Saltfjord and Santa Maria - dice drafting at its finest

Saltfjord is a reimagination of the game Santa Maria by the same designers, Kristian Amundsen Østby and Eilif Svensson. It isn’t just a retheme, it builds on top and adds some new stuff to the game, though they do feel quite similar - but more on the comparison in the last chapter of this review.

The best way to introduce the game is probably to talk about the most unique aspect of it: the action selection!

Action selection

The heart of the game is a dice action selection which is the same as Santa Maria’s. During the game you are drafting dice that will activate buildings in the rows or columns (depending on their color) of your 6x6 player board. You always go top-to-bottom or left-to-right, so you cannot freely choose how you activate buildings. The last building used will also be blocked by the die for the rest of the round. As you play, you will construct more buildings, thus making your rows and columns more profitable.

It’s not always simple though, as you are drafting dice from a central pool, and dice you desperately need could be taken by others. You are limited in how many white and orange dice you can take in a round, so sometimes you can calculate what will surely remain there for you. Luckily there is dice mitigation too, as you can pay fish to alter dice values, and you also have workers that can activate buildings on their own. But workers also block buildings until the end of the round, restricting your actions a bit.

Safe to say, this central mechanic of the game is a really compelling puzzle, and remains that way up until the very last turn.

Actions

When taking your turn you can either build a large building (if you can pay for it) or draft a die. Or you pass when you run out of resources and dice to draft, which ends your round but gives you income and lets you choose a bonus.

Buildings you activate with the chosen die could generate resources or do 1 of the 4 main actions of the game. These are the actions:

- Build:
Place a small tile for one wood into your 6x6 village tableau.
These could be another action or resource generator you will be able to activate, or just a boardwalk space. Boardwalk spaces only activate once when their row or column is completely filled on your player board.

- Complete and order:
All kinds of different resources are needed to fulfill orders that are a big source of victory points, but they also provide income during the end of the rounds. Orders you complete go into the same row you take them from, determining the type of income.

- Gain technology:
There are 4 tech tracks, each requiring a resource type to advance. You can unlock both very powerful passive bonuses and the randomly chosen end-game scoring conditions too.

- Fishing:
With this you can either call back your ship and claim every resource and point on board, or move out further on the sea and draw a new fishing token.

Resource Management

While the action selection is a huge part of the fun in Saltfjord, I want to give a special mention to the resource management, as it is very engaging as well - which is definitely good, as you are constantly needing all kinds of resources for everything. Each player has a warehouse board. Resources are only symbolized by cubes, and whichever room they are in determines their type. Now normally I prefer when you have physical tokens for each resource, but the cubes here are much more ideal, as you can upgrade or downgrade resources to suit your needs.

You can gather resources in different ways, but you could also upgrade fish into the 3 basic resources, or upgrade those 3 into their respective more advanced forms, or upgrade those into gold (then downgrade gold into anything). This gives a high amount of freedom, but with a nice serving of compromises and decisions. The fish resource is the basically like money: they help you change the value of dice, used to upgrade resources and also power some of the asymmetrical player abilities.

Game structure

A game of Saltfjord is divided into 3 rounds. With each round a new orange die per player will enter the game (used for activating rows). Of course your village board will also fill up with buildings over time, so the first round will be a lot shorter and simpler than later rounds. This gives a fun arc to the game as you get more and more effective at everything. You can also specialize your board for specific actions, and end-game scoring tiles or asymmetric abilities can greatly influence how you do things.

Closing Thoughts

In summary Saltfjord is a super solid euro. It’s around mid-weight, but there is potential for analysis paralysis, as you can do things in many ways and order of doing things is very important too. The central puzzle of the action selection and the flexible resource management should keep you engaged, and replayability is also nice as your village board will be always different, as will be the dice that are rolled. This is further aided by asymmetric abilities and end-game scoring goals.

We did play Santa Maria too (just after Saltfjord actually), so let’s compare the old and new game to finish this post off!
Feel free to skip this if you aren’t interested in the differences between the two.

Saltfjord vs Santa Maria

Dice action selection is exactly the same. Well actually in the basic rules of Santa Maria the row-activating dice are rolled in a personal supply, but there is an advanced variant where they are drafted from the common supply just as in Saltfjord.

The resources are different and there is no upgrading/downgrading in Santa Maria. So putting down buildings that produce specific advanced resources can be more important, or fulfilling orders could be more difficult as you have less flexibility.

A big difference is how you fill up your player board with buildings. In Saltfjord a completed row or column will immediately give you points and resources according to the boardwalk spaces, in Santa Maria however they are only for earning points at the end of the game. I think the way Saltfjord does it is more satisfying, but in exchange Santa Maria has some other fun stuff with end-game scoring conditions that check for the positioning of forests, farms, mountains and cities on your board.

Santa Maria has a religion track that you can go up on with an action. This track is used for unlocking more row-activating dice, while in Saltfjord you organically get them each round. You also unlock Monks from this track that are used to claim end-game conditions, one-time resources or passive powers, which is completely replaced by the 4 tech tracks in Saltfjord.

Santa Maria has a conquistador track too that is just a majority race for points plus a way to get a few gold resources. Saltfjord has the fishing mechanic for this which we found more fun, especially as you can improve your fishing on the tech track.

A really small but impactful difference is how Santa Maria doesn’t have a score track, and instead uses fiddly happiness point tokens in strange denominations.

Instead of workers you can use silver coins to activate buildings in Santa Maria, and it counts as a full turn, while workers in Saltfjord are free actions. Again a small difference, but it can be felt.

We do not own the expansion for Santa Maria, so I am a bit lost there, but I did see that the first module of it is actually present in Saltfjord as an advanced mode, as by activating columns/rows you can push a cart to activate buildings or boardwalks, and you earn points at the end for how far you managed to push the cart.

Finally the aesthetics and theme: Managing a Norwegian fishing village doesn’t sound super interesting, but it still easily beats out another ‘Colonists in the New World’ theme. The colors and vibe of Santa Maria also feel dated now, so for us Saltfjord wins out in this subjective regard too.

Even though Saltfjord was completely redesigned with new elements, it doesn’t fully make Santa Maria obsolete, as Santa Maria has its own charm and certain nuances that are more enjoyable. If I had to choose one I’d definitely keep Saltfjord, but I guess we are keeping both games in our collection.

Thanks for reading!