Pandemic: Rising Tide

Plays: 5Px1, 2Px4.

The Game

Yes, yet another version of Pandemic, this time set in the Netherlands, at the start of the industrial age. Much of the Netherlands is below sea level, and the dikes protecting the land are starting to fail. Your objective is to build four modern hydraulic structures to help keep the country safe. Instead of four deadly diseases, your enemy is now just one thing - water. If you are unable to contain the flooding, you lose. If time runs out (you exhaust the draw deck), you lose.

The map is divided into four areas - purple, orange, yellow and green. There is one specific spot in each area where you must build a specific hydraulic structure. The wooden sticks are the dikes. They block water flow between regions. The four cylinders at the bottom are the markers representing the four hydraulic structures. Whenever you build one such structure, the marker is moved to the corresponding region, and you also gain some benefit.

The card on the right is a character card. Every player gets one, and gains a special ability as stated on the card. In Rising Tide, the character abilities are very strong. Some even feel overpowered to me. I wonder whether it's because one of the designers is Jeroen Doumen, one of the key designers from Splotter Games. I find there is a boldness in Rising Tide. The character abilities are strong. The flooding can be devastating. The designers do not shy away from being brutal or giving you great power.

The two cards on the left are region cards (player cards). The names are, of course, in Dutch, and I struggle with that. I don't know how to pronounce them. They are long. Some region names are similar, so I can't just abbreviate them by only reading the first few or last few syllables. I need to carefully read the whole thing. There are a few regions called Land van something. The card at the bottom is a player reference card (double sided) listing the possible actions.

The procedure of a turn is very similar to basic Pandemic. You perform 4 actions, then you draw player cards, and finally you draw dike failure cards. Your actions usually either help you in containing the flooding (a short term goal), or they help you in building the four hydraulic structures (the long term goal). Dike failure cards cause dikes to be removed, and regions to flood. There is a water flow procedure to be done at the end of your turn. Let's talk about this. There are two seas on the map, the North Sea, and that bay in the photo above. The seas start with 2 water cubes, representing a water level of 2. This can increase up to 4 during the course of the game. The general principle of water flow is water in a region causes all unprotected neighbouring regions to have at least one fewer water. If a region (or sea) has 3 water, all adjacent regions not protected by any dike will have at least 2 water. If a region or sea has 2 water, then all adjacent unprotected regions will have at least 1 water. In the photo above, the Zuiderzee bay has 2 water. When doing the water flow, Wieringemeer will get 1 water, because it is next to the bay and it is not protected by a dike.

To build a hydraulic structure, you need one player to have collected five cards of the colour matching the structure, and he needs to go to the specific construction site to build it. This is similar to basic Pandemic, just that the construction sites are fixed.

Some Storm cards are seeded into the player deck, and they work in a similar way as the Epidemic cards in Pandemic. Whenever you draw a Storm card, the marker on the sea level track advances. After certain thresholds, the number of water cubes in the seas increase, which can cause much water to spread inland if the shoreline is not fully protected. Also the number of dike failure cards to draw every turn increases. After a Storm is resolved, the dike failure discard pile is shuffled and placed back on top of the draw deck. This means regions which had failures will get failures again. This is one of the core mechanisms in the Pandemic series.

The orange windmill is a pumping station. Building a pumping station is one of the things you get to do in the game. You need to spend a region card matching the location you're in to do so. There are only five pumping stations, and if you need to build a new one after they are all on the board, you will need to dismantle an old one. Every turn the active player may use each pumping station to remove one water. As long as there is water at the station, the station can remove one water from any region connected to it by water. Regions with dikes between them are not connected by water, even if they both have water. Just imagine how the pumping station can remove water from the puddle which it is in and which is spread across multiple regions. Pumping stations cannot remove water from the sea though.

Some regions are high ground, and water cannot enter. When doing water flow, they are ignored. I realise I have made a mistake when playing. I had treated such high ground as inaccessible to players too. In the five games I have played, no player has ever stepped foot into high ground. I have inadvertently made life harder for myself and my fellow players.

The red dots are where dikes are placed during game setup. All dikes will be on the board at setup, but they will fail. Dike failure cards are drawn during game setup and at the end of every player turn. They specify which regions to degrade. Degrade means removing a dike if there is any left, else add one water. It is possible that water sprouts from an inland region because all its dikes have broken down. The sea is not the only source of water.

This is an event card. Some are shuffled into the player deck during setup. They are useful. You keep them and may play them any time.

When you build this orange hydraulic structure, you get to build dikes (for free) along the coast of the orange area. In this photo you can see some regions with double layered dikes. There is no limit to how many dikes you can to build on a border. The more you build, the longer it will last, because whenever degrading is done, dike pieces are removed one by one.

One other action you get to do is to build ports - those black buildings. Similar to the pumping stations, you have to discard a region card matching your location. Ports can be built anywhere, not just coastal regions. On any player's turn, he can move directly to any port on the board. So ports are to ease movement. You can't move from a port to anywhere, it's only from anywhere to a port.

The purple hydraulic structure is different from others. It seals off the bay Zuiderzee, converting it to land. It also serves as a permanent dike that never degrades. Once Zuiderzee becomes land, you may enter it and you may also pump water out of it.

The Play

My first game was played with Benz, Ruby, Xiaozhu and Edwin. It felt different from other games in the series, but nothing too difficult. Containing the flooding kept us busy, and we were a little slow in organising ourselves to build the hydraulic structures. The character powers felt strong. They were helpful. And then disaster struck, and we lost rather abruptly. I was a little shocked how quickly things went downhill. It was sudden and brutal. Water can spread very quickly. Whenever a region gets its second or third water, all adjacent unprotected regions may be affected. In the case of a 3 water region, you can imagine it being the centre of an explosion, the central spot having 3 water, an immediate ring around it with 2 water per region, and then an outer ring with 1 water per region. That can be a lot of water.

After that first game, I played a series of 2-player games with my wife Michelle. We had some losses due to such flash floods too. I think at least part of the problem is we did not build enough dikes. The dikes are not just for stopping water flow, they are also for simply taking hits from the dike failure cards. When there are dikes you can dismantle, you don't need to place water.

We discovered the importance and urgency of building pumping stations. They are a very efficient way to keep flooding under control. With all five stations working, every turn (not round) you can remove 5 water. That's equivalent to 5 player actions, when you have only 4 per turn. In one of our games, the setup was horrible and we already had severe flooding even before our first turn. We had almost exhausted the water cubes. We would lose when they ran out. It felt like we were doomed to fail even before the game started. However we worked hard to get the pumping stations up and running, and we managed to bring the flooding under control from the brink of disaster. It was crazy how far things could swing.

The Storm cards are nerve-wracking. When resolving a Storm card, one of the steps is to draw a dike failure card from the bottom of the deck, and degrade the indicated region three times. Since this card has never appeared in the game, there's not much you can do to prepare for it. Degrading a region three times may mean adding 3 water, if that region has run out of dikes. This sudden explosion of water will spread far and wide. The only thing I can think of which can mitigate the risk of Storm cards is to not let any region completely run out of dikes. This is not easy to do though, because you already have so many other things you need to do.

One important difference between Rising Tide and basic Pandemic is every region appears twice in both the player deck and the dike failure deck. Having double the cards in the player deck makes things a bit easier for the players. You have more time before the deck runs out, and you can better afford to spend or waste some cards. When you spend a region card to, say build a port, you know there's another copy still in the deck. On the other hand, having double the cards in the dike failure deck makes things more difficult for the players. If you have drawn a region card to degrade, you cannot be sure that region will be safe until the next Storm, because there is a second copy of that region still in the deck. If both cards of a region happen to be close to the top of the deck, that region will be degraded very frequently, which is dangerous.

During game setup, the bay area is a hotspot. In the initial setup, there are few dikes, and quite a few of the regions are already flooded. See the blue squares preprinted on the board. In this photo above we had removed most of the water and we had built new dikes to protect the bay area.

One difficulty I have with the map is some regions are in long, weird shapes. It is not always easy to tell which regions are adjacent and which regions are not.

This was one game we lost due to running out of water cubes to place. We still needed to place 2 water in Land van Altena, because that region in the centre with the pumping station had 3 water.

In this game we built all five pumping stations, and we removed water very efficiently. The flooded regions were almost all connected. We could pump water from as far away as that green region at the bottom left. You need to put some thought into where to apply the power of the pumping stations. Usually you want to remove water from regions with more water, or from regions which are far away. You try not to break up the flooded regions, because if you do, your pumping stations won't work for those isolated areas.

You can only build a dike when the region has no water. Sometimes when you remove water, you know that by the end of your turn, water will flow in again from an adjacent region, but you still have to do it because you need to build a dike.

Some of the pumping stations have removed even the last bit of water in the regions where they are standing, so they are idle now.

The white pawn is the sanitation engineer. Michelle played this character. His ability was he could take a player card from the discard pile matching his location. This didn't seem like much. I wasn't optimistic when we drew this character, but we decided to just go with it. To our surprise, this character ability turned out to be very powerful. Michelle could play the card to jump directly to a region, then pick that card back from the discard pile, then play it again to build a pumping station. She could even pick the same card up again to then build a port. The sanitation engineer was very well suited for collecting cards. I could intentionally play some cards simply for the sake of putting them into the discard pile, so that Michelle could then pick them up and use them for building the hydraulic structures. We eventually won the game without too much trouble.

In this particular game Michelle and I drew the green and black characters. Rising Tide comes with 7 different characters. We have played 4 games and we have tried them all now.

The sea-facing dike at Georee-Overflakkee is broken and seawater is rushing in.

The Thoughts

Rising Tide is a variant of Pandemic. This statement probably already helps you decide whether you are interested to try it. It's a cooperative game of medium complexity, and shares many similarities with the original. Despite no longer having four different diseases to deal with, the game does not become less interesting. The water and dikes mechanism is something different and keeps you busy enough. Compared to the other regional variants, Pandemic: Iberia is the closest to the original, because you still have four diseases to manage. Pandemic: Rising Tide and Pandemic: Fall of Rome are both more different. I like the Pandemic system so it is fun for me to experience the various variants.

The main thing I like about Rising Tide is how extreme it can be - in the character abilities, in the severity of Storms, and in how sudden disaster can strike. I like the boldness in the design.

This is not a difficult game to learn. You can teach it to people who have never played the original. It works well as a family game.