Today we bring a fresh, fresh analysis: Point Salad, a simple, fast and addictive card game
When I look at my toy library, I can’t help feeling a sense of pride at seeing so many years of compulsive purchases that have finally been distilled into a careful selection of the best titles (in my opinion) of each genre. However, when I sit at the table with friends and they present me with a game like Points Salad, the humbling effect I receive is loud and resounding, since I keep forgetting that in the meantime, a giant game with a multitude of expansions that it occupies half a shelf, entertainment like the one offered by Devir’s new proposal is also necessary.
So if you have some time, please grab your shopping basket and join me. I guarantee you that the ingredients that Ensalada de puntos offers are some of the freshest and tastiest that can be found in the market right now. Perhaps you have heard in the aisles of the supermarket that is the world of board games, the word “filler”. Or perhaps you are an accomplished gourmet who controls the game genres to perfection. If you are one of the first and for you a “filler” is a kind of mushroom or a frozen brand, allow me to develop.
Fillers are a type of games that are characterized by their speed and simplicity of rules. They are games that are usually used to oxygenate and offer quick games between more complex and long titles. Or they are also ideal for a varied gaming session where several of them are combined.
Be that as it may, the “fillers” are explained in a few minutes, they are prepared in even less time, they do not last much more than half an hour and they can be enjoyed even by those who have just started in the hobby and still do not know that the cards are they sleeve (because yes, friends, the cards in the games are sleeved or else they end up smelling like Cheetos). And best of all, they are usually cheap and take up little space.
And this is why we, oh, great experts in the gaming world, tend to overlook these types of games (I know, I’m projecting myself on the reader, but hey, I haven’t started reading) in favor of more striking proposals. And sometimes we forget that small games can be simple and still not be without complexity. This is the case with this Points Salad. The beautiful metallic can in which the game comes contains 108 cards and a very brief regulation. But the number of hours of fun it offers thanks to an almost unlimited replayability they wouldn’t fit no matter how much we squeezed them.
But we’re four paragraphs in and we still haven’t explained how Point Salad is played and what makes its mechanics so compelling. Each of the aforementioned 108 cards has a front and a back. On the obverse we can find a vegetable (cucumber, tomato, onion, carrot, cabbage, etc.). On the back, we find a way to score (for example, each pepper gives us 2 points and each onion subtracts 1, or for each group of tomato + carrot + lettuce = 7 points, or the one with the least onions gets 10 points ) and also, in the printed corner, we can also see the vegetable that awaits us on the other side of the letter.
Thus Every time we draw a card, we may be getting different ways of scoring or with the necessary ingredients to complete the “recipe” that gives us the points.. The key is how we manage all this. At all times we can see a common market of 6 vegetables and 3 reverses (that is, 6 ingredients and 3 ways of scoring). And on our turn we can steal either any two vegetables or 1 score card. But keep in mind that every time you draw a card, you have to replenish the market, so both the vegetables and the scores vary constantly.
If we add a small rule that makes 1 time per turn, we can turn a punctuation card and turn it into a vegetable (to compensate for possible previous bad plays) we find ourselves with a very fast game but with a tremendous “chicha”, since the number of ways to score is so huge (108 ways) that at all times we will have to be weighing options and managing our resources to optimize them to the maximum. Point Salad lives up to that “simple to learn, hard to master” maxim. Although it is true that this time we are not facing a brain burner.
If we add a resultant art (let’s see, they are vegetables, there is not much more). A very nice presentation with its metal box. An unnecessary but well-chosen topic (the final round of games in which we can obtain points in various ways, as well as usually in slightly unconnected ways, is called “point salad” ). And above all, an attractive price of 14 euros. We are faced with a recommendation to take into account to fill the gaps in our toy library.
