The Tide

The Tide (Italian title: Marea)

Designers: Piero Cioni and Silvano Sorrentino
Publisher: GiocAreA Online
Type: Tile
Languages: English, Italian
Status: Free
Available from: http://www.davincigames.it/giocarea_eng/11/dagiocare.htm

The idea behind The Tide is the cooperation between two designers. An author from daVinci (Silvano Sorrentino, “Dancing Dice”, “Ostrakon” among others) has written the first page of these rules, while an author from Red Omega Studio (Piero Cioni, “Crazy Rally”, “Tortuga”), has completed the work. Successful experiment? You call it!

The playing area is made up of a 6 x 6 area of tiles (the extra 36 tiles are placed in 6 piles of 6 tiles each at the top of the paying area, which represent the tide.) Each player contols 4 pawns, representing friends who are collecting shells & cleaning up trash at a beach. On his turn, each player can do one of the following: move one of his friends, collect ONE seashell, or collect one OR MORE pieces of rubbish. Each time a tile is removed, it is replaced by a tile from the tide.

The game ends as soon as one of the following conditions is met: one of the players reaches 10 points: that player is the winner, OR one of the column runs out of tiles (no tiles in the column, no tiles in the relevant pile); the winner is the player with the most points. In case of a tie, the winner among tied players is the one with the most tiles

(Note: the link on the game's website to the pieces is broken. However, you can get the components from the Italian edition -- here's the link to the archive: http://www.davincigames.it/giocarea/archivio/giocarea11.zip. The components are language-independent.)

This game appeared in issue #11 of GiocAreA Online.