Got in a couple of 4-player sessions of PANDEMIC: RISING TIDE.
OVERVIEW:
This is the second in the "Survival Series" of Pandemic special editions (after PANDEMIC: IBERIA), which all take unique aspects of a particular geographical location and historical era to produce a Pandemic variant. In RISING TIDE, you're tasked with bringing the Netherlands into the Industrial Age by building dikes and pumps to keep ocean waters from flooding the land. Players win by building four industrial structures before running out of player cards or water cubes.
In most respects, RISING TIDE uses very familiar Pandemic base game mechanics. Roles are similar in nature to previous Pandemic roles, and players get the usual 4 actions on their turn. "Storm" cards take the place of Epidemics, but work in much the same way.
The key difference in RISING TIDE is that instead of stopping diseases, you're trying to control the flow of water represented by blue cubes. At the end of each turn, water flows - lands with 3 cubes cause connected lands to fill with 2 cubes, and in turn lands with 2 cubes fill adjacent empty lands with 1 cube. Lands with 1 cube don't spread.
To mitigate this effect, players are able to build pumps. Pumps activate every turn and pump one cube of water out of any region connected to it by a "chain" of water. They are also able to place dikes, which keep water from spreading through open borders.
COMPONENTS:
This is the first time I've ever seen our group's "Master Game Pimper" have no ideas on how to improve the default components. Water is represented by nifty little translucent blue cubes, and the other tokens for ports, pumps, and industrial structures are wooden. The game board is beautiful, with the same high production values set by IBERIA. The art design heavily emphasizes the water theme, right down to the water droplets on the game board. The cards are also beautifully represented. I bought IBERIA for the artwork alone, and it was nice to see RISING TIDE maintain that quality.
GAMEPLAY:
I've quite literally played every iteration of Pandemic ever released, so I have a lot of points of comparison. I will say that after a couple of plays, RISING TIDE for me jumped way ahead of IBERIA. The water mechanic changes the core strategy enough to make the game feel different enough from Pandemic to be worth owning, something I didn't get from IBERIA. I also felt that much of IBERIA was spent trying to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B. In RISING TIDE, movement seems to be fairly trivial, so that you can focus on the fun stuff.
Because of the way the water flow mechanic works, RISING TIDE becomes a much more proactive game than reactive game. Once floods start breaking out, you can lose the game very quickly. So it's all about preventing them from happening in the first place. In our first game we were just one turn away from winning when we got hit with a massive cascade of floods that depleted our water cube supply and cost us the game. All because we failed to properly shore up our coastline.
Pump location also becomes very important. You have to learn where to place pumps (and how best to drain water) to get the maximum efficiency out of them before they dry up. I love when a game's theme is reflected strongly in the game mechanics, and RISING TIDE is a perfect example. We really did find ourselves thinking like engineers - trying to bring water levels down evenly to prevent re-floods, building dikes around certain regions so we could pump water out, etc. The fact that they were able to convey the theme so strongly without significantly changing the base Pandemic mechanics is pretty amazing.
Another fun point - all the region names are authentic, so be prepared to face a bunch of lands with incomprehensible names. A lot of our fun was doing our best "Swedish chef" impressions as we read some of these out. At some point we stopped trying, so that something like "Noordoostpolder" just became a mutually agreed "Nord Pot Holder."
CONCLUSION:
My personal favorite alternate edition of Pandemic (aside from LEGACY, of course) is still REIGN OF CTHULHU, but RISING TIDE is a fantastic variant. As much as I love IBERIA'S production values, I prefer RISING TIDE'S theme and game mechanics. The proactive strategy is a nice change of pace from traditional Pandemic, and figuring out the water flows and pumps added a little extra brain stimulation each turn that we really enjoyed. It's probably not going to blow you out of the water (no pun intended) if you're burned out on Pandemic, but it's one I'll be adding to my collection just for the unique theme and high production values.
