Seaside is a push-your-luck game that's designed and packaged so that you can - quite littorally - take it with you to the seaside to play on the beach. It comes with a sturdy canvas bag and all the components are printed wooden discs, so they can played with on the sand and just wiped down afterwards. A sea view is not essential, however: you can play Seaside just as well on a table at home.
Designed by Bryan Burgoyne, Seaside is a game for 2-5 players, but there are rules too for solitaire play. The game comprises 70 double-sided painted wooden discs, with art by Fanny Saulnier, but you only use all the discs if you're playing with four or five players. Gameplay is super simple: you just draw a disc from the bag, decide which side you you want to use and follow the rule for the image you picked. If your disc shows a Shell, Crab or Isopod you place it in a shared area designated as 'the Sea'; if you're playing the game on a real beach tho', don't chuck the discs into the actual sea! All the discs to be placed in the Sea show a 'take another turn' icon, so having placed your disc, you immediately draw another and repeat the process.
If your disc shows a Sandpiper, Beach, Wave or Rock it's played to your 'beach' - your individual tableau - and your turn ends. Here tho' is where it gets just a little more complicated because each of the beach discs functions in a different way...
When you play a Sandpiper you can take any number of Isopods from the Sea and stack them under the Sandpiper. The wrinkle here is that you only ever keep your largest Sandpiper/Isopod stack, so if you place out another Sandpiper and this time collect more Isopods, you'll have to discard your previous stack.
When you place a Beach disc, you take from the Sea one Shell for every Beach disc you have in your tableau. When you place a Rock disc in your tableau it has no immediate effect but when you place a second Rock, you get to take all the Crabs from the Sea plus one Crab from one other player.
Finally, if you place out a Wave disc, you flip a Beach disc and apply the effect of the new side. Since some of the Beach tiles have Waves on their reverse, this may well lead to a cascade of actions. Wave tiles are also important because when the game ends (as soon as the bag is empty), the player with the most Waves gets to take all the discs remaining in the Sea. And the winner is the player who has the most discs.
Seaside plays quickly. There's a high luck factor but players have a 50/50 decision to take over every disc they draw from the bag. If you're taking Seaside to the seaside to play on the beach, we recommend playing it at home a few times first so that players all know and understand the actions and interactions triggered by the seven different disc faces. The game comes with a Player Aid card summarising all the actions but it and the paper rules sheet are less likely than the other components to survive your trip to the seaside.
Seaside is published by Randolph and it's distributed in the UK by Hachette Boardgames.