliantly just called the HR space. Here you can drill, store brine, geothermal energy, and lithium, and expand your warehouse. There’s the opportunity to get contracts to score points, money, and bonuses, as well as carry out research to improve your operation or buy shares in companies, as well as repair your machinery along the way. There’s a lot going on here, and it can definitely feel a little overwhelming at the start.
Action spaces are marked with fine diagonal lines, which is subtle, but I think it has a nice minimalist and clean design, which I do appreciate. There are also thin lines of different colours joining certain spaces where actions are interlinked, which is also a very welcome touch.
Next up is the company board. Here you’ll track the amount of shares you own in each of the three companies as well as boost the value of those shares as you sell to them. There are bonuses to be had as you gain more value in those companies, and there’s some element of dynamic pricing as each time you pass a certain threshold on the track, new company prices are revealed. I’d argue that this felt, to me at least, the most complex part of the game, so we’ll pick that up below.
Finally there’s the market. Here we have the available contracts you can take to give your fledgling enterprise some focus, as well as research cards that give you either an immediate boost or ongoing benefits throughout the game. It’s also where you can get (but not purchase) action cards and brings in a unique idea about multi-use cards that I’ve not seen in any other game. Hence its uniqueness. Skipping ahead a chapter or two, whenever you sell anything to a company, fulfil a contract, or complete an objective that grants you money, you have a surprising amount of freedom in what that looks like.
Cards come in levels 1, 3 and 5 (or $1, $3, $5) and have the action on the front and a monetary value on the back. You hold these primarily as action cards, but any time you have to spend money (say, to repair your equipment), you discard these to pay that cost. The temptation is always to hammer the valuable cards first, as their actions are the most powerful. But any time you are spending money, no change is given, so having to toss that amazing $5 card to pay a $3 price feels doubly galling. This is an incredibly involved economy which partly requires you to see into the future to predict what you might need, and partly encourages you to go big quickly so you can get the benefits of those expensive cards early.
This takes up a lot of table space, so that should definitely be a consideration you keep in mind. In terms of overall setup, once you’ve got every card and token where it needs to be, each player begins the game with four of their seven workers in the HR space and takes an identical hand of the seven different level 1 cards to begin.
Where on Earth do you start?
A very fair question, and one I might not be best placed to confidently answer. So instead I’ll give you a sense of what the structure could look like and call out some things you need to be mindful of along the way.
At its most basic, the engine in Salton Sea is:
- - Drill
- - Extract
- - Process
- - Sell
Of course it’s much more nuanced than that. Drilling first means acquiring a licence, or in this case a new card to drill down to, from the market of four on the main company board. These have cost modifiers on the board, contain various benefits (in the form of brine) and challenges (in the form of rocks that will damage your equipment). There are also differing levels of bonuses for fully extracting the brine as you drill.
At a minimum, the first two steps on that oversimplified set of bullet points will take three actions (buy a licence, actually drill, extract what you’ve come across) – that’s 75% of what you have available each round at the start of the game Also take into consideration that you’ve probably lost 3-4 cards form your hand to get that licence as well.
Here’s a callout that I think follows throughout my experiences of playing this. And I should say that there’s a good chance you might be better than me and see it in a different way, but anyway…
This is a worker placement, economic management game. Put people places, get stuff, sell it, upgrade what you can do to get better – rinse and repeat for points. In the early stages it feels far from that though, and I often want it to feel more efficient than it is. Spending three actions and then using a fourth to sell half of what I’ve drilled for just to be able to do the processing to have better stuff in the future feels… circular. Sure, I’ve done stuff that the game wants me to do. But you can only store two brine at the beginning, and if you’re going to process that into lithium and/or geothermal energy, then that’s going to cost you money you almost certainly won’t have. So you drill the brine to sell the brine to have enough money to process the brine… there’s definitely a means to an end there – I totally see it. But it feels more futile than you’d like at the beginning, is what I’m saying.
Playing the market(s)
You probably want to grab a contract early on so you have something to aim for. The monetary benefit will probably be lower than if you just spammed selling your wares to the companies directly, but there are victory points and other benefits to be had from those contracts, and they tend to be linked to the randomly dealt objective cards at the beginning, so they aren’t to be ignored.
One of those extra benefits could be a bump or two up your business development track, which sounds incredibly mundane but helps you unlock more warehouse space and workers along the way, so it’s something else you shouldn’t ignore. I would say that while you can always progress this using a worker action (and spending $3), being able to tactically chain that as a benefit from fully extracting a drilled card or completing a contract is definitely one area that you can get some efficiency from.
The other market I said I’d come back to is the share market for each of the three companies you can sell to in the game. This scrambled my brain the first time I played, but it does feel more intuitive these days. I’d say the language used to describe certain elements possibly makes it feel more complicated than it is.
Essentially, each of the three companies has a price (and points) tracker and a separate track for player share markers. Whenever you sell directly to a company, you move the price marker up a space, regardless of what or how much you sell. This tiny cube determines how much each share you might choose to buy will cost you – getting ever more expensive as the game progresses – as well as the number of victory points each share is worth at the end of the game. There are three threshold lines marked, and whenever you cross one, you flip the next random price tile over to show what that company will now pay for each of the three commodities. Crossing the final threshold line ‘closes’ that company, meaning nobody can trade with it anymore.
Running alongside this is the share ownership tracker that you move up whenever you buy a share. There are also threshold lines here as well as a couple of bonus spaces in the form of business development track progression that you can claim as you climb the shareholder ladder. Crossing a threshold allows you to take a bonus token (if there’s one left), which could be a VP boost, money, or another action to take. These get increasingly rare as you move up, starting with one per player at the first threshold and ending with a solitary token at the last one. It’s another way to farm some efficiency.
Round and round we go
Turns will go clockwise until everyone’s placed all their workers and you do some fairly standard cleanup steps. The bottom card in the drill licence market is discarded, and the rightmost card in each of the five card rows (research, contracts, $5, $3, $1) is also discarded, and everything is moved to the right before being refilled.
Cards in your hand also have action spaces that reflect those on the main board, but usually more powerful versions, or with some kind of benefit. For example, the standard board action of taking a contract is enhanced if you choose to play a card to do that, as you also get $1 from the market, which could just be the perfect card you need to do something else. There’s a lot of opportunity cost in there, though you’re effectively spending between one and five dollars to do an action.
Thankfully, as part of the round cleanup, as you move your workers back to HR, you take these cards back into your hand, and I do like that they never spent unless you use them for their monetary value.
The game end is triggered when either two of the three companies are closed or when, during end-of-round cleanup, there are no cards in the drill licence deck. At that point everyone counts up points and, as is traditional, most points wins.
Final thoughts
I’m really impressed with this despite being generally not very brilliant at it. Salton Sea tempts you with myriad possibilities and paths to pursue, but probably rewards a more streamlined or focused approach to what you choose to do.
If you’ve played other economic games, you might be expecting a growing engine that offers more resources and easy pickings of contracts on the board for you to fulfil at your whim. That’s not my experience of it, but I’m also not saying it’s impossible either. You might have to play a near-flawless game for it, though.
There’s a lot to admire about the design here as well. Clearly marked spaces, each with their own icon and joining lines to see which actions support each other, are incredibly good. You want to drill? Great, but bear in mind this line here links to the drill licence space, so you need to do that, and over here it’s linked to the repair action, which you’ll definitely need to budget for at some point. Extracting some brine, are we? Well, don’t forget that specifically links to this process action over here, will you. It’s neat, it’s clean, and I cannot fathom why more games don’t do it.
Speaking of which… the player reference card might just be the best in class for me. It’s double-sided, which can sometimes be a curse, but the execution here is first-class. Salton Sea knows it’s complicated, and it knows you could be trying to plot a course through half a dozen things, so it doesn’t try to explain them all to you. It has the icon that outlines the name of the action, and it (gloriously) has the page number reference to the rulebook so you can look up any specific points without having to hurriedly flip back and forth trying to find the one bit of information you need. Seriously – every mid-to-heavy weight game should be doing this as standard (as well as explaining how to pack your big game away properly, but that’s a different story).
The game deals in opportunity cost as much as it deals in commodities. You can, within reason, do whatever you want here. But don’t forget that spending either $4 or $6 on processing your brine for geothermal energy or lithium means you’re chucking at least two (if not more) cards from your hand, so is that the right move for you at this moment? The flip side of that is playing a card for an action that leaves you without the money to do something else.
And therein lies the heart of whether you’ll love it or loathe it, I think. There are a lot of plates to spin here and a lot of different processes to follow to get to various point-scoring end points. But they cost you cards as well as workers, and you’re constantly evaluating these choices.
For me, it’s a yes – unequivocally so. For others, including people I was convinced would love it as much as me, it fell horribly flat to the point of “I know that was a learning game, but I do not want to play that again”. Your experience can and will vary. It’s a complex game in a small-ish box, and there’s a bunch of replayability with randomised tiles and tokens, as well as how you approach the game itself. There’s even a very good solo mode to compete against as well. It’s full of stuff – you just need to decide whether it’s your kind of stuff!
