Pandemic: Rising Tide

Rising Tide uses the Pandemic card system but rejigs it to suit a different narrative, with a different foe: here instead of fighting infection, you are attempting to hold back the sea as it attempts to bring 19th century Netherlands to a watery demise. To win, the players collaborate to build the four key hydraulic structures that will keep the country dry. But whilst you’re doing that the sea is rising…

The board shows the Netherlands broken into regions, with each region comprised of several territories. At the start of the game a number of dikes (represented by wooden pieces) are placed out on the board, players receive a starting hand of territory cards, and the sea is represented by several blue cubes already encroaching onto land. All players start in the same central region.

As previously mentioned, the goal is to build the hydraulic structures. To do that, somebody has to be in the appropriate territory with with five cards that colour-match the region in question. So objective one is collect cards of the same colour, and as you’re working co-operatively, each player should collect different colours! The secondary ‘objective’ is to prevent the game from defeating you between-times by holding back the sea. So play is a sort of management of these two opposed endings – on your turn you can pump away a single water cube from the territory you’re located in, build pumps that will do similarly at the end of everyone’s turn, repair dikes the sea has washed away, and navigate the board in a variety of ways (costing cards, unless you’re simply moving to an adjacent territory) and take/give/swap cards with your fellow collaborators.

At the end of each turn you draw two more cards and then the sea does it’s worst: cards from a Dike Failure deck are drawn to show where a dike will be removed, or if there are no dikes left, a water cube will be added instead. One, two or even three cubes is considered manageable, but the moment any region tips over into four, there will be a flood – a water cube is added to every adjacent region, with the possibility of further flooding triggered. Following this there is a Waters Flow phase where territories with water in them can potentially spread water into adjacent unprotected territories.

Additionally, in the territory deck are a number of Storm cards – when one of these is drawn, three water cubes are added to a random region and the number of Dike Failure cards drawn at the end of each turn may rise.

In summary, the game is trying to drown you, and your chief weapons are teamwork and the special ability of your character: everybody has some kind of vocation-related power that, when played well, can make the difference between winning (-build the four structures!) or losing, which happens the moment either the territory cards run out or there are no water cubes left to be placed when you need them, because they’re all on the now-soggy Netherlands.