Plays: 6 at player counts: 1 – 2
Appearance
The front of the box is simple with a picture of a salmon and the face of a new elder in the corner. The back of the box makes it obvious that this is an expansion for Nusfjord and provides metal coins (the exact same as the Plaice deck coins) for use as gold in the game. The new cards are the same art style as the other decks in the game with a large salmon on the back to help distinguish the deck. An appendix is again included describing all the buildings in great detail along with potential timing issues with other buildings. There is also one new elder included (as an alternative to a previous elder) but in the first printing this is unfortunately misprinted but the appendix does show the correct player count it can be used at.
Gameplay: New Mechanics
For a gameplay summary of the base game of Nusfjord see my previous review. Overall this deck of cards doesn’t add any new mechanics to the game just new cards with some different abilities. The deck is a step up in difficulty from the base game decks and a similar level to the Plaice deck. There are some brand new effects included in the deck, which revolve around manipulating the number of fish on elders or using an elder without taking a fish from the plate area. Also there is a B building, which allows you to remove an elder without fish from play and take a new elder from the display and use them immediately. This gives you access to more elder actions in a turn if you plan ahead. There are also buildings, which allow you to convert fish in your reserve into gold or wood adding to your resource management each turn. The C buildings in this deck are where most of the added complexity comes from. There are now C buildings that are worth fewer victory points but reward gold when certain actions are performed with more gold offered for actions in later rounds. Also over half of these C buildings victory points are based on conditions that are dependent on 2 factors, such as points for gold but only up to your haul size or points for wood but only up to the number of forests remaining on your board. 579
These are a significantly more difficult to score compared to C buildings from the other decks and really require you to focus on two things to get high point rewards. The new elder is very straightforward offering a fish per building in your village.
Theme and Game Length
The theme remains the same and the average playtime of the game is unaffected as it is simply a new deck cards to play with increasing the variability of the game.
Strategy
As previously stated there are no new mechanisms added to the game just several new buildings. Overall I would say that the A and B buildings are worth more points than in the previous decks so if you build a lot of buildings you will score more points than you would have done before. The A cards are a mix of immediate and engine building cards that reward you for certain actions so (as with previous decks) timing is key for the immediate cards and you will be more incentivised to take certain actions. However it is easy to have these actions blocked by other players, especially at lower player counts, so you don’t want to commit to one action too heavily. One of my favourite new buildings is the immediate bank which rewards you with gold for all of your other buildings that have immediately in the text. This can be very lucrative at lower player counts where you have more control over the buildings. The building cards that let you change fish in your reserve into other resources open up new ways to play the game. You can fill your reserve each turn and convert the fish to other resources allowing you to take a big transfer reserve action late in the game for lots of resources and not just fish. The C buildings in this deck are very interesting and I particularly like the ones that reward gold for taking certain actions in the last 3 rounds of the game, especially as they reward more gold the later in the game it is. If you do draw one of these into your hand in round 4 you want to make sure you build it as fast as possible to get the maximum benefit out of it. The C buildings that reward the number of resources you have left at the end of the game add a reason to keep resources rather than just spending them on buildings for a few points. These can give a lot of points but do need careful planning, and you need to make sure your opponents can’t block you from optimising the points from these buildings and this increases the depth of your decision making. The replayability of the game is improved with all the new building card and effects and you can mix and match these with the base decks for near infinite replayability. Game end scoring remains the same although the new C buildings can make this take slightly longer as you need to count 2 parameters for some. 579