Point Salad

Point Salad is a card game published by Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) in 2019. It was designed by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, and Shawn Stankewich, with artwork by Dylan Mangin. The game is named for the scoring method rather than for a setting or storyline: a player's final score is assembled from combinations of vegetable cards and point cards.

It supports two to six players, is intended for ages eight and up, and typically takes about fifteen to thirty minutes. Its deck contains 108 cards representing six vegetables: lettuce, carrot, tomato, pepper, onion, and cabbage. Each vegetable appears in a distinctive color and illustration, making the market easy to read. The cards are double-sided in function: one face shows a vegetable, while the reverse presents a scoring condition.

That dual use drives the central decision. On a turn, a player takes either one face-up point card or two face-up vegetable cards from the market. A chosen point card is kept with its scoring side visible; a vegetable card is kept with its produce side up. After the pick, the market is refilled, and play passes clockwise. Players may also take a point card from one of the available piles rather than drafting only from the three exposed cards.

The scoring side of a card can reward a particular vegetable, reward sets or pairs, compare a player's supply with another player's, or impose a penalty for collecting something. This variety means that the same vegetable can be valuable under one scoring card and undesirable under another. Because every point card has a vegetable on its reverse, choosing a scoring condition always removes a possible produce card from the shared supply. Players therefore constantly weigh immediate access to vegetables against long-term scoring potential.

At the end, players reveal their selected point cards and score each condition independently. They add applicable bonuses and subtract penalties; the player with the highest total wins. The design uses no board, money, dice, or hidden hands: tension comes from a limited public market and changing card availability. Players may take vegetables that help opponents, because leaving useful cards visible can make a later turn stronger. Its compact format makes Point Salad a replayable optimization puzzle: draft scarce ingredients, align them with scoring cards, and accept that no selection satisfies every objective. That tradeoff defines Point Salad at every possible player count.