Water month started off very well. Both Lowlands and Saltfjord are new to us. Saltfjord is a reimplentation of Santa Maria, a game we had once upon a time, with a theme that definitely needed a new coat of paint.
Lowlands is an economic farming euro in the vein of Uwe Rosenberg. However, there is an interesting semi-cooperative element with the dike. All players should work toward its development or everyone could suffer. Otherwise, you're using your three farmers worth two, three, and four action points to carry out actions like building buildings, building fences, getting resources, and buying or selling sheep. Pretty standard farming euro fare but all quite enjoyable. Each farmer being worth a different number of action points adds a bit of spice to the worker placement as you have to plan how to deploy them to maximize actions. The three rounds move quickly and you really do need to balance focusing on your own board with managing the dike (unless you go heavy into buildings that mitigate dike breakage). This was a very pleasant surprise for us.
I had little doubt that I'd enjoy Saltfjord. It's just the sort of optimization puzzle euro that I like (even if I'm not always great at it right away). The bulk of the game centers around selecting dice to activate rows or columns on your player board to gain resources and take actions. One of the main actions you'll want to take is building more buildings onto your player board to improve now and column activations. Of course, you need resources to do that, which you can get directly from your player board and from the fishing action on your board. The game has a very interesting storage board interaction, as you can improve or degrade resources to get what you need for deliveries, going up the tech trees, or building buildings. The three rounds breeze by though and we found it difficult to be a generalist and succeed. You really need to pick a path or two to focus on. While this wasn't a surprise like Lowlands, it was still a delight.