Quick Facts
Age range: 14 and up
Play time: 45-60 minutes
# of Players: 1-4
Price point: $39.99
In a time when global warming, alternative energy, and electric vehicles seem to be on everyone’s mind, the Salton Sea in California feels like a mirage.
This single location offers geothermal energy, brine water, and raw lithium salts. With the right technology, a company could use this combination of resources to generate clean energy while making a tidy profit on lithium.
In Salton Sea from Devir Games, the players operate small companies that gather raw brine and process it into geothermal energy or lithium which big corporations want to buy. You operate your company with the goal of making money for yourself and creating value for the big corporations, which in turn makes you money through stock investments.
Grab a sun hat (this is the California desert after all) and explore the top five things you need to know to make green profits in Salton Sea.
Set It Up With Care#
When you first open the box, the game’s contents feel a little overwhelming. That’s mostly because Devir included rulebooks and quick reference cards in five languages. Just dig through the stack to find your preferred language and set all the others aside.
Fair warning: You’ll need plenty of space to set up Salton Sea, especially if you’re playing with four people. This game spreads out, so be sure you have the space available.
Setting up the game means dealing with six decks of cards. The trick is reading all of the instructions for a step before doing anything with that step. It’ll save you pain and heartache and prevent you from shuffling the wrong decks (*cough* like we did).
Navigating the Boards#
Each player gets their own company board and a set of matching tokens. The company board contains spaces for all of the actions you can do each round. It also tracks your company’s development advances, warehouse space, and damage to your drill and processing machinery.
The main game board contains six major areas. On the left, it begins with the available claim cards. Next to that are the tracking spaces for the three corporations you’ll do business with.
Above the corporate info are the five objective cards that tell you how to earn bonus points in this play. Finally, the far right side of the board hosts the row of research cards, the available contracts, and the action cards. The board only includes spaces for the face-down decks; the rows of cards will spread out across your tabletop.
Playing the Game#
On the surface, Salton Sea’s basic gameplay is very simple: Place one of your engineers on an action space and perform that action. Basic action spaces are on your player board.
They let you do everything you need in the game, but they’re not the most efficient options. When processing brine, for example, the basic action space only lets you process one brine unit. That’s fine at the beginning of the game, but soon you’ll need to do more.
That’s where the cards fit into the game. To improve your company’s abilities, you acquire and play research, contract, and action cards. Your player board has a limited number spots to store research and contracts. You keep action cards in your hand until you play them, and you can have as many of them at one time as you want.
Running Your Company#
When playing Salton Sea, you feel like you’re really running a company. Your available actions fall into three broad categories: Industrial, commercial, and management.
Industrial actions focus on gathering raw materials and processing them into finished goods. They include getting licenses and drilling wells, extracting and processing brine, and maintaining your machinery.
In the commercial actions, you sell products for cash. You also get and complete contracts with the three big corporations to grow your company, earn money and victory points, and gain corporate shares or free cards from the board.
The management actions focus on making your company more efficient and profitable. These include researching new ways of doing things, developing projects, getting financing, and investing in shares of the three corporations. There’s also a very valuable “repeat an action” space that will save your bacon many times during the game.
Playing with the Robot#
As a new empty nester, I appreciate Salton Sea offering a robot opponent for solitaire play. A small deck of cards presents the actions the robot takes on its turn.
The solitaire game set up starts as a standard two-player game, then you remove some of the research cards and profit-sharing tiles. Each turn, you deal four cards face-down from the robot deck. These determine what the robot will try to do on each of its actions.
The robot deck has four starting cards and five advanced ones to give you variety in what the robot does and when it tries to do it.
Verdict#
Salton Sea is an impressive business game with tons of player choices. It delivers high replayability thanks to the random appearance of cards from the various decks and a varying set of both immediate and game-end bonus conditions.
Once you get comfortable with the game’s iconography, it’s easy to figure out what all of the cards do. The rule book helps you there as well with detailed explanations of most every card in the game.
Having a single-player mode earns Salton Sea extra points from us, since few things are sadder than a solo player staring at a shelf of multiplayer games.
If you like simulation-style games that stretch your strategic brain and give you a new mix of options every time you play, you’ll love Salton Sea. Recommended!