Last night, I played Salton Sea for the second time. The first time was a year ago so the setup and review of the rules was lengthy. I was teaching an accomplished board game player so it only went badly for the first few rounds.

Salton Sea is a Euro-style game where players use worker pieces to select the actions they will take. There are cards in this game and they work both similarly to many other games and yet differently in a few ways.

The photo isn’t all that interesting but at least it’s a photo I took myself and didn’t “borrow.” We had only played for a few minutes when I took this picture so not much is going on.

Game play is quite simple (but not really): Move the drill down through the layers. Then extract brine down to the drill bit. Then sell brine to get money and cards. Along the way, but some tech cards to help things go better. Once money is not too hard to come by, get and fulfill contracts to get points and other things, instead of just getting money from sales. Finally, buy stock in companies that are buying good from the players and sell more to them to bump their value in points.

So with all of that previous paragraph said, here’s the difficulty in the game: Selling only makes enough money to drill and extract with almost none left over to do anything else interesting. Since money and cards for actions are the same thing, sometimes it’s much better to use a card for an action than for money. But it takes a bit of cleverness to get the right cards to make this work out well. If it does work out and a player has a bit more money, then things start to go better and tech cards can be bought and deeper drilling can happen. Converting resources can also be beneficial if done at the right time and for the right reason. Usually there is no profit in conversion since it might take $3 to convert brine to geothermal energy that then sells for $3 more than the brine. But taking a little early damage to workers or the drill can double that, giving the player a little working capital to increase production. Just remember to fix the machine to avoid the negative point penalty in the end.

This is a finicky game. It’s hard to progress early on and it’s always hard to get points. But if you like games that take work and are hard, try it out. There’s a lot more to it than I described here and you might enjoy it.