Sandy Tableaus – Santa Monica Review

Being from the Midwest and now living in the rainy Pacific Northwest, one thing I haven’t really had much of a chance to do is walk the sandy ocean beaches on the Pacific Ocean.

Yes, the Oregon Coast is amazing, but where we’ve gone in the past, it’s a bit more rocky than sandy.

That doesn’t mean it’s not on my bucket list!

In the meantime, there’s always the chance to build my own beach boardwalk area, attracting tourists and locals, and VIPs who just want to experience certain things and will pay you well for them (but not in a creepy way or anything).

That’s where Santa Monica comes in, the tableau-building card game where you are building a beach and boardwalk area in, I assume, Santa Monica.

This card game was designed by Josh Wood with art by Jeremy Nguyen and Josh Wood (though the box just says Jeremy’s name).

It was published by Alderac Entertainment Group in 2020.

This is a card-drafting tableau-builder where you are forming your beach and your boardwalk, trying to install areas where tourists and locals alike will want to hang out.

It also has a lot of icon/tag matching which can score you points.

If you place your cards in the right order.

You need a starting point for all of this, so you will be drafting (in reverse turn order) a starting tile that will give you your starting sand dollars and people who will be wandering the area.

You will always have at least one green VIP meeple, and the top of the tile will tell you what they want to experience.

The one above will give you two VIPs and they want to experience Sports and Waves (the latter of which are only on beaches).

You’re going to be forming a tableau where the bottom cards are your boardwalk and the top cards are your beaches, with lots of different activities (or at least icons) on each card.

That’s where a bit of the randomness frustration comes into effect, because there is a grid of cards (2×4) where you take one of the bottom cards.

It could be that none of those cards work for you, and even worse, the one you want could be on the top row!

There will be two sand dollar actions that you can spend sand dollars to do, but it’s very possible none of them will actually let you take from the back.

More likely is that it will let you both take a card and move meeples.

And maybe swap two cards in your tableau, which can be very handy when you’ve had to take a card you don’t want previously.

Each game will also have one of three scoring cards that will dictate other ways you can score (beyond the cards themselves.

One of these will be based on the Wave icons on your beach cards. One will be based on icons on your cards, and one will be negative points (in some fashion) for unplaced people on your beach.

Because you want everybody to be happy. You don’t want people just wandering around aimlessly.

That’s no fun.

As you’re building your tableau, you’re going to want a mix of chained (adjacent) icons of the same type, and activity areas for your people to hang out in.

When you take a card and place it, it may give you people that you have to put on that card, and then move around your beachfront.

It will also have one or more tags, as well as possibly an oval area which will house people. Some will house any colour people (blue=locals, orange=tourists, green=VIPs) and some of which will only house a certain type.

You are trying to get a nice mix of cards that will give you people, and that will let you move people around.

If your people are stagnant, then they’re not going to fill your activity spaces, and that’s a bad thing.

What the card gives you is on the top left, and can also include sand dollars that will let you do the sand dollar actions.

As soon as somebody has placed their 14th card, the game end is triggered and you finish the round.

Generally that means everybody has 14 cards, though there are a couple of sand dollar actions (if they’re out) that let you take two cards, which means you’re at least a card ahead of everybody else.

Santa Monica is a nice, pleasant game that takes about an hour, so it’s a good bookend for a normal game day, either before or after the main event.

The rules are fairly simple (though the rulebook isn’t the best).

Some of the iconography made me have to stop and think, and the icon guide in the rulebook doesn’t include everything, though you can extrapolate the missing ones from the ones that are in there.

Just takes a bit of thinking.

You have to place the card you take adjacent to one of your other cards, but you don’t have to necessarily have a card below or above it.

This is very possible.

It’s interesting having to try and get both the people movement and the scoring places, and I like how the activity locations for scoring don’t have to score to have the people “placed.”

Considering you always have a penalty for “unplaced” people, it’s nice to give them a home even if they don’t actually score.

Like the beach above where 3 Locals will give you 3 points. You can put two locals there if you just want to have them placed. They won’t do you any good, but they also won’t count against you.

I also like the fact that when the game ends, you get one final movement where all locals move three cards and all VIPs and tourists move one.

That means you’re not so dependent on getting move cards near the end, though you do have to position the people at least a little bit to take advantage of their last movement.

(Edited this in because I forgot to include it!) The other knock against the game, if you’re wanting to buy it anyway, is the box is way too big for the components.

I mean way too big.

The only reason it needs to be this huge square box is because the rulebook is a huge square rulebook.

If not for that, the components would fit into a box that’s half the size, if not smaller.

Alderac (or whoever does their Bluesky account, anyway) says that they’d love to get this into a smaller box. Hopefully that will happen!

(End Edit)

Santa Monica isn’t groundbreaking at all, and it won’t burst your brain.

It’s also very random and you are at the mercy of the card market with very little mitigation.

However, it’s a really nice diversion and I will always play it if it’s on offer.

(This review was written after 3 plays, and numerous asynchronous plays on Yucata)