Salmon Run!! was designed as an educational tool to teach consumers of fish about the various elements that involve the farming of Atlantic Salmon. All of the information in the flavor text of each card is factual (sans the lawsuit card) and based off of a research paper that I wrote while developing the game. The game does not try to skew the players' perspective of farmed salmon in any way, rather, provides them with basic background information in order to make informed choices while purchasing fish.

The name, Salmon Run!!, comes from the behavior of the same name, in which salmon swim upstream from the ocean and into freshwater streams to spawn. Ironically, farmed salmon aren't allowed to participate, as they are not allowed to breed when they reach adulthood. Farmed salmon are spawned at a location separate from the farm and raised until they are a certain size before they are shipped to the farming facilities.

Initial ideas took the form of a fisherman vs. farmer game, in which players would separate into two teams and try to squash the others' industry. This proved to be too complicated and thus was boiled down to only the farming side of the fishing industry.

Cards were initially plotter printed as a single large sheet and hand-cut to size to create a deck of over 100 cards, with supplementary cards being printed and added as necessary. These cards, some of which even lacked graphics, were used in six separate play testing scenarios to adjust the rules and fine-tune the effects of the cards themselves.

The 20 unique card types are divided into five color-coded subcategories based upon their effect on the player.

The completed deck contains 144 cards and 80+ plastic tokens.