Base price: $30.1 – 5 players.Play time: ~20 minutes.BGG LinkPre-order!Logged plays: 3
Full disclosure: A review copy of Seaside was provided by Hachette / Randolph.
It’s almost the summer! Which means we should start covering beach games. Will I do that consistently? No, but I have two surfing games that I’m eyeballing for future reviews. Surf week! Shark week! Pool week! Who knows. There’s always more themes to try out and no way to kick off summer that’s more hot and muggy than Gen Con, so I’ll be there for a bit of the summer as well! I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, let’s check out one beachy game: Seaside, from Randolph! I had a chance to try this a while before release and now that it’s almost out, I wanna tell you more about it!
In Seaside, players take turns building up their little ocean environment. It’s pretty simple. Draw a token, choose a side, play it, and activate the effect! Catch some isopods! Steal some crabs! Do whatever you want! It’s a big ocean; will you be able to be the biggest fish in the sea?
Contents
Setup
Almost none. Take the pieces and place them into the bag:
Once you’ve done that, remove some based on player count:
4+ players: Use all of the tokens.
3 players: Remove 15 – 20 tokens.
2 players: Remove 30 – 40 tokens.
Why is it a range? Anyone’s guess. No need to be exact. Leave some space in the middle to be the Sea and you should be ready to start!
Gameplay
Seaside is pretty simple. Your goal is to finish the game with the most tokens! Straightforward enough. How do you get them? Let’s find out!
On your turn, draw a token from the bag! Look at both sides without showing anyone else, and then choose one effect to apply! The effects have different outcomes.
Isopod / Shell / Crab: Place this token into the Sea and take another turn. Gotta throw those back!
Sandpiper: When you take this one, you can take as many Isopods from the Sea as you want (0 or more) and create a stack. Once you do, discard any smaller Sandpiper stacks you have from the game. Note that if you create a stack that is the same size as your other stacks, you do not discard the stacks; you keep them all.
Beach: When you place one of these, take Shells from the Sea equal to the total number of Beach tokens you now have. Make a stack and keep it in your play area. You can play Beach tokens with no Shells in the Sea.
Wave: When you place a Wave, choose a Beach token and flip it over, and then apply the effect on the back. You can (and should) look at the backs of the Beach tokens before you flip one over.
Rocks: Placing a Rock token does nothing (for the first one, at least). Every time you place a second Rock token, you create a Crab Habitat (Crabitat), and can take all the Crabs in the Sea (as well as one Crab from any player), creating a Crabitat Stack. To make another Crabitat, you have to take another pair of Rocks.
Play continues until the bag is empty; at that point the game ends and the player with the most Wave Tokens takes all the remaining tokens in the Sea. If there’s a tie, equally distribute them as best you can among tied players, leaving any remainder in the Sea.
Final scoring is super easy; stack up all of your tokens and compare stacks. Whoever has the tallest stack wins! If there’s a tie, all tied players win. So that’s nice.
Player Count Differences
Not a ton, really; the only real thing is that with more players, you’ll have a bit of trouble waiting for certain configurations in the sea to come around to you. There are just more people who can get that extra rock or draw the right Sandpiper at the right time or whatever they need to pull from the center. The sole consolation here is that there are also more people to place the Isopods and the Crabs and such into the center for you to later take, so more players might pay off for you in the right circumstance. It goes back to the thing I’m always talking about: variance. Just more variety to the situations. Regardless, the game moves fast and the pace is solid, so, no huge complaints! I’d happily play at any player count.
Strategy
Getting a bundle of crabs is a good time! If you can play two rocks, you can gather all the crabs that you want from the Sea, which is a great way to make a ton of points quickly. Just keep in mind that if enough crabs get into the Sea, everyone else is going to want those crabs too.
Stealing crabs is also fun! It’s rude, but it’s a nice way to add to your own crab supply. Crabs!
If you’re going to grab Sandpipers, make sure you always get the same number of Isopods! You don’t want to discard useless tokens. It’s pretty useful to try and stock repeat stacks of Isopods, otherwise you’re just trading in tokens around and around and around. You can generally trade up and get more tokens, but if you can just keep increasing your stock by taking the same number of Isopods each time.
There’s some benefit to just pushing a token to the Sea, taking another turn, and trying again. Sometimes you don’t get anything useful! Take another turn! Just don’t make the mistake of overfilling the Sea and giving a ton of tokens to your subsequent opponents. It’s not ideal.
If you can get a good run of Shells, it might be worth grabbing a few Waves and just flipping some Beach Tokens. You can’t keep getting increasing numbers of Shells. Nobody will give them to you! So once you get a good amount, use Waves to start flipping Beach Tokens and exploring your options. Plus, if you place enough Waves on your beach, then you get all the tokens that are leftover at the end of the game.
If you’re not the one with Waves, make sure there aren’t tokens in the Sea at the end of the game. If you can’t have them, nobody should!
Keep an eye on what your opponents are gathering! If you see an opponent already has one Rock, don’t add a bunch of Crabs to the center. It’s unwise.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
It is fun to yell “Crab a tat tat” whenever you make a Crabitat, but I think I’ve just been listening to too much Fall Out Boy. No apologies; they were fantastic live.
I really like the art style! It’s muted in a way that I think is really great, and the limited color scheme really works with the whole thing. Even the negative space made from the standard wood token color adds to the charm of the whole thing.
I agree with the designer’s fascination with circular components. It’s fun to have some non-square shapes in a game from time to time. I think
They did a lot aesthetically to make this game feel like you could play it on a beach. I wish I were one of those people that did contextual photo shoots, like Ross; I feel like you could really make the game look great with some sand, but I don’t want any sand in my house and I also don’t really want to be in sand. But the wooden components and the bag and the whole thing just looks like a beach game.
Plays quickly! Each turn is super fast and doesn’t require a lot, and the game moves pretty fast as a result. It’s not intended to be an intense or long game, and I’m always a fan of a short game.
Easy to transport. You can kind of just take the bag, even though I’m a boxed board game kind of guy.
I love games that are easy to setup. No setup here beyond removing tokens!
Mehs
Oh! I hate the box. I understand why it’s like that from a product standpoint, but boy howdy from a “things I can do with boxes standpoint”, it’s horrid. I assume you’re just supposed to use the bag moving forward, but I like boxes for a reason.
Cons
Honestly, the nonspecific token count for removal is a bit strange. I’m not thinking there’s a way that you can use that to cheat or anything; it’s just, I mean, tokens aren’t that difficult to count. Making a range seems like it barely saves any time and just adds some strange confusion.
Overall: 7.75 / 10
Overall, I think Seaside is a pleasant little abstract game! Aesthetically, they’re definitely going for one of those games that you find in a beach house that your family rented for the week, but they’re shooting for making it a fun and compelling family experience. Honestly, a perfect fit for Randolph as a publisher, and a great game to kick off the summer with. Who doesn’t love a game with simple rules? Furthermore, who doesn’t love a game with a dead simple final scoring mechanic? This is actually my favorite part of the game; you just compare stacks at the end; there’s not even counting or math involved. My second favorite part of the game is the isopods; they’re silly to include in a beach game and yet they’re here and I love them. They’re my new best friends. Regardless, I think the game has a strong sense of its own aesthetic and appeal and leaning into that was a smart move. It’s a good beachy game, and it even has the ability to be played at a beach without ruining everything, provided you don’t get the components too wet. If you’re looking for a game to take to the beach, you want to think about the beach, or you just want to yell “Crabitat tat tat” at someone, I’d definitely recommend Seaside! It’s a cute and quick experience.
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