Pandemic: Rising Tide

EvEvanstar10,0

I don't have much basic pandemic experience. I have a little Pandemic Legacy experience. Generally speaking Pandemic is not a game or game system that gets me very excited. What brings this game to my attention is the co-designer Jeroen Doumen, who is a part of Splotter Games. Splotter's work always has my attention. So, let's talk Pandemic Rising Tide. At the start of this game, you populate the whole board with wooden sticks which represent dikes holding back water. Then you flip some cards, and degrade the matching regions by removing dikes. If a region is out of dikes, then instead you add some water cubes. The game starts slow and then gets super intense, as once a certain number of events hit, the water level of the ocean goes up, and if you've lost dikes along the coast, water starts pouring in. In our game we lost due to running out of water cubes to place. I'm excited for my next go at it. Something I found delightful about this game, other than the fact that the water cubes are this beautiful translucent blue, is that the water flows very logically. A spot with 3 water sets it's adjacent spots to 2 water. Spots with 2 water set their adjacent spots to 1 water. I also think the tools the game gives you to remove water are fascinating. One thing you can do is build a windmill sort of thing, which removes 1 water each turn from a spot the windmill can reach from a chain of contiguous flooded spots. It doesn't work at all if the mill is sitting on dry land. Where to build these things is a really compelling strategy decision. You win the game when you construct all the buildings, which can be fairly far flung on the board, and when built they activate a strong one time ability. Other than those things, there are enough Pandemic mechanisms shining through that players familiar with Pandemic were able to jump right in and play. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★★★★ Raw enjoyment

Rob Millwardstar8,0

Best re-theming of Pandemic. Works amazingly well