Teach a man to fish, and you'll feed him for a lifetime

⛵Saltfjord is a highly enjoyable mid-weight euro, a reimagination of the game Santa Maria. While it’s biggest strength is undoubtedly the dice 🎲 action selection - activating rows or columns of buildings on your player board depending on the die color and value (which we talked about a few days ago) - I think another very satisfying aspect is the resource management! 😊

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. Gives a high amount of freedom, but with a nice serving of compromises and decisions. 😁

🔨You are always in need of wood and planks to put more buildings down into your village, which is quintessential to make your dice activation turns more lucrative.

📦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. Income which is highly welcome!

⚙️Then there are 4 tech tracks, each requiring a resource type to advance. These are of course also essential as you can unlock both very powerful passive bonuses, and the randomly chosen end-game scoring conditions too.

🐟Let’s not forget the most basic resource: fish. They can help you change the value of dice, they are used to upgrade resources and also to power asymmetric player abilities. 

In summary, Saltfjord is amazing. It’s around mid-weight, but there is potential for analysis paralysis. The central puzzle of the action selection is brilliant, and the order of doing things is often very important. Very satisfying, combo-heavy gameplay! 🥰