Shallow Sea
- Steve Berger
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Shallow Sea is a 2025 release from Bad Comet, designed by Yeom C W, and is a game aimed at families and gamers who enjoy games similar to Cascadia (Flatout Games), Harmonies (Libellud) and Calico (AEG). The instructions are clear and the game is both quick and simple to learn and teach, but playing Shallow Sea creates one of those moments when you realise that tho' what you are doing is obvious, how to get it just right is a lot harder to master.
On your turn, you select a fish and one of two paired tiles, and you place them both on your ocean board. There are two types of tiles – coral tiles that require matching fish, and sealife tiles that require matching coral tiles to score. Repeat until everyone has four empty spaces left on their board, and then score, with final score being based on scoring cards, tiles (completion and variety having an impact here) and fish. The placement of tiles as well as the selection of fish is what provides the depth to the puzzle here – seeing opportunities, and using the scoring tiles in the most effective way provides a real challenge and takes a while to begin to master. And with a variable selection of the scoring sealife tiles, each game can feel very different as these all interact with the coral tiles in different ways.
Players are constantly trying to create interconnecting scoring chains and, when this is achieved, it feels highly satisfying. The addition of seashells to provide the player with the option to refresh the pool, or break the partnered fish and tile rule gives a needed ability to create that combo you’ve been working towards, and managing these accordingly provides an important consideration during play.
There's a Nesting Season expansion which adds a new scoring mechanism that creates competition to score goals early as well as adding more coral and sealife tiles, and is a valuable addition to add more variety to the game for those who really want to explore everything it has to offer. This all highlights why this stands as a worthy contender in a genre with some very popular and well-known titles. Shallow Sea is a clever design, rich with replayability, and also excellent visual table appeal. The amount of variability, further enhanced by the expansion, keeps this fresh, and the low rules overhead makes is easy to get to the table.
(Review by Steve Berger)
