Description

Seafood Palace is a medium-weight resource management and auction game for three to five players aged 10 years and older. Games usually last from 60 to 90 minutes. The game features an innovative dice drafting mechanism for players to obtain resources used in bidding for cards which yield points. Each turn, players have a variety of actions available to them and tempo is an important consideration – it may be good to get a bid in first to win a card cheaply, but at the cost of taking a high value die instead.

In Seafood Palace, players take on the role of Chinese seafood restaurant owners in Singapore, seeking to gain fame points by bidding to satisfy public demand for tasty seafood dishes. The more resources you put into the dish, the more likely that people will identify that dish with your restaurant, and this recognition is represented by fame points.

Every player starts with stores of fish, prawn, crab, non-seafood resources (chicken and vegetable), beverages and coins. The resources are represented by counters on the player’s own board, which represents the player’s stores.

Each round, public demand is represented by dish cards that become available for auction. Players bid to satisfy the demand with the corresponding resources and the highest bid wins the card and the fame points on the card.

Each round, new resource dice and number dice are available for players to replenish stores. These dice are traded in as pairs (one of each kind) to get the specified number of the specified type of resource (e.g. a 5-number die and a crab resource die are traded in for 5 crab resources).

There are also bonus cards which could permit special actions to benefit the player - some of the bonus action cards include discounts on buying seafood resources, using MSG to get an advantage over your competitors (but with a penalty) or the abundant catch that helps you stock up on seafood. Bonus cards could also be set menus, which if fulfilled by the end of the game, will yield bonus points. A wedding banquet menu is valuable, and this game also caters to vegetarians with a vegetarian set menu. If you hire a master chef, your lowly 1-point dishes will increase in value.

The twist is that players have to choose which of several actions they want to take (take a die, bid on a dish, claim a dish, bid on a bonus card, claim a bonus card, or pass) and focusing on one action means sacrificing the tempo to carry out another action. If you decide to go for the high number die, someone else could take the resource die of the type you need badly, and yet another will get in a bid on a valuable card that you can’t outbid because you haven’t managed to obtain the right dice yet …

The game lasts enough rounds so that each player has the advantage of going first an equal number of times. At the end of the game, players score fame points for dish cards they have won, set menus they have fulfilled with their dishes, and recognition for having the best stocked cellar (player with the most beverages) and best seafood stocks (player whose least seafood resource is greater than other players’ least seafood resource). The player with the most famous restaurant wins.