Salad Days

My gaming group is always on the lookout for solid short options -- games that don't take a lot of time to play, but still manage to serve up decent decisions. A new entry in this space is the card game Point Salad, from a trio of designers: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, and Shawn Stankewich.

Nominally, each player is drafting cards to make a salad. (But the story veneer is about as thin as the name Point Salad implies.) There are six different salad ingredients (essentially, suits) in a large deck of cards... but different players will want to gather different things. That's because the backs of each card are all unique, each one presenting a different scoring condition for the end of the game. You might have a card that gives you 2 points for each card you gather of two particular ingredients... but that costs you 4 points for each card of a third. You might have a card that scores big for each complete set you gather of three particular ingredients. There are a lot of possibilities, each putting different ingredients in demand, and each sure to put you at odds with the other players.

The deck is divided into three roughly equal stacks, and then two cards are dealt face up from each stack into the center of the table. On your turn, you either take any two of the six face-up ingredient cards and place them in front of you, or you take one of the three cards from the top of the stacks, placing it in front of you for its particular scoring conditions. Play goes around the table until all cards have been drafted, and then players score their salads to determine the winner.

It's a brisk game that can take anywhere from 2 to 6 players. The reality is probably that it's best at a smaller player count, because more players just makes planning ahead harder -- the cards available will completely change by your next turn. But that said, the game is going to take roughly the same amount of time no matter how many are playing, a rarity in games. And even with more players, you do get enough turns to carve out a strategy and work at it.

The short run time of 15-30 minutes is good not just to fill in between meatier games, it's good for playing a few hands back to back. When my group did so, we found the strategies varied wildly from game one to game two. Everyone was blindly aggressive in game one, looking to score the most points possible for themselves. Everyone went on defense in game two, "counterdrafting" cards to make things harder for the player acting after them, and generally being much more aware of what everyone else was up to. Both ways, the game was pretty fun.

I wouldn't say this game is so exceptional that it'll become the go-to 15-minute choice for my group. But everyone did seem to enjoy it well enough, so I can see it entering the rotation for a while. I give Point Salad a B+ -- and in its own class/category, it should probably be scored even higher. It would be challenging indeed to make a game this brisk and easy that still has at least some strategic meat on it. (Well... not "meat." It's a game about salad. But you get my point.)