Review: Santa Monica (AEG)

Sun, sand, shopping, and relaxing. It’s all there, along the beachfront streets of Southern California.

Now you can bring all of that home to your game table with Santa Monica from Alderac Entertainment Group.

At its heart, Santa Monica is a tableau building game where you create your ultimate tabletop haven by the sea. Players build postcard-perfect, point-scoring Southern California spaces, complete with ocean beaches, charming streets, and crowds of locals, tourists, and VIPs.

But the game extends the basic tableau concept by adding fun scoring twists involving card combinations, meeple crowds, and even a food truck.

Let’s take a look at the top five things you need to know about Santa Monica before we get too distracted and lose ourselves in the sun-baked awesomeness.

Setting Up the Game

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Santa Monica hits the table pretty quickly. After organizing the meeples and sand dollars (the game’s special action currency), players shuffle the deck of beach and street locations and lay out eight cards face-up in two rows of four. Players will select a card from this display and add it to their tableau each turn.

Someone then shuffles the special sand dollar actions, randomly selecting two and placing them next to the two card display rows. All players can use one of these special actions on their turn instead drawing a card normally, provided they have one or two sand dollars to pay.

Adding a final layer of initial randomness to the game, players select one of the three scoring objective tiles and put it at the other end of the card display. This sets the game’s three special scoring conditions.

Building Your Beach (and Street)

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Every player begins by selecting a double-height starting feature card with both a beach and a street. This anchors everything you’ll build, plus it gives you a starting bonus and a unique way to score victory points.

On your turn, you select one card from the bottom row of the display and play it. The cards show either part of the beach or a building along the road to cue you on where it goes in your tableau, since you always place a new card so it’s next to a card already in your tableau.

The game uses indirect competition, so you only work on your own tableau.

Collecting Stuff and Arranging Combos

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In addition to their playful artwork, most cards include a small bonus for placing them and icons that help you score points at the end of the game. This is where tableau building gets strategic.

Starting on the left, placement actions bring more meeples to your tableau, give you sand dollars, or let you move your meeples (more about that next). Scoring opportunities are next to that. These might give you points for having a group of similar location cards in a row or just for having a certain type type of location adjacent.

Location tags are either directly above (on street cards) or below (on beach cards) the scoring opportunities section. These tell you which kind of meeples will enjoy hanging out in the location, such as the blue sunglasses for local hangouts or the pink shopping bags where visitors spend their money.

Meeples Gone Wild

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Speaking of meeples, the game includes three kinds: blue locals, orange tourists, and green VIPs. Of course, they all want to do different things, so managing and moving your meeple population is a key part of the game.

Some cards in your tableau include activity circles that show which type of meeple enjoys being there and how many meeples the space can serve.

If you maneuver the right number of meeple there by the end of the game, the game rewards you with plenty of victory points. Most of the special sand dollar actions we mentioned earlier give you an extra chance to move meeples in addition to the move action on the card you choose, so guard those sand dollars carefully.

The Joy of Foodie and the Truck

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Finally, wandering across the card display are the food truck and foodie. In addition to being adorable, they’re an incentive mechanic that gives you a unique reward for taking the card above them on your turn.

The food truck gives you an ever-important sea dollar, while the foodie lets you move any of your meeple one space.

If the food truck and the foodie are at the same card, then it’s a happy day. (Seriously, it’s in the rules.) Whoever takes the card above them both gets to use both of the rewards once or one of their rewards twice.

After claiming the foodie or food truck reward, they move to the next card in the display and their chase begins anew.

Verdict

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We loved this game. It hits a great balance between strategy and luck by forcing you to make the most of each turn’s limited choices while still giving you complete flexibility on ways to win.

Chasing a big group of related activities can give you a big payoff, but if the cards aren’t coming up, just shift your strategy on the fly and try something else. Lots of meeples filling your tableau? Grab more activity spaces. Need a sand dollar so you can (hopefully) get a particular card next turn? Pick the card where the food truck is parked.

Alderac went out of their way to make Santa Monica accessible, too. The meeples are either blank (VIPs) or printed with sunglasses (locals) or a camera (tourists). The foodie is physically smaller than the others, so it’s easy to pick out. Likewise, card icons use unique designs so players don’t need to rely on color alone.

Santa Monica delivers a wonderful playing experience with endless options and challenging strategy. Plus the food truck meeple is irresistible. Demo it at your favorite game store, take a copy home, and enjoy some tabletop time in the sun and sand.