Matthew BaileyGame 60 of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” is “Seaside” played with Jack(9), Toby(6) and Katie.
In the first week of this marathon, I played “A Gentle Rain,” which was meant to be relaxing and cosy. However, I found it to be neither and gave it a fairly negative review.
“Seaside,” on the other hand, is a game free from pretentiousness and possibly one of the cosiest games I’ve ever played. Its premise is fairly simple, yet it absolutely blindsided me with how good it is. When we all sat down to play, we ended up playing more games in one session than I’ve ever done with a game before.
The premise of “Seaside” is straightforward. You play on a table, with the middle of the table representing the sea and the area in front of you being your seaside. On your turn, you draw a token from the bag, look at it secretly, and decide which of the two sides of the token you will play. This 50/50 decision-making forms the main structure of the game.
If you choose a blue sea token, you place it in the middle of the table. There are three types: isopods, shells, and crabs. After placing a token in the middle, you most importantly get to draw another token from the bag. This continues until you draw a white token, which must be played on your seaside.
The sandpiper is a bird token that lets you take as many isopods from the sea as you want and place a similar pile under your sandpiper on your seaside. What’s interesting is that all future sandpipers on your seaside must have the same size stack because if you end up with two sandpipers, the smallest stack is discarded. This creates a really interesting dilemma: you want to take the sandpiper and isopods, but deciding how big a stack to take is difficult. If you start with a stack of, say, two, you must make all your stacks two, or you’ll lose the smaller stacks. Therefore, knowing when to take them is crucial.
Next are the beach tokens. When you take a beach token, you immediately get to take a shell token from the sea, based on the number of beach tokens you have. Therefore, the first time you take a beach token, you get one shell; the second time, you take two shells, and so on.
The rock tokens allow you to take a crab for every two rock tokens you have. While these don’t score massive points, they are valuable because they aren’t vulnerable like some of your other tokens and provide a solid three points per set.
Finally, the all-important waves are potentially game-winning. The player with the most waves at the end of the game gets to take everything from the middle. If there’s a tie, the tokens are shared equally, with any leftovers discarded. However, the potential downside to waves is that for every wave you take, you must turn over one of your beach tokens and activate it. This reduces your beach multiplier, making subsequent beach tokens less effective. You could also run into problems, such as turning over a sandpiper and losing it because you can’t make a stack the same size.
The game ends when the tokens run out. One thing I absolutely love about this game is how scoring works. Once you’ve finished the game and taken all your relevant tokens, you simply stack them on top of each other to form a pile, and the person with the tallest pile wins. This makes the usual tedious score calculation much easier, and it’s great fun stacking up the tokens.
The component quality in “Seaside” is absolutely off the charts. The game comes in a really nice cardboard box, and inside is a beautiful bag containing possibly some of the nicest wooden tokens I have ever seen. The bag is sturdy and chunky, and the whole game is described as water-resistant, windproof, and all-terrain-ready, so you can easily play it at the beach.
We played several games of this, and everything seemed pretty well matched. The fact that all the different abilities are really well-balanced was a pleasant surprise. In the first game we played, the waves seemed really overpowered, but then someone else won with the beach tokens, and another with a massive sandpiper/isopod strategy. This shows there are multiple ways to win, and no one token type seems particularly stronger than the others.
There have been a lot of positive reviews recently, and looking ahead to what I’ve got planned for the final week, there are still more positive reviews to come. “Seaside” is an absolute gem of a game and quite possibly my new favourite bag game. I know we’ll be taking it on holiday with us for years to come.
Absolutely wonderful.
Disclaimer: “Seaside” was kindly provided by “Hachette Games” for the purpose of review. Flavien Loisier is the General Manager of Hachette and is in our community. Our thoughts and opinions are, however, our own.
