Turn the Tide Board Game Review

Year Published: 1997

Players: 3-5

Playing Time: 30-45 Minutes

There’s not a ton to discuss here. But that’s a good thing.

See, Turn the Tide is a game with a simple structure, low rules overhead, one or two minor twists that make it unique without becoming complicated, some subtle strategic considerations, and it makes me laugh every time I play.

Not only is this acceptable for a game; sometimes it’s exactly what I want from my gaming.

But it also makes for a tricky review, because there aren’t fancy components to describe, nor a ton of ideas to dissect. I wonder sometimes if the race toward complexity in many modern gaming circles is spurred – at least in part – by the social media and content marketing engines that thrive on pretty visuals and 2,000+ word articles. It’s a lot harder to make Turn the Tide look or sound sexy for an audience increasingly used to their buyers’ guides being video-based.

It’s a favorite of mine, though, and it’s perhaps a quieter one than some. Let’s learn about it.

Turn the Tide – The Premise

You’re each dealt a hand of cards from 1-60, with the remainder face-up for all to see. Cards may or may not have half or all of a life preserver, which is your potential score for the round. Two “tide” cards numbered 1-12 are drawn in the table’s center before each action. On your turn, players pick a card and reveal simultaneously.

The first twist is that the highest card takes the lower of the two tide cards, with the 2nd-highest taking the highest tide card. So it becomes a hand management and psychology test as you try to shed your hand without taking the highest tide card available. If you’re stuck with the highest (or tied) after a cardplay (newly acquired tide cards cover older ones), you lose a life preserver.

The second twist is that not all hands are created equal, but this is evened out by playing rounds equal to the player count, with each hand rotating around the table. So the crap hand my neighbor is stuck with this round will be mine to deal with next round.

Hidden Delights of the Psyche

As I said, there’s not a ton to discuss. Minus a few minor rules, that’s the whole rules teach above.

So rather, I want to talk about the delights of nuanced hand management and psychologically-based gameplay. Because that’s what this is. It delivers those two things, and your enjoyment – or lack thereof – will be entirely dependent on what you think of those elements.

The “I think she’s going to play {X}, but she knows that…” recursion is funny, but this is a 3-5 player game. It’s a bit more chaotic than that. But not without insights you can glean.

Who really needs to get rid of an onerous 11- or 12-ranked tide card? Have you played with their hand of cards in a previous round? Was it replete with high-numbered cards in the 50s? Or will they be forced to play, say, a 43? The answer can be the difference between staying safe for a few more cardplays or accidentally taking the high-tide card while that opponent covers his 12 with a lower tide number.

Is this hand lacking numerous high and low numbers, which are generally the safest way to avoid losing multiple rounds in a row? If so, how you dole out your mid-tier 20-40 cards, and at what moments, can be the difference between a high-scoring round and one where you score nothing.

There’s more of this tactical nuance under its surface than it initially appears. Many will play the game like a random party game, and it can still be fun this way. But they’re missing out on the full experience.

Underscoring all of this is that someone – always – will be at the end of a bad beat after each card play. So there’s always something to laugh at. Sometimes it will be you, and that’s funny too.

Hands where the same player gets brutalized multiple cards in a row are particularly hilarious. Sure, you need to be aware that this is a possibility; but this is a card game. If you can’t roll with the punches, smiling through it, entire swaths of gaming are avoidable for you.

It’s unforgiving in this sense, but always amusingly so. Few games make me smile more.

Nits, and the Picking of Them

Those same bad beats mean that someone can, and probably will, be out of it by the final round (or two rounds in 5P games). It could be argued that the game overstays its welcome slightly in this regard. I don’t mind it personally, but also don’t disagree with the criticism. It’s not a long game, but at 5P can be 45 minutes with teaching and shuffling and such.

And while this next point isn’t a criticism, I’ve spoken a lot in my reviews about balance in games. Not strategic balance, but balance between thematic elements. If the hand management strategy and party-game-style hilarity are the themes of this one, some will prefer their goofiness to be even more random, while others will want more strategy and less randomness.

This sits in a nice middle ground for me in terms of what I want from my card games. But not everyone will be able to say the same. For example, Take 5/6 nimmt may be more amusing, but it’s also often more chaotic, particularly at higher player counts. Stefan Dorra’s more well-known For Sale is another; that one hews a bit more strategic, but to my eye isn’t quite as funny.

So if Turn the Tide is the best of those three for me (they’re all good, for clarity), that won’t be true for some others. Where you fall on that spectrum is a question I can’t answer.

Turn the Tide – Conclusions

It is the best of those three for me, though, and it speaks to how consistently I simply enjoy myself while playing. It gives me impossible decisions to make, where I can never know the right answer for sure but feel as though I can discern enough of the game state to make informed decisions. And it gives me ample outlets to laugh at the fact that I’m frequently wrong, since the human mind is a more unsolvable puzzle than anything that exists in a table game.

It also solves that issue in card games where a bad draw feels unfair, because any hand is potentially great (or terrible) and you play with each that gets dealt in a game. I’m increasingly respectful toward games that do this without resorting to clunky fixes. No surprise, the masterful Stefan Dorra rises to this challenge and, just like For Sale (also by Dorra), delivers a game that does what it sets out to do with little or nothing extraneous to that core experience.