Salton Sea

Salton Sea arrives as a recent addition to Devir’s small-box line, and it fully earns the phrase “small in the eye.” It is striking how much stuff has been packed in here: on the table, it feels like a much fuller game than its box lets on.

Each player runs an oil-extraction company in the North Sea, in an economic game with no luck involved. The mechanisms are approachable, sensibly connected, and quite well balanced, so progress feels dependent on our decisions and management rather than on a fortunate roll.

Its most original idea is that money also functions as actions. That creates a genuinely interesting tension in every choice: whatever I spend to do things is also a resource I am not keeping for something else. Interaction emerges through that financial pressure and the shared race of managing things, without the game becoming inaccessible to more casual groups.

It is not perfect, and I think it could have been better. Still, it succeeds at being pleasantly thinky without throwing you in at the deep end. It just has a somewhat “dry” feel, despite all the seawater going around — yes, I know, criminally cold joke. For anyone looking for a dense economic game in a small box, though, it is definitely worth a look, if only for the money-as-actions mechanism.