Designed by: Molly Johnson,Robert Melvin,Shawn Stankewich
In Point Salad you’re collecting salad vegetables, and scoring sets of them for points.
The deck of cards shows one of the six vegetables on one side, and a distinct point-scoring criteria on the other. The cards shuffled and divided into three roughly equal stacks. Two cards from each stack are turned face-up, and then the game begins.
On your turn you can either take up to two face-up vegetables, OR one point-scoring card from the top of one stack. You can flip a scoring card over to turn it into a vegetable, but you can’t flip a vegetable to be a point-scorer. If you took face-up vegetables from the display, these spaces are filled from their respective stacks – meaning that the available ways to score points are always changing: being claimed, or being flipped. Some criteria simply give 1 or 2 points per type of vegetable. Some ask for sets. Some demand you to have the most (or the least) of something. As soon as all the cards are claimed, the game ends and points are tallied.
Note that every vegetable you have can score for every point-scoring card – they’re not ‘used up’. Gathering the right set of criteria with the right veg can catapult you into a commanding win – but a little luck helps.
A lot of inadvertent take-that-ery, but you can play spoiling tactics too.
Low. Playing with six might mean a short wait for your turn, but it's probably a better game with fewer people anyway.
Low - just try and make sure your vegetables score points!
Like a crunchy nicoise in the shade on a hot day, Point Salad might not fill you up, but a few more bites are rather pleasant.
2-6
Players
8+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
A really simple, deft little game that it's hard to say no to. You can play in an airy, lassez-faire style, or - with two players especially - devolve into a slippery battle of shrewd blocking and snaffling. Lovely.