Kelp Board Game Review - Roll for Vibe Check

After a long weekend celebrating the release of Ocarina of Time, I reached for what I thought was a simple two-player game to play with my spouse. Kelp, by Wonderbow Games, is absolutely the hardest two-player game I’ve played all year. Completely asymmetrical, with a lot of actions for each player to keep track of, makes this way crunchier than you’d think going by art and theme.

In Kelp, you are either a shark, or an octopus, and they have completely different gameplay. 

The octopus is trying to find food and survive shark attacks, doing so by hiding tiles and playing a bluffing deduction game. Hiding your tiles so the shark doesn’t know where you are, as well as setting traps for the shark, means a lot of planning ahead and resource management. The octopus wins by either eating all four food items or surviving long enough that the shark exhausts itself.

The shark is playing a bag-builder game, and all it has to do is hunt down and eat the octopus before getting exhausted. Using the dice you pull from your bag, you swim around the board, hunt through the kelp forest, and hopefully find and attack the octopus. Building the right combination of dice in your bag, as well as managing your energy/exhaustion, puts pressure on you to play as efficiently and aggressively as possible.

I played the shark, and my spouse played the octopus, and the gameplay felt very thematic for the actual animal. The octopus learns new abilities, and with always shuffling and hiding its tiles, it felt like my opponent was hiding in the environment. Playing the shark, I was moving as fast as I could and going for aggressive attacks before I became exhausted, and it felt like I was actually hunting something down.

As the shark, if I caught and attacked the octopus, it would initiate a confrontation. Each player has three cards, and they secretly pick one. If the shark picked the same color as the octopus, the shark wins. If not, then the octopus survives, they get the action on the card, and the color card used is removed from the game. This means the shark player has a fifty-fifty chance of winning the second Confrontation, and a guaranteed win on the third. That didn’t feel like a good vibe, planning and playing all of this complicated strategy for it to come down to a rock-paper-scissors match.

Overall vibes were a mixed bag, but mostly good. I definitely want to take a turn as the octopus and see if I like that more than the shark. If you like a lot of crunch and rules with your two-player games, Kelp is for you. It’s also worth mentioning that I played the deluxe edition, and it was absolutely a deluxe experience.