B+

Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave hits the beach with Sanibel

Hargrave's lightest release yet is a real shell game.

By Keith Law  |  March 14, 2026 | 8:00am
Images: Avalon Hill
Games Reviews board games
Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave hits the beach with Sanibel

Elizabeth Hargrave has carved her name into board game history with Wingspan, one of the most popular and acclaimed games ever published, which is about to get its third major expansion this year with Americas. Her latest game, Sanibel, is one of her lightest games yet, a thematic shift from her more science-driven titles, but a game you’re more likely to be able to play with your kids.

Sanibel is a light set collection game where the complexity only appears in the scoring, although that means to play it well you do have to have a plan. There are six types of shells you can collect while you move your meeple along the beach, three that come on diamond-shaped tiles and three on hexagonal tiles, and each of those six scores in a different way. Each shell type has a different colored background and symbol for easier identification. Some shell types want to be next to each other, some want to be in pairs, some can’t touch each other at all to score. Some score just through sheer quantity; some want a giant cluster but only of unique shells within that group. 

On your turn, you’ll move your beachcomber at least one section forward—you can move more than one section but it’s usually going to make more sense to go one—on to a space marked one, two, or three. You then select that number of diamond and/or hexagonal shells from that section of the beach and place them on your board as if you were dropping them into a bag, so gravity pulls them down until they hit the bottom or they hit at least one edge of a piece already on your board. Each player’s board has lines on it marking various spaces; you can place shells across those lines, but you can’t split a space into two.

Turn order isn’t fixed in Sanibel, which is why you might sometimes choose to take fewer shells from a section. The player the furthest back on the track goes next, and in each section, the space numbered one is the furthest back while space three is the farthest forward. (In the vernacular of board gaming, this is called a “time track.” I first encountered it in Glen More, and it appears in popular games like Patchwork, Tokaido, and The Search for Planet X.) Grabbing space three in the next section means you’ll get the two or the one in the section after that.

Sanibel board game Elizabeth Hargrave

Each player begins the game with two zigzag-shaped lighthouse tiles that provide bonus points, but they only count if you play them to your board, which you can only do when your meeple reaches the lighthouse at the halfway point of the track. One space there allows you to play both of your lighthouse tiles immediately. One space lets you play one such tile, and then take two random shell tiles from anywhere on the board. The remaining spaces let you play one lighthouse tile and then take a random shell, so turn order can be particularly significant as you reach the lighthouse section.

The scoring is the only part of Sanibel I’d call “difficult,” although it’s just a lot of arithmetic involving small numbers. You add up your points for each of the six shell types, which are usually in the 0-15 point range, then take your bonuses for the lighthouse tiles. 

Where Sanibel loses me a little is in the strategy aspect: I’m not sure there’s that much strategizing to do here other than making sure you lean into at least a couple of the specific shell types. Too much balance across all six isn’t a winning plan, as far as I can tell, and you can eschew one or two and win. With two players, you get fewer shells out on the beach during the game, so there’s more luck involved—you might need more variety in, say, the orange shells (which score for every unique shell within your largest contiguous group), but some of the shells you need to maximize your score may not show up. You have to go hard after at least one of the three diamond types, as those have higher scoring ceilings than the hexagons do. Beyond that, you’re at the mercy of the board, and the optimal choices are going to be easy to identify on each turn.

Sanibel is a very easy game to teach; you can explain the whole thing in five minutes, even the few smaller rules I skipped here. It also plays well under the 45 minutes promised on the box; I played a three-player game in less time than that and a two-player game that might have been around 20 minutes. Sanibel‘s solid; it might be better than solid, and I might just be a little biased because it’s not quite as weighty or thought-provoking as the great science-based games Hargrave is known for.

 
Join the discussion...
Keep scrolling for more great stories.