Saltfjord

Command a thriving 19th-century Norwegian fishing village, expand your coastal settlement, and dispatch your maritime fleet into icy waters in a crunchily satisfying, medium-heavy eurogame that utilizes an innovative spatial grid dice-drafting matrix.

Saltfjord (designed by Kristian Amundsen Østby and Eilif Svensson, and published by Aporta Games) serves as a brilliant, highly strategic evolution of the critically acclaimed mechanics first introduced in Santa Maria. Moving away from warm colonial waters to the striking, wind-swept fjords of Norway, this title task players with optimizing a complex rural economy. The core objective is a high-tension, three-round engine-building race: players systematically draft custom dice from a shared central pool to activate entire horizontal rows or vertical columns on their personal village grids, gathering vital resources like fish, wood, and iron to construct buildings, advance on specialized technology tracks, and fulfill lucrative trade contracts before winter sets in.

The primary strategic hurdle centers around navigating the multi-layered activation costs of your development grid while balancing your expansion between the sea and the land. When you choose a die from the draft pool, its numerical value dictates exactly which row or column on your personal board triggers. However, every time a slot is activated, it becomes increasingly expensive to trigger a second time in the same round, forcing players to carefully plan the precise sequence of their actions. Resources harvested from your grid can be spent to send your wooden fishing boats sailing down a dynamic coastal map to claim high-value catch tiles, or directed into the village to recruit specialized workers who unlock powerful passive abilities. True tactical mastery requires managing your coin economy to manipulate dice values, maximizing the layout of your asymmetric structural upgrades, and securing high-scoring end-game goals across a deeply rewarding 60-to-90 minute campaign.

Game Specs at a Glance:
Age Range: 14+ Years
Publisher: Aporta Games
Play Time: 60-90 Minutes
Player Count: 1-4 Players
Complexity: Medium-Heavy (Dice Drafting, Spatial Grid Activation, Tableau Expansion, Contract Fulfillment, Income Engines)

What's in the Box?

• 1 Central Shared Coastal Game Board
• 4 Cardboard Player Village Grid Boards
• 30+ Engraved Wooden Dice
• 40+ Wooden Resource Tokens
• 16 Wooden Fishing Boat Miniatures
• 50+ Cardboard Building, Technology, and Blueprint Tiles
• 40+ Punch-Out Cardboard Coin Currency and Special Ability Markers
• 1 Scoring Pad
• 1 Strategic Rulebook Booklet