Episode 264: Salton Sea

Salton Seab> is designed by David Bernal, art by Amelia Sales and published by DEVIR. Salton Sea is a 1 to 4 player game lasting around 120 minutes. In Salton Sea you are managing your geothermal lithium extraction companies to obtain the greatest number of points. You do all of this utilizing a worker placement mechanic with long term objectives for end game scoring and short term objectives which can be acquired on a first come first serve basis.

Each player is given access to four engineers at the start of the game and a player board that is essentially your company where you will be executing actions and unlocking more engineers. In Salton Sea there are dual purpose cards, you can use them as money in the amounts of $1, $3, and $5 OR you can play them out in front of you to utilize the action. The actions you can take are :

Acquire a drilling license - by paying the cost and placing it at the bottom of your board which you need to do the next two actions Drill - advancing your drill bit further down the mine and
Extract - pulling the brine out of the mine. Once you place your extracted resources in the warehouse you can then
Process -which is converting the brine into geothermal energy or lithium. OR you can
Sell your resources - you sell your resources to a corporation to gain money and increase the indicator on the financial assets value track of the corporation which raises the share value of the corporation so that when you
BUY SHARES - you pay that price and move your token up that many spaces on the share track which calculates end game scoring. Keeping to the thematics of this game if you drill and process you might damage your machinery so you need an action like
Repair Machinery to fix those parts in your company, if you don’t repair damaged machinery they are negative points at the end of the game and could prevent you from either drilling or processing until the machinery is fixed. Other important actions are
Research - which you purchase and these cards have either immediate effects or permanent effects for you and if slotted in your warehouses at the end of the game, give you points. You can also
Enter into a contract - where you take the contract and once you have the necessary resources and meet it’s requirements you can then later
Execute a contract - where you spend the resource units required to execute it and in exchange you receive the indicated benefit (usually money, points and shares in a corporation), if you don’t complete contracts you will lose half of the contract points at the end of the game. There is also a space where you can gain $1 or copy an action that is already taken by paying $1. All of the actions I just named will either be on your company board, actions cards, or research cards. After all players have utilized all of their engineers then there is a clean up phase where you put action cards you played out of your hand back into your hand, refresh the claim deck for drill licenses, and refresh the markets for money, research and contract cards. Then you play another round. Game will continue like this until at the end of a round THERE ARE NO MORE CARDS TO DRAW AND REVEAL IN THE CLAIM DECK for drilling licenses OR TWO CORPORATIONS HAVE CLOSED, meaning their financial assets value track has been maxed out. Then it goes to END GAME scoring where players will earn points from money in hand, the shares you obtained in the corporations, product in your warehouses, research cards and long term and short term objective cards. Players lose points for damaged machinery and uncompleted contracts and then whomever has the most points wins. Now let’s head back to the studio to hear how the pegs did with extracting their brine in Salton Sea.