Shallow Sea

• Designer: Yeom.C.W
• Publisher: Bad Comet
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 30-45 mins
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In Shallow Sea, a multi-layered puzzle board game inspired by the breathtaking beauty of the Great Barrier Reef, players create their own vivid ocean landscapes by strategically arranging an array of marine life, colorful fish, and corals. Unlike typical puzzle games in which pieces merely stack up, the elements in Shallow Sea can activate, deactivate, and even move, creating exciting combos and thought-provoking dilemmas that keep you on your toes.

On your turn, choose tiles showing fish, coral, or sea life, and place them on an empty space on your board. When fish surround a coral of the same color, you flip over the completed coral, which becomes a home for fish. Choose which fish will inhabit the coral, keeping the puzzle and ecosystem cards in mind. Use seashells to lure fish and move them, ideally completing multiple coral at once if you build them strategically.

Invite other creatures to enrich your ocean, trying to match the distinct scoring requirements of the ecosystem cards in order to score the most points.

To set up the game, first select the 10 Sealife tiles that you are going to use (there are recommended sets in the rulebook).  Put them all in the pouch and then draw out 5 random Sealife tiles to place on the table.  Each player drafts one from this original supply and places it on their personal board.  The supply is then refilled.   Each player takes their 5 shells, keeping 2 of them on their board and placing the other 3 off their board.

Mix up the Coral tiles in the coral pouch and the Fish tiles in the Fish pouch.  Then, make a supply of 5 pairs of tiles, one coral/fish pairing in each. Then place a Sealife tile underneath each – so that the fish is always in between the two tiles.  Finally choose one of each type of Ecosystem card and place them faceup on the table.  

On a turn, the active player goes through these three steps: 1) Select tiles, 2) Place the tiles, 3) complete tiles.  At any time during the turn, you can also move a fish at the cost of 2 shells.

To select tiles, you look at the market, and you must take a fish along with either of the two tiles that it is adjacent to.  If there are 4 Fish of the same color or 4 Coral tiles of the same color, you can wipe that row of tiles and replace it with new ones.   You can also spend one of your Seashells to refresh any of the three rows of things in the market.  While you normally have to take a linked pair of things, you can spend a shell to take any fish and any tile, regardless of their location in the market.

You now have to place both the fish and the tile on your board, and they can be placed in any order.  The tile must be placed so that it is adjacent to a previously placed tile, and you can rotate it any way you like.  The fish can be placed on any bubble that surrounds a placed tile on your board.

Now, check to see if a tile is complete.  Coral tiles have colored areas at their corners, if you have a fish of matching color next to all of these areas, you have completed the coral tile – you flip it over and place one of the fish used to complete the tile on top of it.  You also gain one Seashell from your supply. 

It is possible for you to complete multiple tiles in a turn; and it is up to you to choose the order in which you complete them – as it is possible that when you move a fish to top a finished Coral tile, you make another tile now incomplete.

Then, see if you have finished a Sealife tile. The conditions for the tile are printed right on it.  You must have completed tiles in the designated locations that match the stated rule (same or different colored coral, same or different colored fish).  The locations might be specific adjacent spots or might be any tiles in a stated direction.  If you have completed a Sea Life tile, flip it over and collect a shell.

The next player then takes their turn. The game continues until there are 4 empty spaces left on each player’s board.  Each player will have had 17 turns at this point. Points are now tallied.

• Points for Completed Tiles – VPs as shown on completed Coral and Sealife tiles
• Points for Incomplete Sealife tiles – score the smaller amount shown
• Points for variety of Sealife tiles completed
• Points for Incomplete fish – each fish NOT on a completed tile scores 1 point for each adjacent Completed Coral tile
• Points for the two Ecosystem Tiles – score each card based on criteria

The player with the most points wins the game. Ties broken in favor of the most shells left at the end of the game.

My thoughts on the game

Shallow Sea is a game that instantly attracted me when I saw the artwork.  Yes, this is usually not what attracts me to the game, but the bright clownfish on the blue background just immediately captured my attention. When I learned more about the game and found out that it was a drafting/tile-laying puzzle game, I knew that I would want to try it out.

At first, I thought it was going to be a nice light game (in keeping with the art) – but it’s really a more complicated puzzle.  First, you have the choice of what tiles/fish to draft.  There is a bit of  a layered decision tree going on here.  You need the right colored fish in the right places to complete coral tiles; but you also need to have the right Sealife tiles in the right places to leverage those completed tiles/fish into big points.  

Every now and then, you’ll be lucky and you’ll get a pair of tile/fish that works out just right – but more often than not, you’ll be making compromises.  I have found that I lean towards getting the correct tile as there is no way to move a tile, while you can always spend shells to move the fish around.

To that end, there are times when you might simply pick a set in order to get the right colored fish to complete a coral tile to harvest a Shell.  You can never have more than 5 Shells (hard limit), but you always seem to need them, so it’s good to have things set up to generate more shells.

The Sealife tiles have many different criteria for scoring, and the players that do best in Shallow Sea are the ones who are able to set up synergistic combinations.  I.e. if you already have three pink coral tiles in a row, finding multiple Sealife tiles that will score that set is key.  

Again, I find that the coral tile ones are easier to complete (as opposed to the fish colored ones) – but the game also incentivizes you to get Sealife tiles of different types with the end game bonus for variety of Sealife.  Of course, I don’t win at the game a lot, so maybe my simplified way of looking at things isn’t the best :)

Bad Comet is a company that I had not heard of prior to meeting with them at Spiel 2025, and I have been impressed by the two games that I tried from them – the other being Wondrous Creatures.  This is a company that I will definitely be keeping an eye on in the future.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Dan B. (1 play): I found most of this game very dull. It’s really not that hard to score the coral tiles, especially since you can move the fish around. The sea life tiles provide such interest as there is, but they’re very tactical since you have to take them as you go from a random selection; I think it would work a lot better to draft all the ones you get at the start. (There are also end-game scoring conditions, but they don’t seem to contribute enough points to be a major factor.)

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, John P
• Neutral.
• Not for me…Dan B.