Sea Salt and Paper

The origami art style on these cards is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and I mean that as a compliment. Folded-paper penguins, mermaids, and octopi in soft blues and creams, it’s genuinely one of the better-looking small-box card games I own, and it’s colorblind-friendly graphic design too, which more games this size should bother with.

The mechanics underneath are simple almost to a fault, draw two and discard one or take from a discard pile, pair up matching cards for points or a special ability, and once someone hits seven points they can either end the round on the spot or gamble on a “last chance” that gives everyone else one more turn to try to catch up. That push-your-luck moment is the actual game, everything before it is just positioning for that one decision, and it’s a genuinely tense one when it lands right.

Where this one lives or dies for me is the table. With the right two people who understand what they’re gambling on when they call last chance, it’s sharp and quick and a little mean in a fun way. With four, or with a group that’s mostly drawing blind and hoping, it turns into exactly what one review I read called it, a game where “someone lucked into a great scoring hand” before anyone else had a real decision to make. I’ve had games where the ending felt inevitable three turns before it happened, and I’ve had games where the last chance call flipped the whole table on its head. Which one you get depends entirely on who’s across from you and whether they’re actually tracking the count or just vibing.

I’ll cop to being lukewarm on the iconography too, a few of the ability cards use background colors that nearly match the icon itself, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to stop double-checking the card key mid-game. Cute, quick, best at two, and a real contender for a “one more hand” filler slot, but I don’t think it’s got the legs some of the louder praise online suggests. It’s a good fifteen minutes, not a great one.