Wouter & Ymke 
The seas have risen, most of the old world is underwater, and what remains of civilisation is now floating around in pieces. In Kalypso, powerful vortexes bring salvage back to the surface: wood, metal, rubber, seaweed, plastic and whatever else survived the flooding. You use those scraps to create a foundation on the water, rescue survivors and slowly build something that looks less like a pile of rubbish and more like somewhere people might actually want to live.
Kalypso is a tile-laying survival game played over four rounds. It combines spatial tile placement with building and resource management, and can be played competitively, cooperatively or solo. You start with a mostly empty ocean and gradually build a floating settlement from whatever comes your way.
You’ll also find Kalypso at Spiel Essen ’26, where Inside Up Games will be exhibiting in Hall 3, booth R400.
👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 45-60 minutes
📝 Designer: Gilles Turbide
🎨 Artwork: Amelia Sales
🏢 Publisher: Inside Up Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Your settlement begins with a foundation made from T-shaped salvage tiles. Each contains five spaces showing combinations of wood, metal, rubber, seaweed and plastic. In multiplayer games, you choose a tile from a vortex, place it next to your existing foundation and resolve anything you’ve triggered. Once everyone is finished, the vortexes are passed around the table. Solo skips the vortexes: you draw two salvage tiles from the bag each turn and choose one to use.
How you arrange the materials determines what you can build. A complete 2×2 section of foundation containing at least three spaces of the same building material can support a building of that type. Plastic can fill one of the spaces, but doesn’t count as a building material. Wood is used for houses and coopers, metal for solar panels and shipyards, rubber for warehouses and scrapyards, and seaweed for net workshops and greenhouses.
Coopers produce barrels, shipyards launch boats, warehouses provide more salvage, scrapyards give you scrap, net workshops let you fish and greenhouses create gardens. Houses allow a survivor to become a settler working in another building, activating that building again. A larger 3×3 area with at least five matching materials can support a monument instead. Monuments don’t provide an action, but they’re worth 11 points in competitive games and can contribute towards settlement goals.
There’s more to expansion than adding another piece of salvage. Covering a life preserver rescues a survivor, and reaching a half-submerged barrel gives you a full barrel. Full barrels become part of your foundation and can act as wild building materials. Boats can be launched farther across the ocean and join your foundation once connected to it. Nets let you fish particular zones, and completely surrounding an area of open water can collect resources trapped inside.
Each round also brings a forecast. Competitive players choose forecast cards to pass to one another, with the direction changing between rounds. Cooperative and solo players deal with a shared forecast. These require certain resources, including fish, boats, barrels, scrap or survivors. When you gain something your forecast needs, you may have to choose between using it normally or assigning it to the card. Complete the requirement and you receive a reward. Failing costs points in competitive play. In cooperative and solo games, it ends the game.
After four rounds, the competitive player with the most points wins. Cooperative and solo games have additional survival requirements. Survivors need to become settlers, and the community needs enough fish and gardens to support them. There are four difficulty levels, from Learning to Hard. Survive the four rounds and complete both settlement goals, and you’ve won.
Artwork & Components
For a game about civilisation trying to survive on a flooded planet, Kalypso is surprisingly colourful. Bright blue ocean boards quickly become covered with green, yellow, red, white and dark blue pieces. Amelia Sales’ illustrations have a rough, handmade appearance that suits structures assembled from whatever has been recovered from the sea. Once buildings, boats and settlers start appearing, the settlement looks suitably improvised.
There’s quite a bit in the box: four large ocean boards, 120 salvage tiles, four vortex boards, buildings, monuments, boats, gardens and nets, alongside fish, scrap, barrels, life preservers, survivor meeples, forecasts and settlement goals. Several resources have their own bags, which makes dealing with all of this a little easier. Getting everything onto the table and putting it away again takes time. With several ocean boards and all the shared components on the table, Kalypso takes up a fair amount of space.
The T-shaped salvage tiles are the components you’ll handle most, and layering buildings over them gives the finished settlement some actual height. I also like the little wooden survivors and fish tokens more than I probably need to.
The HoldFast coating on the ocean boards and salvage has a fuzzy, fabric-like texture that feels very different from normal cardboard. It creates enough friction that salvage stays in place when you’re adding buildings or reaching across a crowded board. It works. I still don’t particularly like how it feels.
📷 Magnetic component trays by BGExpansions. We received these free of charge.
Our Experience
Our first game involved plenty of looking between the building supply, player aid and our boards. The actions themselves weren’t difficult to follow. Seeing everything we could do with a placement was another matter. We mostly concentrated on making the next building, leaving ourselves with awkward gaps and materials that would have been considerably more useful somewhere else.
After that we paid more attention to the shape of the settlement. Empty water wasn’t always something we wanted to cover. Sometimes we needed the space around it, wanted to surround something inside it or needed to keep a route open towards a survivor or somewhere a boat might eventually connect. Some apparently useful placements became surprisingly awkward because of what they’d leave behind. Certain salvage tiles also spent an unreasonable amount of time being rotated before we finally put them somewhere.
Several of the turns we talked about afterwards involved buildings feeding into each other. We’d have an area almost ready, gain a barrel or some extra salvage and suddenly have another construction available. Settlers gave us another chance to use buildings we’d already made. There were also plans where one of us had confidently worked out the entire sequence, only to discover halfway through that one material wasn’t where we thought it was.
Competitive games kept most of our attention on our own settlements. We’d notice when somebody took the salvage we wanted, and nobody was above passing along an inconvenient forecast. We weren’t studying each other’s boards very closely. Simultaneous play meant everyone could mostly get on with their turn, apart from whoever was still rotating a tile when the others were ready to pass the vortexes. Three players was our favourite count from those we tried.
Cooperative play led to rather different conversations. Rescuing a survivor sounds like an obviously good thing until the settlement has to put that person to work and support them. There were occasions where we deliberately avoided reaching someone because we already had enough problems to deal with. Not exactly heroic behaviour, but the community survived. A more experienced player can easily start directing too much of the shared puzzle, and we did have to watch that in our games.
Solo gave me as much time as I wanted to stare at the settlement without holding anyone else up. I found myself spending longer over individual placements than I did in multiplayer, especially when there wasn’t an obvious place for the salvage I’d drawn. It suited the survival side of Kalypso well.
Our Thoughts
Buildings, monuments, survivors, fish, gardens, forecasts and settlement goals can all demand attention at once. None of them is difficult to understand. There were turns where I simply wanted to concentrate on the settlement rather than check another objective or scoring condition. I’d happily lose one or two of those extra considerations.
The cooperative mode makes better use of some of that complexity. A competitive settlement can neglect something if the points are coming from elsewhere. Cooperatively, forgetting about food or taking on more survivors than you can support can end the game. We had to look at the settlement differently without learning another construction system to do it. The possibility of one player directing everyone else is the obvious problem with the shared puzzle.
I don’t think Kalypso changes enormously from one play to the next. Forecasts, settlement goals and the salvage coming out of the bags give you different problems. The basic construction puzzle remains familiar. Sometimes the piece you need simply doesn’t appear and whatever you were preparing has to wait. Trying to plan everything several turns ahead never made much sense for us.
What kept me interested was the settlement itself. There’s something nice about looking at the mess towards the end and remembering that several of those buildings started with a salvage tile you weren’t particularly pleased to draw. After a few games, I was less likely to write off a salvage tile just because I couldn’t immediately see where to put it.
For me, building the settlement is the part I enjoy most. By the final round, the ocean board has usually become this slightly ridiculous collection of salvage, buildings, boats and people that somehow works. Our settlements were rarely pretty, but I was usually quite pleased with what we’d managed to build.
📝 We received a copy of Kalypso from Inside Up Games.
If you’re heading to Spiel Essen ’26, you can find Kalypso at Inside Up Games’ stand in Hall 3, booth R400.
We’ve also gathered our other Spiel ’26 coverage in one place.
