There are games which involve underwater life, where you escape big fish with big teeth or spawn salmon or escape from an island which is about to become underwater life, but rarely do you get to be... the plants. And not even the soft green plants, but the rocky crap we step on and it hurts.
Although pretty soon there won't be any of that either.
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Reef is something of a puzzle game. Everyone gets a 4x4 board and four pieces of coral, one of each color, set in the center four squares however you wish. This isn't done blindly; everything revolves around cards, and you get to see a display of three to choose from right away, as well as having two in your hand, and you can use these to determine good starting positions for your coral.
The cards are key, so here's how they work: each card has a top and bottom. The top has two pieces of coral, often (but not always) of the same color. When you play a card, you take those two pieces out of the stockpile and place them on your board. You can put them anywhere you want—different spaces, stacked in the same space, stacked on top of other pieces already there, etc. The only rule is that stacks cannot go above four high. Once a stack is four high, it can no longer be changed.
The bottom has a scoring mechanism. This is some pattern the coral must follow to score the points on the card. Only the top-most color on each stack matters for these patterns. Some of them are easy—for example, score one point for each top piece that's green. Some are more complicated, requiring two different colors diagonal to each other on stacks at least two high. The more complex the pattern, the more point each matching set is worth, but the simpler the pattern, the more times you may be able to score it when you play the card. Therefore, depending on how your board looks, any card may end up being able to score a good chunk of points.
One tricky aspect is that the colors a card lets you play don't match the colors the card lets you score (apart from a handful that let you score any color). A winning strategy involves playing as many cards as possible that let you score points while also playing corals that will let you score points on a future card. You don't need to score every card; if you can combo well enough, taking a zero on one card to score ten on another is better than two three-pointers. But comboing off big time isn't as important as scoring consistently while looking for a big combo. Putting too many resources into setting up a big score will usually leave you behind people who consistently grab points, because if you're thinking a few cards ahead (no one can take cards out of your hand, so you know what you have), you can always set up good combos.
Basically, it's not a question of small scores versus one big score. It's a matter of who can land bigger small scores or more big scores. The game runs for a reasonably high number of rounds, so if you can't pull anything that nets points right away, you still have time to set up something nice for yourself if you keep an eye out for the right cards. Variance can mess things up, of course, especially in a four-player game, but usually the cards come for you to create some nice scores.
And... that's pretty much it. It's a perfectly good game. Like so many games, it will find a niche crowd that adores it, a handful that really don't like it, and a large majority that find it an acceptable way to spend some gaming time. In theme, it's fairly unique; in form, it's reasonably different from most other offerings; yet it doesn't feel hugely different from a lot of perfectly good games that have crossed the gaming landscape in recent years. It's a game with a very pretty box designed to draw you into a game that you'll probably tell your friends is fun. So, if it sounds like a cool concept, by all means pick up a copy. If you're looking for a game that will blow your hair back with its unique greatness, this isn't quite it.
Score: Eleven punctured feet out of fourteen (family vacation).
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