Let’s address the elephant in the room immediately and talk about Point Salad‘s title, a tongue in cheek reference to the Feldian characteristic of every action you take in a game worth a few points here and a few points there. Want to sell some goods? Here, have some points. Would you rather move your ship to another port? Points for you, madam. Sheep for wood? Pointsville. Point salad is that slightly sniffy, definitely derogatory thing that very clever people say about games that reward you for doing anything, except that, annoyingly, the same people seem to keep winning those games. Maybe their salads are just better balanced.
Anyway, somewhere along the line the title was applied to Point Salad where, ironically, you do not get points for everything you do, anything but. However you do get points for putting together a salad which, as the game progresses, needs to focus on certain combinations of ingredients. Get them correct and you can rack in those points while ensuring that you get your five a day, but make a few incorrect decisions and you can cry over those onions all night long.
This card game – no tokens, no meeples, nothing but cards – by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin and Shawn Stankewich is an entry into that very crowded field (not Feld) of short and quick-playing designs that aspire to be fun to play while presenting enough meaningful decisions to make their short play time feel like more than just a quick shot of randomness, and it certainly scores well on the portability front. The box is compact, but the rules are so easy to understand that you could easily just carry the one hundred and eight cards in your pocket and play it whenever the opportunity arises and live boxless.
Those cards each represent one of six vegetables – well, five vegetables and a fruit to be precise – and there are eighteen of each in the deck. The required quantity of each varies according to player count, so a two-player game only uses thirty six cards, six of each type, but that really is all there is to that particular side of the deck. The reverse of each card, however, is where the magic happens, for tucked away on the opposite side of each tomato, onion, carrot, lettuce, cabbage and pepper is a scoring requirement, each different from all the others. Get the right combination of these to mesh with the ingredients in front of you and you may well have the opportunity to leaf, sorry, leave your opponents behind.
The art work in Point Salad is bold and brash, the colours lively and in your face, and the scoring requirements so simply expressed that it would be very difficult to misinterpret what is on offer. The entire production is a classic AEG product, enticing and inviting, and it is hard not to want to experience what Point Salad has to offer at least once.
Once the correct cards have been selected for each player count, set up is as simple as shuffling the deck and dividing it into three equal piles. Take the top two cards of each pile and place them below in a column to form one row of scoring cards and two rows of vegetables and that is it – set up is done and you can get straight into a game which is also easy to learn. On their turn a player may either take two vegetable cards or one scoring card. It really is as simple as that. Well, almost, for a player can, as an extra action, turn one of the scoring cards in their tableau over to the other side, adding it to their vegetables. Gaps in the vegetable market are filled with cards from the appropriate pile, and play progresses to the next player until the cards run out, at which point players score according to their own personal requirements.
It does not sound like much. In fact, it sounds about as satisfying as some particularly limp and unimaginative salad, but actually Point Salad is better than it sounds, and thankfully it reveals a little more of what it has to offer even in its first play. While decisions might seem to be easy, players still need to choose their options carefully, for that scoring opportunity might well tally perfectly with those veggies, but taking those veggies will mean that the scoring opportunity disappears. Tricky.
Better still, once you realise that you also need to keep an eye on what your opponents are up to, something that most players learn to do very quickly indeed, then Point Salad turns from a game in which everybody pursues their own aims into one in which your choices are dictated by consideration of your opponents’ intentions as much as your own. While this happens to a certain extent at all player counts, it is in a head to head situation that the game truly shines, precisely because of this little detail. In a four-player game the chances of being able to influence the choices of the player to act three after you are virtually non-existent, but in a two-player game everything that you do impacts directly upon your opponent and vice versa. Games with more than two players therefore feel much more wafty than face-to-face battles and lack their tension and immediacy, not enough to kill the game entirely but certainly enough to make it a much more leisurely and laid back experience.
There is also another facet of Point Salad which is worth mentioning, and that is its almost entirely tactical nature, at least in the way that a sense of strategy only emerges in the playing. Or is that still tactics? Each player begins the game with a blank tableau – so no scoring conditions whatsoever – and until they take a scoring card there is no direction for them to follow. It means that the game takes shape like approaching a house in a fog, the details only becoming apparent as players gain cards. This means that you need to dive in almost completely blind at the beginning of each game, either hoping that the right scoring cards come up for the vegetables you have taken or instead hoping to grab the vegetables that go best with your scoring conditions, although the problem with this latter approach is that your opponents will know very early on what you might be aiming for.
Thankfully, there are so many different scoring conditions that it is well nigh impossible not to come away with points for something at least, and there is always that option available, once per turn, of flipping over a card in order to negate its scoring effect and instead turn it into a vegetable, and Point Salad is gracious enough to indicate what is on the veggie side of each card so that there is no guesswork involved. In later games this also become an important factor in determining which cards to take from the market, especially in two player encounters, and flipping a scoring card can become an important way to avoid penalties.
The scoring conditions are also very clearly expressed in veggie-based equations, so that the game is entirely text-free in the playing and even new players should be able to pick up what they need to know within a single play. Couple that with the oh-so-straighforward rules and the quick play time and you have a game that has the potential to hit the table often. In fact, given the smaller decks for two and three players, it is recommended to play twice or even three times in a row at lower player counts to run through all of the cards in the game, and you might well want to do this all the way up to the maximum player count of six.
The main question, then, is whether this short-playing game comes with enough meat on its bones, or, possibly, dressing on the salad, to make it worth the time spent with it, and the answer to that question is yes, as long as players go into the experience knowing what to expect. With a few plays under one’s belt the choice of what card or cards to take and whether to flip can be based on several factors rather than a simple case of I want this, but at heart each player’s turn is quickly done, and it is easy to finish a game within ten minutes or so, and the richness of the experience is just about right for the length of the game. If the game were, say, fifty per cent longer then it would stray into more competitive territory with plenty of other designs out there just ready to give it a good kicking, but at this length as it is there is just about enough to keep players involved throughout.
It also needs to be said Point Salad is definitely what I would call an opener or a closer, a swift-playing game that can be slotted into the beginning or end of a session, but certainly not a main event. Also, as explained earlier, the game becomes much more open and noticeably less gripping as more players are added, meaning that Point Salad ventures into territory that is inhabited by more established and better games for these player counts.
In Point Salad’s favour, though, is that is can be easily grasped by anybody who has played a card game, so it definitely hits the target when put in front of people who might otherwise reach for a pack of cards and suggest something possibly less fun. The rules, the art, the colours and the decisions are all so easy to understand, and I can imagine this game becoming genuinely popular with those who would like to spend some quality time with gaming parents or children who might not be up to something more complex, so thumbs up to Point Salad for that.
In conclusion, Point Salad is a decent game that slots nicely into a very short play time indeed and at the lighter end of the gaming spectrum. For me its sweet spot is definitely at the two player count, but because there is so much consideration of an opponent’s moves at this level I would hesitate to suggest that new players do drop in at this player count when more participants and elbow room would probably suit them much better. After a couple of games, though, they should have enough experience for you to take them down in a veggie duel.
Be aware also that point spreads can vary wildly in this game, so it is certainly for players who do not mind being beaten by large margins occasionally. While it is theoretically possible to keep an eye on opponents’ scores as the game is running, this is so tricky as to be almost impossible to do, so it is only at the end of the game that the scores are revealed, and a fortuitous scoring card can certainly provide for some wild swings in the late game. As always, the more luck there is the shorter a game needs to be for players to feel that they have not wasted large amounts of time and, once more, Point Salad does this just about right.
So, in conclusion it seems fair to say that there are some caveats with Point Salad. Two player is best, there can be some wild swings, and you need to be happy diving into a game and working out your route as you go along. If that sounds like your thing, though, then you will be pleased to know that getting into your first game of this will take no more than five minutes, and that this is an eminently easy box to get off the shelf to fill a short gaming void. Do not expect anything too deep and meaningful and you should get along with Point Salad just fine, and it is definitely more of a side dish than a main course, but it works easily and happily and could well become the kind of family favourite that gets people around a table, and there is nothing wrong with that at all.
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