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Point Salad

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Point SaladOne of the ‘holy grails’ of board games is games with easy and quick to learn rules with a surprising depth of gameplay. If the game can play in less than an hour that’s a bonus too. Point Salad is a game that scores big on all these fronts. Point Salad comes with a single deck of cards. On the ‘front’ of the cards is a vegetable and on the ‘back’ is a uniqu…
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Point Salad One of the ‘holy grails’ of board games is games with easy and quick to learn rules with a surprising depth of gameplay. If the game can play in less than an hour that’s a bonus too. Point Salad is a game that scores big on all these fronts. Point Salad comes with a single deck of cards. On the ‘front’ of the cards is a vegetable and on the ‘back’ is a unique scoring condition. Cards are shuffled and dealt into three draw piles. Two cards are then place face up under each of these draw piles. On your turn you will pick two face up vegetable cards or one of the scoring cards on the top of the decks. This is a fine balancing act because often point cards will give positive points for some veg and negative for other. Once a turn you may also flip over an acquired point card to it’s veggie side, but not the other way around. There is a graphic indication that tells you what veggie is on the other side of the card. When all the cards are gone you score. The game is incredibly fun to play and what you think will be a case of selecting the most obvious cards becomes a battle of tactics and meanness. Do you take cards that will benefit others, hoping they will help you later. Do you broadcast your plans with a big scoring card and try to fulfil it? Point Salad is a genius design at home on the tables of families and gamers. It’s simple rule set, good looks and engaging gameplay make it a winner every time. Look out for Calico and Dollars for Donuts from the same designers soon! Player count: 2-6 Time: 15-30 minutes Age rating: 8+

Awards

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You Might Like

  • Accessible
  • Quick playing
  • Easy to teach
  • Small & compact

Might Not Like

  • Not theme
  • Limited depth/strategy
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Description

Point Salad is a fast and fun card drafting game for the whole family. There are over 100 ways to score points. Players may use a variety of strategies and every game of Point Salad is unique!

Cards come in six different types of veggies, and the back of each card has a different scoring method. So for instance, one scoring method may award 2 points for every carrot you have, but deduct a point for every onion. By drafting combinations of veggies and point cards that work for your strategy, you can amass the most points and win.

 

Point Salad, designed by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin and Shawn Stankewich and published by AEG, is a two to six player, quick playing, card drafting game. In Point Salad there are six different vegetables (Lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, onion and cabbage). The cards are double sided with the vegetables on one side and a point scoring opportunity on the other. Taking it in turns players will draft vegetables or point scoring cards to score the most points.

The game is set up with three stacks of cards with the point scoring side face up. Then two rows of cards with the vegetable side up placed below these. On a players turn they can either draft two vegetables from the available vegetables, adding them to their display, or one of the three point scoring cards. Once per turn, as a free action a player can flip one point scoring card to its respective vegetable side.

Play continues this way until all the cards have been drafted. Players count up their points they have gained from their point scoring cards and the player with the most points is the winner.

Final Thoughts

Point Salad is a light, fun drafting game. It is a great game to introduce the drafting mechanism to new players, or players who have not played a drafting game before. The rules are straightforward and easy to understand and you can get the game set up and taught in minutes.

The scoring cards give you some strategy to aim for and help focus players on which vegetables they should draft. Some of the scoring cards can work really well together if you get the right combinations of cards. Certain scoring cards require a player to have the most of a certain vegetable and can cause some competition when drafting that vegetable, especially if another player needs the same vegetable for one of their cards. Other cards will give you points for a certain vegetable but negative points for a different vegetable.

Certain point cards will require players to set collect a combination of vegetables. They are all pretty varied and players are going to see a different combination each game. This game has been an instant hit with my work colleagues and gaming group. The artwork is vibrant and colourful and draws people in. It is the perfect game length for this level of game and sits well as a lunch time game. Or filler game for a games night. There is enough to it to keep experienced gamers entertained. Yet accessible enough that non gamers can get in to it easily.

I have had a lot of fun with Point Salad and I can see this sticking around on my shelf and hitting my gaming tables often. A great addition to the card drafting genre.

You may have heard the phrase ‘Point Salad’ chucked around on Zatu blogs before. In board game lingo, it means opponents aim to score the most points, with many ways to achieve this. You score points for doing X. You score them for doing Y (and Z, and often A-W, as well!). The challenge is that often, point scoring methods X and Y are not connected. Should you spread yourself thinner to score less across multiple categories? Or should you go all-in and put all your X in one basket?

It’s to board game geeks’ global delight, then, that Point Salad – by AEG – pokes fun at this board game mechanism. It’s meta to the nth degree. Point Salad is a game where the scoring method is a point salad of you scoring points, by collecting types of salad. There’s lots of ways to score points here – 108, in fact! Each card in the game offers a unique method of racking up VPs. Usually you’d refer to them as victory points… But here, let’s call them veggie points! So: knife and chopping board at the ready? French Dressing poised to drizzle? Let’s make ourselves a tasty Point Salad!

How To Become A Salad Supremo

The aim of Point Salad is, to no surprise: score the most points. 2-6 players attempt to achieve this with the end-game in mind – once the last card’s drafted. Cards are all doubled-sided. On one side, they’ll be one of six different veggies: carrots, peppers, tomatoes, lettuces, onions, or cabbage. There’s an even distribution of each, so 18 of each (108 in total).

On each cardbacks, there’s a unique point-scoring condition. Stated on them is what combinations of veggies you need to to colltor to trigger that card’s scoring. In Point Salad, cards sit either Veggie side-up or Point-Scoring side-up. Because of this, there’s a near-infinite range of modular set-ups for this one! Talking of which…

How To Prep The Perfect Point Salad

Setting up Point Salad takes less than 60 seconds. (It’s best, when packing the game away, to separate the cards into their Veggie types. That way, when coming to set up the game for next time, you can get started pretty much straight out of the gate.)

Depending on player count, you need to count out a set number of cards for each of the six vegetable types. You do this by selecting the cards at random, so you cannot see the Point-Scoring sides. In a 2-player game, you need six of each Veggie Card (so 36 cards in total). Any excess cards go back in the box; they’re not needed for this game. For 3P, you need nine of each card. For 4P, you need 12 of each card (or, you can simply remove six veggies of each type, whichever’s easiest for you). For 5P, it’s 15 of each card (or remove 3/18 cards from each type). For a 6-player game, you use the entire deck.

Once you’ve got the correct number of cards, give them a good shuffle together. Then split them into three piles, and sit them so they’re Point-Scoring side-up. Have them sitting in a row, then flip the top two cards from each deck, so the two cards are Veggie side-up. Situate these below their corresponding decks. You should now have three decks, and six Veggie cards in a Public Market. Pick a start player (who last ate salad?) and you’re ready to play!

Super-Simple And Speedy Turns

Turns in Point Salad are super-simple, and speedy. On your turn, you get to draft cards, in one of two ways. Option one is you can draft one Point-Scoring card from the top of one of the three decks. If you do this, you place it in front of you, Point-Scoring side-up.

Your alternate option is to draft two Veggies from the six cards in the Market. If you go for this option, then you also place them in front of you, Veggie side-up. It’s worthwhile keeping your veg

cards in matching sets. That way you can see, at-a-glance, how many of them you have at any one time.

As a bonus action, if you like, you can opt to flip over one of your Point-Scoring cards to its Veggie side. There’s a Veggie symbol in the corners of the Point-Scoring card, so you know what Veggie sits on its reverse. You can’t do this vice-versa, though: you can’t flip a Veggie card into a Point-Scoring card. So once it’s flipped, it’s flipped for good!

Pick Up A Pepper, Or Choose A Cabbage

Why pick one option over another, then? Well, that all boils down to the requirements on the Point-Scoring cards. You might have a Point-Scoring card that rewards you with 8VPs for every three tomatoes you own. If you see two tomatoes in the Market, you might feel inclined to grab both of them. That’s two-thirds of the way to another 8 points, after all!

Alternatively, you might have grabbed a Point-Scoring card early in the game. Have you struggled to gain any Veggies for it? No problemo! Check the Veggie symbol on the card’s corner. It might be a candidate for flipping. (Especially if you could use it as a Veggie to score towards a different Point-Scoring card!)

But it’s also worth noting: beware! Some of the Point-Scoring cards come with penalties! Some, for example, reward you 2VP per pepper you hold, 2VP per cabbage, but -4VP per tomato you have. If you’ve got lots of peppers and cabbage, but also lots of tomatoes (because you grabbed that ‘3x tomatoes = 8VP’ card), they don’t sync up! Should you consider flipping one of those Point-Scoring cards? Only you can make that decision…

Grab Them Before They’re Gone

At the end of a player’s turn, it moves to the next player, clockwise. Did the previous player draft cards from the six-card Veggie Market? If so, those cards get replaced from the Point-Scoring deck sitting above the empty spaces in the Market. The Point-Scoring card(s) in those decks flip, becoming new Veggies that the next player(s) could draft.

This is fantastic with regards to decision-making. Your opportunity window to grab those Point-Scoring cards is so slim! If you don’t draft it now, chances are it won’t be there by your next turn… Can you take that chance? The other neat thing is you know what kind of Veggie card those Point-Scoring cards will become. Meaning, you might be able to manipulate the Market, to an extent.

There will become a time in the game when one of the three decks runs out of cards. This is inevitable, due to copious drafting and re-filling of the Market. When this happens, it’s a simple case of splitting the largest of the two remaining decks. You place the bottom half of that deck into place of the depleted one, and continue. Gameplay continues in this fashion, turn order going clockwise. The game end trigger is once all cards from the Point-Scoring decks and the Veggie Market have been drafted.

Add Them Up To Pluck The Point Salad Prize

Then it’s time to add up your points. Most points gets the Point Salad crown! It’s worth noting, though, that for scoring, you calculate each Point-Scoring card at an individual rate. And when you do this, you considering all your collected Veggies. This means that Veggie cards can – and will – get used to score towards numerous Point-Scoring cards.

However, as I stated earlier, this can be both good, or bad, depending on the requirements for your Point-Scoring cards! Did you double down on collecting carrots for points? If you did, and you’ve gone carrot-crazy with the drafting, then it’s all good. But if you also have three cards with carrot penalties, they’ll also cost you! If you don’t at least break even there, then you’ve made a Pointless Salad!

Games of Point Salad can be rather snappy once you get going, especially in a two- or three-player game. If you like, during set-up for, say, a three-player game, you can split the Veggie cards in half. (As in, you’d one set of 9×6 Veggies for one game, which would leave a second set of 9×6 Veggies that you’d put back in the box. You can then use that second set to play a second game of Point Salad, straight away! Or, in a two-player game, you can split the 108-card deck into three lots of 6×6 Veggie Cards, to play three rounds. Doing this saves you even more time during set-up!) If you do this, you can keep an accumulative score to find out the ultimate salad supremo…

Zatu Score

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You might like

  • Accessible
  • Quick playing
  • Easy to teach
  • Small & compact

Might not like

  • Not theme
  • Limited depth/strategy