Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders

The first game of this series, Tidal Blades: Heroes of the Reef, became a standout hit for Druid City Games. It featured a mix of worker placement with push-your-luck dice rolling and light RPG elements with increasing stats. Although the deluxe game comes in this awkwardly sized box, the game itself is pretty fun. I think the biggest attractor of the game is just the beautiful and vibrant art which draws you into this fantasy island world. I actually streamed a playthrough of the first game, playing it solo.

Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders continues the story from the other two games. This time instead of competing against each other, the heroes area working together in a dungeon crawler game. Similar to Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, it uses map books to create differernt scenes and battle maps that you'll explore, which makes setup and play a lot easier.

Tidal Blades 2 takes the dice rolling from the first game and augments it to be more tactical. The dice have special symbols that interact with abilities, sometimes asking you to spend Focus in order to deal out more damage.

One of the innovative features is the "Nexus Grid", which is your 3x3 player mat where you play cards per turn. This is what drives your actions in a game, and depending on how you puzzle it out you can get a lot of value out of one card, potentially getting to activate it up to 3 times before it gets discarded. On your turn, you'll play a card onto an empty space, with the board bonus getting replaced with the card's ability. You only discard cards if the row or column you activated is completely full of cards. The mix of deckbuilding and dice rolling works well, it's a really solid system.

Player turns follow an initiative track that is like a simplified version from Gloomhaven. The action card you play may modify how quick or slow you'll go in turn order, and once players have picked their card then the enemies reveal from their own action deck, possibly augmenting their initiative too. So there's a decision layer of picking cards for the action they can provide or maybe picking one for initiative and then strategically activating existing cards on your board.

I was impressed with the quality of the minis, the details popping out from the wash. One minor setback was that they didn't deliver enough card sleeves the first time, so anyone who ordered the sleeve pack was left in the lurch for a while. Thankfully they resolved the issue and sent out sleeve packs to backers. I'm really excitied to be playing through this campaign and can't wait to see how the story unfolds.