Designed by Carl Robinson, with art by Weberson Santiago, Kelp is an asymmetric two-player game where one player is a shark and the other an octopus. The shark is trying to hunt out and eat the octopus, while the octopus is trying to remain hidden until the shark exhausts itself. Alternatively, the octopus can win by finding its own food and feeding four times. For the shark, Kelp is a dice bag builder. For the octopus, it's a deck builder.
The shark rolls blue dice to determine which currents they can follow to increase their movement, their yellow dice allow them to peek at tiles that are otherwise hidden from them as they search for the octopus, and the shark's red dice are used to attack. To get more red dice added to the shark's bag, the shark player will need to spend other dice to buy cards. This action, and any red dice it uses, will also add to the shark's exhaustion, which functions, in effect, as a timer that the shark has to beat.
The octopus will be hidden among the nine Mah Jong-style blocks that the octopus player can see but which are concealed from the view of the shark player sitting on the other side of the table. The octopus player uses their deck of cards to try to remain hidden for as long as possible and to confuse the shark. There are cards, for example, that allow the octopus to shuffle blocks on the board so that even if the shark discovers the octopus' location, the octopus may be able to hide again before the shark can use a red die to strike.
When the shark does make a successful strike, it's not an automatic win... Each player simultaneously reveals a card showing their movement and if the shark's card doesn't correctly counter the movement card played by the octopus then the octopus gets away. There's potential here for bluff and double-bluff as well as blind luck but if the octopus gets away, the card choices next time are reduced - upping the shark's chance of success...
The gameplay for each of the protagonists is not unduly complex, so you can be playing without an overly demanding rules overhead. However, you'll ideally need to know not just your own gameplay options but also those of your opponent. Those are going to be totally different, so you are, in effect, having to learn two games in order to play Kelp well.
Kelp is a mind game where each player is always trying to outguess and therefore bluff or double-bluff the other, and not just in the mini-game you play when the shark makes a successful strike. You can expect most games of Kelp to run to around 30-40 minutes, and tho' it can be a game of lucky strikes, it's at its best with players initially biding their time as they build up their respective capabilities, albeit that the shark will be adding to its exhaustion and the octopus may be periodically revealing its location as it too feeds. Whether it's the shark or the octopus that comes out on top, our plays have all had a distinctive arc.
Shown on our Board's Eye View 360 is a preview prototype of Kelp that was produced by Wonderbow ahead of the game's run last year on Kickstarter. The published version will come with a shark mini rather than the LEGO shark you can spy in our 360. Kelp successfully funded - raising close to €1.5 million - but it's not too late to join the party: you can click here today to pre-order the game on the pledge manager before it closes on 12 April.