I didn`t expect how unhinged this would get, and I`m genuinely refreshed to see Matt re-emerge from his wormy sleeping bag for a sip of hotdog and tuna. Stay weird, you wonderful humans.
You might be interested to know a few things about the real Salton Sea, (at least during the mid '00s.) I used it as a location for a movie I made because it had this very unusual feature. At some point the sea had risen to a point where the houses were all half submerged by the water. The people of the community had to leave and resettle, and apparently it happened so quickly that some cars were even left behind. The water later receded, but there was so much salt that the community remained half submerged in what looked like sand. So imagine, if you will, coming upon a town in the desert that is half buried. You can see into the houses through the top part of windows. The roofs started a little below the waist. The tops of cars were at my feet, except a school bus which stuck a little more out. The salt appeared light brown, like sand, but when you stepped in it, your footprint appeared red, like blood. If you've ever seen The Last Jedi, that planet at the end is supposed to be the same thing, (very pale on the surface, but red when you dig into it.) I frankly think that was the inspiration for that planet, actually. And of course, near the water's edge, were hundreds of dead fish. In my own movie I used it as a location for an abandoned town where something sinister had taken place. It was a great spot for a horror scene.
As someone with knowledge of and fascination with the man-made ecological disaster that is the Salton Sea, I was real curious to see where this was going.
This feels like it might be coming for the "Really good game with a really bland theme and presentation" throne that Xenon Profiteer has been perched on for years.
I live in southern california and definitely bought the game thinking of it as a fantasy. Or "of course we're gonna do industrial extraction at the poison lake, why wouldn't we?". That's in contrast to the game Daybreak which I enjoy in its earnestness.
I was expecting this to be a bit under an hour to play from how it was being described. I was getting a bit excited, but 3 hours? I don't think will be something I ever pick up :/
I found the economy in this game to be significantly too tight. Using only the actions on the base board, you can't actually make money. Everything that spits out money costs money in equal measure to within a dollar or so. This means you absolutely need to have the right dollar cards at the right time to make actions cost less or pay more. If you mess up at any point and need to waste a bill because you can't make change or you simply don't have the dollar cards for the stage of the process you're at, you're basically screwed for the entire round.
@rectorsquid i meant that as the baseline. If one were to only use money as a resource, all the actions break even. So you need to use money to make money, but you only start with something like 7 dollars so it's really hard to actually make money if you don't have the money actions that make actions cost less money. To make it worse, the $1 actions only adjust that efficiency by a single dollar, so you make a dollar per turn of the engine per dollar card used. It's an unbearably slow engine, and if you need to break a 5 to pay a $3 bill, you just broke even even though you used money card actions
I feel like it would be worse if the game just completely brushed over the horrors it was portraying. As many Euro games tend to do. Where hey, why are we picking up these brown meeples and using them as workers? Clearly this has no horrifying historical significance and we can all just pretend that everything was okay. So in that sense, even if they maybe tried to put too positive and hopeful a spin on it, at least acknowledging it on some level is probably better than ignoring it? But thats just my 2 cents.
I admit I don't understand the thematic criticism this game gets. Yes it is called Salton Sea because it is set there. It is about lithium mining and geothermal energy plants in Salton Sea, which, well, are happening. Are these things good? Maybe yes, maybe not, probably a mix. They are for sure not as bad as oil or gas extraction, and yet games like Pipeline don't get all this flak for their theme. I don't get why this game is tasked with addressing the whole history of the place which has not really much to do with neither lithium deposits nor geothermal activity. Yes, the introduction of fish or the dumping of wastewater or even military testing happening there suck and impact local communities, but they just happened to occur there, where lithium and heat also come from. At the same time, we do mine lithium if we want to transition to EVs, and we extract geothermal energy if we want to offset fossil fuels. The process of doing so is interesting, and it's fun to play a game that simulates it in a quite abstract way. Also, it is quite weird to dismiss two pages of intro about this written by a geologist with expertise in both water & environment because it is "bobbins" and "messed up"? If we can play something like John Company with historical and political consciousness, I guess we can do the same with Salton Sea? Anyway, game needs an expansion for variety.
I was gonna say...isn't that the place man's hubris already destroyed? Why are using it as a setting for a game about...*checks notes* more of man's hubris? Kidding aside I love these miniaturized dense games like this. But I can't imagine teaching this one. Mottainai is one of my favorites but even that one is a real pain to teach with each card being used for four different things.
I have never seem a video for this game and then, after playing it last night for the second time ever, this showed up in my recommendations. How the heck does You Tube now what I played last night? This is a very interesting game. It's not easy to play the first time but the second play was fine and it's definitely not the hardest game I ever played. What is hard is coming up with early-game actions that get production up before the game is half over. I am still not sure what to do for the first two or three rounds. But figuring it out is the fun of a game like this (for me). I don't like that a hard game is considered a horrible game just because it's hard. But I do get how it can give that impression. It can definitely be a frustrating game with each action not really doing all that much when there is so much to do.
I LOVE these weird bits that Matt puts at the end of his videos. Sometimes it's about cooking, sometimes arts and crafts! You never know what's going on! I love them please don't stop making them ❤️
This is my game of the year (2024 edition). A heavy economic euro that has loads of crunchy decisions? Yes please. How about we add a really cool mechanic where your money is your actions and vice versa? Absolutely. Would you like us to make it in a small box but keep component quality high? Of course. Oh, and just one more thing - how would you feel about a £20ish price point? If this game sounds too good to be true it’s because it is. I have no problem with the theme either. If it washes over you and you don’t give it a second thought then it’s done no harm (it’s hardly like you’re going to become a rabid advocate of geothermal engineering). And if it does resonate with you to the extent that you go down a rabbit hole on this stuff then in addition to being an awesome game it’s now also become an educational tool. TL; DR: This game is brilliant for the money and you should buy a copy immediately if you have any interest in medium-heavy Euros and/or economic games.
Does theme matter in games? When I play chess (badly) I dont think of the Queen as a queen its more the underlying mechanics of the game that are relevant.
I mean, to take an extreme example, would you play an Auschwitz boardgame? Maybe a worker-placement game about efficiently... no, can't even finish that example. This isn't THAT bad, but... it's pretty bad. And it's not like that theme is "can we fix this ecological disaster", it's some kind of strange whitewashed "hey look at how science can money!" thing. They could have made this about a fictional lithium-rich drilling area and it would have been fine (ish). Setting it in a real epic disaster zone and then, like, ignoring the disaster part is just bizarre.
@@chrishillerythere's a card game called "Train" where the player has to get trains to their destination, and then at the end it is revealed that the destination is Auschwitz (so the player isn't supposed to know this). I think it goes without saying that it wasn't meant to be played as a normal board game and was made for didactic purposes. I think it was appropriate to do this because the game takes its theme as seriously as it deserves. And I think this is what's sometimes lacking in boardgames
I'm mildly amused that this review goes to great lengths to discuss the environmental impact of the theme, then proceeds to mildly ruin 2 board games instead of giving them to people who would enjoy them. Then again, what do I expect from Matt "bowl of soup" Lees? I propose that these be auctioned off as prop copies, along with Food Chain Island, the Viking 1866 expansion (or whatever that one is called), No Thanks, the microplastics that used to be colonists in Spirit Island, and Burncycle.
Yeah that was just jelly babies and powdered sugar for smoke? Also these games aren't ruined, they're just personalised. Ok, so maybe the manual for Monopoly Reading Edition is ruined.
I didn`t expect how unhinged this would get, and I`m genuinely refreshed to see Matt re-emerge from his wormy sleeping bag for a sip of hotdog and tuna. Stay weird, you wonderful humans.
You might be interested to know a few things about the real Salton Sea, (at least during the mid '00s.) I used it as a location for a movie I made because it had this very unusual feature. At some point the sea had risen to a point where the houses were all half submerged by the water. The people of the community had to leave and resettle, and apparently it happened so quickly that some cars were even left behind. The water later receded, but there was so much salt that the community remained half submerged in what looked like sand. So imagine, if you will, coming upon a town in the desert that is half buried. You can see into the houses through the top part of windows. The roofs started a little below the waist. The tops of cars were at my feet, except a school bus which stuck a little more out. The salt appeared light brown, like sand, but when you stepped in it, your footprint appeared red, like blood. If you've ever seen The Last Jedi, that planet at the end is supposed to be the same thing, (very pale on the surface, but red when you dig into it.) I frankly think that was the inspiration for that planet, actually. And of course, near the water's edge, were hundreds of dead fish. In my own movie I used it as a location for an abandoned town where something sinister had taken place. It was a great spot for a horror scene.
My family just sold our house out their. I went to get my stuff and it's hard to see the sad state it's in.
Well, I'm sure THAT smelled great.
'avin a good brine, 'AVIN A GOOD BRINE
It's like making a game espousing the benefits of nuclear power, and running a reactor, and calling that game Chernobyl.
This game looks like a joke boardgame specifically designed to parody the idea of impenetrable-looking boardgames
It’s Cones of Dunshire, but with salt and small wooden men.
Nexus Complexica.
Boardgames do be like that. Sometimes someone in the board game group is doing the teach and I'm like "so this is just Eurogame: The Game"?
I live near the Salton Sea. Fascinating and horrifying
Going to it is absolutely an eye opening experience. It's basically a monument to human greed and hubris
As someone with knowledge of and fascination with the man-made ecological disaster that is the Salton Sea, I was real curious to see where this was going.
The choice of putting the Rusty Bucket Bay music on in the background is truly inspired.
For other Germans watching: Brine = Salzwasser, Lauge 😀
good words
Thanks for the tutorial on modding board games! I just ordered a 2L bottle of glue, excited to get to work!
This feels like it might be coming for the "Really good game with a really bland theme and presentation" throne that Xenon Profiteer has been perched on for years.
God damn, for the first time on SU&SD I know within the first 60 seconds that this is a game I will not be getting.
Oh god, another installment in Matt's spreadsheet arc.
"JPEGS of fictional ladies"
I feel judged.
Continue
"Two and a half days down a rabbit hole of reading academic papers"
I feel judged
Continue
I was trying to figure out why you had the can opener at the start
... YOU FAILED
Good to see you keeping hydrated!
I live in southern california and definitely bought the game thinking of it as a fantasy. Or "of course we're gonna do industrial extraction at the poison lake, why wouldn't we?". That's in contrast to the game Daybreak which I enjoy in its earnestness.
I love you and your brain that needs to read academic papers for two days Matt, don't change it ❤
So this is the first time I've seen the game box.
Seriously, I thought it was Salt & Sea this entire time.
This has reminded me of when Matt used to do cooking to go along with the reviews… I want that back!
The core gameplay loop sounds an awful lot like Race for the Galaxy - down to the impenetrable iconography
2:03 this is the best advice ever! I'm teaching my friends how to bake starting tomorrow. Just in case 😅
The German word for pear is Birne so you got me quite confused with the BRINE in your Video Title 😂
I was expecting this to be a bit under an hour to play from how it was being described. I was getting a bit excited, but 3 hours? I don't think will be something I ever pick up :/
The FF7 reference is great.
"big Shinra energy" 😂
Excited to try that one, eventually.
All I will ever take away from this video is that in the UK they sell jarred hot dogs
That's a glizzy ma'am
Super easy to learn from the rulebook, too!
I found the economy in this game to be significantly too tight. Using only the actions on the base board, you can't actually make money. Everything that spits out money costs money in equal measure to within a dollar or so. This means you absolutely need to have the right dollar cards at the right time to make actions cost less or pay more. If you mess up at any point and need to waste a bill because you can't make change or you simply don't have the dollar cards for the stage of the process you're at, you're basically screwed for the entire round.
This description makes me want to play it even more now
Using actions only on the base board is not a good strategy. They certainly did make the game hard that way!
@rectorsquid i meant that as the baseline. If one were to only use money as a resource, all the actions break even. So you need to use money to make money, but you only start with something like 7 dollars so it's really hard to actually make money if you don't have the money actions that make actions cost less money. To make it worse, the $1 actions only adjust that efficiency by a single dollar, so you make a dollar per turn of the engine per dollar card used. It's an unbearably slow engine, and if you need to break a 5 to pay a $3 bill, you just broke even even though you used money card actions
@HeaterCalhoun44 it's really unbearably slow to accomplish anything
I feel like it would be worse if the game just completely brushed over the horrors it was portraying. As many Euro games tend to do. Where hey, why are we picking up these brown meeples and using them as workers? Clearly this has no horrifying historical significance and we can all just pretend that everything was okay. So in that sense, even if they maybe tried to put too positive and hopeful a spin on it, at least acknowledging it on some level is probably better than ignoring it? But thats just my 2 cents.
I admit I don't understand the thematic criticism this game gets. Yes it is called Salton Sea because it is set there. It is about lithium mining and geothermal energy plants in Salton Sea, which, well, are happening. Are these things good? Maybe yes, maybe not, probably a mix. They are for sure not as bad as oil or gas extraction, and yet games like Pipeline don't get all this flak for their theme. I don't get why this game is tasked with addressing the whole history of the place which has not really much to do with neither lithium deposits nor geothermal activity. Yes, the introduction of fish or the dumping of wastewater or even military testing happening there suck and impact local communities, but they just happened to occur there, where lithium and heat also come from. At the same time, we do mine lithium if we want to transition to EVs, and we extract geothermal energy if we want to offset fossil fuels. The process of doing so is interesting, and it's fun to play a game that simulates it in a quite abstract way. Also, it is quite weird to dismiss two pages of intro about this written by a geologist with expertise in both water & environment because it is "bobbins" and "messed up"? If we can play something like John Company with historical and political consciousness, I guess we can do the same with Salton Sea?
Anyway, game needs an expansion for variety.
Ultimately, the prompt to learn more should always be in games, whether the history you hear is grizzly or not.
And people will love the Brass series, not really paying attention to the human costs involved during the early industrial revolution. *shrug*
Effortless dropping of FFVII references, there Matt 👌🏻
6:27 lol loll heh heh heh
6:19 this comment came up as I was watching, was wondering if it made anyone else roll as hard! 😂😂
I was gonna say...isn't that the place man's hubris already destroyed? Why are using it as a setting for a game about...*checks notes* more of man's hubris?
Kidding aside I love these miniaturized dense games like this. But I can't imagine teaching this one. Mottainai is one of my favorites but even that one is a real pain to teach with each card being used for four different things.
I have it and want to play it.
I had this. I sold it because while i don't think it was bad, it has potential... But is a game o know i won't get it to table any time more.
Would you guys be interested in reviewing Can't Stop perchance?
I have never seem a video for this game and then, after playing it last night for the second time ever, this showed up in my recommendations. How the heck does You Tube now what I played last night?
This is a very interesting game. It's not easy to play the first time but the second play was fine and it's definitely not the hardest game I ever played. What is hard is coming up with early-game actions that get production up before the game is half over. I am still not sure what to do for the first two or three rounds. But figuring it out is the fun of a game like this (for me).
I don't like that a hard game is considered a horrible game just because it's hard. But I do get how it can give that impression. It can definitely be a frustrating game with each action not really doing all that much when there is so much to do.
I enjoyed the movie with Val Kilmer
The Saint is an all time 11/10.
Or do you mean Batman?
@TrojanManSCP its a movie called the saltin sea..val is in it and plays a meth head
Legit dinky 😂
I LOVE these weird bits that Matt puts at the end of his videos. Sometimes it's about cooking, sometimes arts and crafts! You never know what's going on! I love them please don't stop making them ❤️
Great game, love it
Salton Sea more like Salton Deez
NUUUTTTZZZZZZZZ
This is my game of the year (2024 edition). A heavy economic euro that has loads of crunchy decisions? Yes please. How about we add a really cool mechanic where your money is your actions and vice versa? Absolutely. Would you like us to make it in a small box but keep component quality high? Of course. Oh, and just one more thing - how would you feel about a £20ish price point? If this game sounds too good to be true it’s because it is.
I have no problem with the theme either. If it washes over you and you don’t give it a second thought then it’s done no harm (it’s hardly like you’re going to become a rabid advocate of geothermal engineering). And if it does resonate with you to the extent that you go down a rabbit hole on this stuff then in addition to being an awesome game it’s now also become an educational tool.
TL; DR: This game is brilliant for the money and you should buy a copy immediately if you have any interest in medium-heavy Euros and/or economic games.
Does theme matter in games? When I play chess (badly) I dont think of the Queen as a queen its more the underlying mechanics of the game that are relevant.
I mean, to take an extreme example, would you play an Auschwitz boardgame? Maybe a worker-placement game about efficiently... no, can't even finish that example.
This isn't THAT bad, but... it's pretty bad. And it's not like that theme is "can we fix this ecological disaster", it's some kind of strange whitewashed "hey look at how science can money!" thing.
They could have made this about a fictional lithium-rich drilling area and it would have been fine (ish). Setting it in a real epic disaster zone and then, like, ignoring the disaster part is just bizarre.
The John Company review on this very channel dives into this
@@chrishillerythere's a card game called "Train" where the player has to get trains to their destination, and then at the end it is revealed that the destination is Auschwitz (so the player isn't supposed to know this). I think it goes without saying that it wasn't meant to be played as a normal board game and was made for didactic purposes. I think it was appropriate to do this because the game takes its theme as seriously as it deserves. And I think this is what's sometimes lacking in boardgames
Did you liked it? 😊
This is the 'Meet The Grahams' of board game reviews, and I love it.
Genuinely interested to hear your reasoning, it's not a link I would've made 😅
Hi everyone
I cnfess euros leave me cold. Add a climate theme and watch me run screaming. Yet watching you trash the game in the outro was strangely triggering 🤔
I'm mildly amused that this review goes to great lengths to discuss the environmental impact of the theme, then proceeds to mildly ruin 2 board games instead of giving them to people who would enjoy them. Then again, what do I expect from Matt "bowl of soup" Lees?
I propose that these be auctioned off as prop copies, along with Food Chain Island, the Viking 1866 expansion (or whatever that one is called), No Thanks, the microplastics that used to be colonists in Spirit Island, and Burncycle.
I believe the Spirit Island one is a camera trick
Yeah that was just jelly babies and powdered sugar for smoke? Also these games aren't ruined, they're just personalised. Ok, so maybe the manual for Monopoly Reading Edition is ruined.
First!
Seems like your true jam is 1970s porn star aesthetic.
Why have you decided to model yourself on my secondary school geography (and PE) teacher? It's disconcerting.