The Hungry Gamer's Old Salt Mini Review

0:00 ooh that looks tasty welcome folks the H Gamers back with another Mini review and today we're talking about old salt from never board games designed by Tim faery with art by Jennifer Walsh and what this is is this is a skirmish style Fleet battling game where each player is going to take on the role of a different faction and each of the different factions has widely different faction powers and plays differently however each of the different players is going to have the same types of ships and each of the ships is designated by a different color hex token that you're going to have and be able to put out onto the board and what you're going to be doing with your Fleet is you're going to be trying to conquer six different Islands or completely wipe the other player off the map and the Third Way the game ends is if all the trade wins tokens are used and whoever has the most Island is going to win the game then now broadly speaking this is a fairly simple game and I apologize I don't have video for you but I am about to start a little photo Journal of the last game that I played so you can kind of see kind of the progress was going on and you should be able to see everything you need to see to understand what I'm talking about as you go each turn of the game players are going to get to spend all of their coins that they're going to make at the beginning of their turn they're going to make one coin for every island they control minimum of three and they're

1:30 also going to have the option of trading in masts from the other sh from the other players that they have suckk their ships and the more you turn in the more money you make up to a maximum of three that you can turn in and the way it works is almost all of your actions are going to cost coins with the exception of sailing when you do a sale action you get to move three of your ships and if you are sailing where the trade wins are active you get to move a little bit further on the pictures that that you're seeing on the screen the Tradewinds areas are the kind of different colored regions on the map and on and each turn you're going to flip out a new Tradewinds tile if the Tradewind of that color is not active it's now active if it is active then it becomes inactive and all that does is helps you move a little further when you're in those zones but the actions you're going to be taking are you're going to do a sale which will let you move your ships three spaces unless you're in the trade winds and in general three ships are what you're going to be able to or you can fire and if you're and if you're firing at a ship that is in your front Arc or your rear Arc then you get to fire one time for one coin and however many hexes away that's the number you have to hit on the die to a maximum of five so if a ship is exactly five hexes away you have to roll a five on the die if it's one hex away you only have to roll a one the reason you can still miss on the one is the sixth side of the die is blank it is always a Miss of course there are exceptions the yellow ships are the Marksman and their range is actually 5 to n meaning anything one to four hex's away they can't shoot at at all and that's how combat works if however you

3:02 are shooting from the side of your ship you can do a broadside attack which means you're going to spend two coins you're going to roll the dice three times potentially doing three damage however when you attack another ship if you're attacking their broadside they can take one free shot back at you and it's important to note that with the exception of one of the factions the engineers there's no healing in this game there's no getting new ships in this game so taking damage is a really big deal and with the exception of the blue ships have eight health every single ship only has five health so you get hit five times and you are done the next thing that you're able to do is you are able to capture and you can capture Islands by spending two coins plus one more for every ship of the same faction that controls the island that's within two spaces and turning in a ship Mast that is the same color as the faction that controls it and if no one controls is two coins and a ship Mast that's it you're going to play back and forth until someone has taken until one player has conquered six islands or until the trade Runs run out or someone has wiped off the board and I found it's about 50/50 six islands or wiped off the board is how it works but that's how this game works so what do I like about this game first off I really like this kind of old school look that it has it it looks really cool to me it also looks very old so I really enjoy that I like the way the ships are these wooden hexes that

4:33 you're moving around it has the firing arcs on them it took me a minute to kind of figure out what the front and what the back is but once I figured it I was like oh yeah obvious and you're just kind of slotting in your sales on each one which at first I thought was going to be kind of hard to figure out what is what from certain angles who controls what ship but it's really not it really does work well the flags look kind of nice out there again it's old school looking but it looks good all the way through and I really do enjoy that I really like how differently the factions play and it's very simple how the factions are different it's just each one has three abilities and if you're not doing a ship draft which I also really like that has the option to do this draft where you have 17 points you spend it and you get whatever ships you want I really like that but if you're not doing the draft you are given a specific set of ships that you're going to use and that's what your faction uses but the way this the three simple abilities work really makes them different for example the Forgotten every time they're shot they can move two spaces away so they have a little bit of extra Mobility I already mentioned the engineers are able to heal themselves there's the they're not called the enlightened I can't remember what they're called I'm call them the enlightened but when their ships are sunk they get these they get these like ascended tokens where they're basically little ships that can move around they can't do anything but they can kind of move around and block things and very very interesting but very simple the way these things work but it really changes up how you are going to play I also like the again very simple differences

6:03 between the different ships you want one that's tank take a blue ship you want to be doing a lot of damage from far away take the yellow ship you want to get some you want to do a lot of shooting take the red ships they get a free shot every turn or maybe you want to have ships that are bombs take the Green Ships when they get destroyed they explode all kinds of things right there that really change up how are you going to play every single time and I really like that I also really appreciate that built into the game there's this thick campaign book it's actually set up to kind of do this long campaign against other players where the longer you go through you're getting points that you're going to be able to use to kind of change up your own factions they have it set up to where you can buy different abilities so you're going to go through and kind of create your own faction as you're playing but in addition to that you're scoring points that are going to go to the overall win condition of the campaign and I like that it's a very clever little system it's very cool that it has that in there because it takes what is a very simple game and gives it some interesting replay and along with that the different scenarios that it has in there have different setups so they're different than just the core game that I described at the beginning again all of that very very cool sort of my quibbles with the game the first two quibbles that I have are very much component one the standy bases are terrible terrible I'm going to find some other game that I'm not using the standy bases and sub those in because it's so hard to get the banners into those bases

7:37 it's I don't know terrible standy bases the other thing is I wish it came with three dice comes with one die and obviously you can get some other d6es and just know that the six is a blank but there's times when you're rolling three dice so I wish three dice is what it came with very minor equiv but beyond that you're not looking at a game here that is l Rich you're not looking at a game here that is story rich I mean you do have the campaign scenarios and again when I use the word campaign if you watch my channel usually when I'm talking about campaigns I'm talking about dungeon crawls with big long stories and no this is like a war campaign where you're just doing battle battle battle battle battle so you're not getting a ton of story here and that's not the type of game that it is but when you have games with factions and I keep saying the word campaign that's something that we think about so you're not going to get a lot of story here this is really about putting down on the table and kind of having it out in this kind of Naval sea Battle thing and then the second to last thing that I want to bring up is I really wish there was an AI I wish there was a way to really play it solo it is a game that I think is pretty darn fun it's interesting it's easy to play and I wish there was a solo AI that could go with it maybe it's not fair for me to say but I'm going to say it anyway and the only other thing that I'm going to bring up here is depending on your player count this is a game that you absolutely can wind up having the two players beat up one player and that's just not fun now that is part and partial with this kind of game but just understand there is nothing that's going

9:09 to kind of help you catch up if you're getting wailed on it's very much a if you're playing three player two players at some point are going to say oh let's get them out of here or one player's going to be doing well and okay we're going to team up on them then we'll face each other and it's not a very long game at the end of the day but just kind of something to think about and understand that this is not a forgiving game this is not a nice game you're going to beat each other up and and so it might feel like they're just totally out of the game early on when they're knocked down to like one ship or something that's it folks this is a game that I sat on it for a while because I was they asked me to cover it and thank you to the designer for sending me a copy they asked me to cover it and I was like that's an interesting sounding little game it's kind of neat I like this sailing and sailing combat and I just had a hell of a time getting it to the table and I finally did and I'm really glad that I did because overall I am very Charmed by this game I like how simple it is I like you just throw it out there on the table grab a faction easy to figure it out and go have a little battle put it away be done doesn't take up a lot of space on the Shelf doesn't take up a ton of space on the table and again because of that old school Vibe I don't know it works so well I found myself really Charmed by it and want to play it more want to take it to a convention play it there and all of that but there you have it folks that is old salt as I said this is an old school feeling game it looks old school overall

10:40 with the exception of the one thing that I mentioned earlier the components are nice for what you're getting in this box for the price of the box for the look of the box and if you looking for a skirmish game and you want to get that kind of sailing feel naval battle feel then this is a pretty good option for a light quick game so there you have it folks as always if you found this video useful please like subscribe share maybe become a channel member as always thank you so much for watching have a wonderful wonderful day