I’d never played Point Salad yet it filled me with nostalgia

 Point Salad is a simple yet effective little game that made me feel like I was back when I first discovered the broader world of board games.

It consists of a deck of double-sided cards. One side shows a vegetable. The other side shows a scoring condition. Lay out three rows, one of scoring cards and the rest of veggies. On your turn, you take two cards from the common market for your personal tableau.  You can turn a scoring card over to be a veggie card but a veggie card can never flip to be a scoring card.

When the cards are gone, most points wins.

The scoring cards are, of course, the heart of the game. And they aren't just things like having X points for having sets of veggies. Some cards give you negative points for certain veggies as well as positive points or have the most of a given vegetable out of everyone. You can't get points if you don't have any point cards. And, while there isn't any direct interaction, indirect conflict quickly develops  as players try for similar goals or take cards to keep them out of other folk's hands.

Point Salad is simple and intuitive. Most of the rules are literally on the cards and none of them are hard to understand. And, while you don't get to directly do anything to another player, you get in each other's faces really quickly. It takes ideas that you've seen before and distills them down to about as simple as they going to go and still work. It isn't a complex game and it wouldn't be the center of a game night. But playing it made me happy.

When I first discovered games like Bohnanza or the Very Clever Pipe Game (both very early gaming experiences for me), I was impressed by both their simplicity and the amount of play that I could get out of them. As I mentioned, Point Salad had that kind of feel for me.

I understand that it has been revised and rethemed as Point Galaxy, including a solitaire option. I am seriously thinking of looking into that.