LogFAQs > #933080918

77. Turn the Tide (1997)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Simultaneous action selection, separate hands, bidding
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 20-40 minutes
Experience: 2-3 games over 2-3 sessions (2016-2017) with 4-5 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 61/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player has a hand of numbered cards and is attempting not to drown. There are two cards in the center representing water height. Simultaneously everyone plays a card, and the two highest among the played cards get the two water height cards respectively. Then the player with the highest water height drowns (loses a point). These initial points are assigned based on the estimated difficulty of the cards in your hand. At the end of a hand, your hand is preserved and passed to another player, and the game ends once you've played a hand using everyone's initial hand.

Design - Turn the Tide is super-clever. Any balance issues are solved practically by default due to the pass-your-hand mechanism. (You can get screwed by card deals; a hand with almost zero points has very limited upside, while a hand with all middle cards (that have more points) will give you little agency.)

I really enjoy simultaneous action selection and bidding as mechanisms - they can make you feel wonderfully clever or super-dumb, and the stakes can be high, but the action is quick. Turn the Tide has an interesting set of incentives. When you start the game, you actually have no water-height cards at all - which often means that you may want to avoid taking the card by playing a low card. However, if the water-height cards are low, you may want to burn a high/mid-card by taking one now - you'll lose a life potentially, but you get to save your low cards, and you preserve your lower cards. And if you get stuck with a high card, to avoid drowning multiple consecutive rounds, you're going to have to bid high the first chance you get on a lower card.

In this way, both low cards and high cards have benefits, because they hold the power of control, which is super-helpful in this game. Very clever design.

Experience - Uh, I think that a slow group can make this pretty rough. I also find that playing with a group of five is just slightly worse, because playing five hands feels a little longer than you need. But a four-person game feels snappy and fair and fun.

Future - I don't really have any desire to play Turn the Tide again, but I recognize its cleverness and I like the mechanism behind it. Might rank it a bit lower with careful thought, but it's a cool game and I wouldn't veto if it came up, especially with four players.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness