Sea Salt & Paper vs AI

The goal: be the first to reach 40 points, over several rounds. Placing all four mermaids wins at once.

Your turn has three steps:

• Take a card: draw the top two cards of the deck, keep one and discard the other face up onto either discard pile (onto the empty one, if one is empty); or take the top card of a discard pile.
• Play pairs (duo cards) from your hand in front of you, as many as you like, for their effects: two crabs take any card from a discard pile, two boats give you another turn, two fish draw a card, a swimmer and a shark steal a random card from your opponent, and a swimmer and a jellyfish limit your opponent's next turn to drawing one card. The lobster pairs with a crab: look at the top five cards of the deck and keep one. A starfish turns a pair into a trio, worth 3 points but with no effect.
• End your turn, or, with at least 7 card points, end the round:
  • STOP: both players score their card points.
  • LAST CHANCE: your opponent takes one final turn. Then, if your card points are at least theirs, you score them plus a colour bonus (1 point per card of your most common colour), and they score only their colour bonus. If not, you score only your colour bonus, and they score their card points.

Card points count your hand and the cards in front of you: 1 per pair (played or not), the collections (shells, octopuses, penguins, sailors), the multipliers (the lighthouse scores your boats, and so on) and the mermaids (each scores the cards of one of your colours). Point at any card to read what it does; the panel on the right adds up your points line by line.

The deck: if it's empty when a turn passes to the other player, the round ends and nobody scores.

Events (the Extra Pepper expansion): each round reveals an event that changes a rule for both players. At the round's end it goes to the leader or to the player behind, as the card shows, and from then on its rule is theirs alone, for as long as they stay in that position. The Coral Reef's face-down shell, LAST CHANCE and a revealed hand protect a player from attacks (steals, swaps and the jellyfish).

This page: anything outlined in gold can be clicked. To play a pair, click its cards in your hand, then its button (or click a pair's button first, then adjust the cards). A 👁 on a card in your hand means the computer saw it go there; the cards shown face up in the computer's hand are the ones you saw go into it. "Look" under a discard pile lists every card you remember on it: the computer remembers them too. Undo (Ctrl+Z) takes back your last decision and the computer's moves since, and Redo (Ctrl+Y) plays them again. Undo can be used to peek at the deck, since it doesn't reshuffle; the computer never sees what it shouldn't. The blue and orange bar is who the computer thinks is winning, from its last search: it only moves when the computer thinks.

This plays the base game with the Extra Salt and Extra Pepper expansions, for two players, as Board Game Arena's Arena mode does. It's an unofficial fan-made version, not associated with the real game.