When you’re looking for a simple and fun game, it’s hard to beat Sea Salt & Paper. It’s very much the little game that could, an easily overlooked little card game that has become a surprising evergreen.
The game has a unique aesthetic, with the card art being photos of origami creatures and objects associated with the sea: crabs, boats, penguins, seashells, even sharks and mermaids. It’s very unusual, but also very easy to tell what everything is.
The goal of the game is to score the most points. How you score points depends on the cards in your hand. Some cards, like shells, crabs, and penguins, score more points the more cards of the same type you have. Other cards score more points when you have other types of cards; the lighthouse, for instance, scores more points depending on the number of boat cards you have in your hand.
Most cards grant you special abilities when you play them in addition to scoring points. Some let you take another turn or draw an extra card from the draw deck or the discard pile, or let you peek at the draw deck. If you are able to play the shark and the swimmer as a set, you get to steal a card from another player.
Mermaids are special cards; if you ever have all four mermaid cards, you win the game, full stop. Each mermaid card scores depending on how many cards sharing the same color you have (and the colors are also represented by symbols, so colorblind players will be able to tell what they have).
To play the game, you shuffle the deck and put the top two cards face-up into two different discard piles. The rest of the deck goes face down. On your turn, you can draw the top card from either discard pile, or the top two cards from the face-down deck, keeping one and discarding the other onto one of the two discard piles. If you have cards that combine to form a scoring set, you can play them by laying them out in front of you, adding their points total to your current score and using the special ability they give you.
Once a player has acquired at least seven points in the current round, they can declare the end of the round. Everyone totals their points, the cards are gathered up and reshuffled, and the next round begins. If you’re feeling brave, you can declare “Last chance.” This gives all the other players one more turn. If after that turn you have scored more points this round than all the other players, you get a bonus to your score while they score at a penalty. If, however, even one of the other players scores more points, then everyone else gets their normal score while you score at a penalty.
Sea Salt & Paper is a quirky little game that feels familiar, having many elements of classic card games while still being its own unique thing. Players pick it up fast, and it’s a great game to play with non-gamers. It can be played with two to four players, and games take about a half-hour to play, allowing you to play it multiple times in an afternoon or on a long trip. There’s a new expansion out, Extra Salt, that adds eight new cards, like the jellyfish that, when paired with a swimmer, paralyzes other players, and the wild seahorse that can stand in for a missing card of a set. If you’re interested in adding this unique and fun game to your collection, talk to the card game gurus at your local Dragon’s Lair Comics & Fantasy® today about adding Sea Salt & Paper to your collection.
