Last Thursday night, Andrew, Chad, Trevor and myself tackled Saltfjord, a 2024 re-implementation of Kristian Amundsen Østby and Eilif Svensson's earlier dice-drafting effort Santa Maria.
By all accounts, this newer iteration of the game incorporates some design evolutions learned from that earlier title, as explained by the designer himself on this particular thread.
Here's what the publisher, Aporta Games, has to say about it:
The generations before you have relied on harvesting the oceans. But as the 19th century ends, change and opportunity reach your fishing village in northern Norway. In Saltfjord, you must decide if you will expand your settlement with new buildings, send your boat to collect fish, engage in trade, or pioneer new technologies to make everyday life easier. How will you shape the destiny of your village?
Saltfjord is set in a Norwegian fishing village, and is loosely based on the dice drafting mechanisms from Santa Maria, but the game has otherwise been completely redesigned and expanded with new elements.
Over three rounds, players draft dice to activate buildings in their settlement. This provides resources as well as activating actions such as sending out your fishing boat, advancing along the various technology tracks, completing trade orders, or erecting new buildings. Each player's player board shows a grid. When you draft a die, you activate all buildings in the row or column corresponding to that die. By erecting buildings in your settlement, each die can activate more buildings.
The technology tracks unlock special abilities, such as upgrading your fishing boat. And fishing is an important part of daily life in Saltfjord.
To add to the replayability, the game has lots of variable elements in the set-up, such as what special abilities and end scoring tiles are available.
***
I have no clue about Santa Maria but I really dug Saltfjord. First off, the game scores big time with me right out of the gate by giving players unique starting powers and resources. Asymmetrical powers are like gaming catnip to me!
Also gratifying is adding new buildings Tetris-style to your player board in order to create efficiencies as you draft and play dice. There's strategy inherent even in this simple decision since you're limited at first to how many orange dice you can draft to trigger those left-to-right perks, versus white's top-to-bottom. Even the physical process of moving your selected die along the track to get all the resources and actions coming to you is oddly gratifying.
Resource management is easy and intuitive since you can spend two Fish as a free action to upgrade another item by one tier. The fact that you can downgrade anything to a lesser goods (also a free action) makes this flexible and never frustrating. I also dig how "retiring" for the round lets you choose whatever bonus you want and then determine player order for the next round.
The Technology Track is also a fun area of exploration. Craftsmanship lets you gain bonus actions in the form of more workers, Carpentry lets you expand the capacity of your fishing boat, gain a unique special ability and reduce the cost of your buildings, Logistics lets you get more perks when you spend resources to complete orders and - in turn - juice your end of round step, and Fishing - well, that just helps you fish better! D'uh!
It was this last element of the game that I really wanted to explore...and explore it I did! I started with the extra cargo hold special feature, immediately upgraded my ship and then set about earning all of the special Fishing perks. This let me stay "at sea" for long periods of time and return with an insanely valuable catch. Despite my best efforts I still placed second overall to Trevor's completely maxed-out player board, which garnered him a huge 15-point end-of-game bonus.
Only two trepidations prevent me from giving this one a perfect score:
(1) If Fishing is the game's #1 theme but player board development is the optimal strategy, will that just send every player down the same path?
(2) I feel like the game needs one or two additional exploration elements in order to be perfect. Hopefully by adding the advanced "Wagons" to our next game, I'll come back here and turn this sucka into a "6."
After weeks of playing dense, mind-numbing. borderline abstract and - dare I say it - kinda dull uber-heavy Euros games like Nucleum and Shackleton Base, this one was an intuitive breath of cool northern air.
As such, I'm giving this one five pips out of six with a huge tilt up towards the top of Mount Galdhøpiggen.
(look it up, it's pretty cool.)
.jpg)
