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Jesse Dean
United States
Orlando
Florida
Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious predator on Earth!
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Upon A Salty Ocean, by Marco Pranzo, is an economic game centered on fishing. In it players are city merchants who are investing in ships and buildings in order to turn a profit, with the player who has the most money in the end being the winner. I don’t have any particular opinions of either the publisher or the designer as I have not encountered them in the past. The theme itself also does not particularly appeal to me, and it seems to be simply another means of delivering a game centered on the generation of profit.
Upon A Salty Ocean has four primary actions: City, Harbor, Market, and Navigation. Each of these actions has a number of subactions related to it, any one of which can be selected when you pick one of the four primaries. At the beginning of a round, any taken action costs nothing, but each consecutive time an action is selected results in an increase in the cost of that action by $1 for all players. Thus the majority of the game ends up being about analyzing the costs, both opportunity and financial, in taking a particular action, determining when it is worth the additional costs of going into debt, and identifying at which point it is no longer worthwhile to continue selecting actions and to instead pass until the round ends. The fact that players that are later in the turn order are likely to be forced into taking more expensive actions is accounted for by an increased amount of starting cash, with each player after the first starting with an additional $2. I am slightly concerned that this additional money will end up being too much. With four available actions and four players, it is likely that each player will be able to take actions for a relatively equal cost. It is possible that this additional money is meant to make up for the strategic advantage that the first player will likely achieve from an early fish sale, however.
The game appears to have the potential for tactical variety centered on the competition to gain big fish pay-offs. For a total of four actions, players may transport salt on the player’s boats from the port of Rouen, convert it into fish, and return the fish to Rouen where it can be sold at the market for a potentially large, but consecutively diminishing, profit. However, that is not the only way to make money. Since it is possible to see how the market is going to change from round to round, it is possible to buy and sell the two types of fish and salt between rounds for a profit. Additionally, various buildings can provide money both during the game and at the very end, with construction of the cathedral providing the largest potential end of game profits. However, none of these items, with the exception of perhaps the building of the cathedral, really compare to how much you can make from fishing and then selling the fish on the market, thus making it unlikely that a player will specialize in one of these secondary areas. The exact combination of fishing, market manipulation, and building purchases that occur will likely vary between plays, as the effects of the event tiles and player decisions on the profitability of particular actions is potentially large, and will thus have a similarly large impact on how the game plays out.
This does not change my central concern, which is how much interplay variability will Upon A Salty Ocean really have? It seems that with particularly advanced players, that there will be scripted openings depending on your particular player position and the first tile. While this is not inherently a problem, it could point to a low level of interplay variability even with the impact that an individual player’s decisions have on the game.
Upon A Salty Ocean remains a game that I am greatly intrigued about despite my concerns. I expect I will try it at BGG.Con, and if it does not end up being a game that I am able to immediately dismiss, I will get it to explore further. The action selection mechanism is interesting, and there is a lot of potential for this one to be the economic game of Essen 2011. The only question is whether it lives up to that potential.
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Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious predator on Earth!
Being an enabler not a drug dealer! 
