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!

MATERIALS: print four times and cut the page with the materials to have:
- 72 tiles (12 shells, 20 bottles, 16 plastic bags, 12 cigarette ends, 12 watermelon leftovers);
- 24 tokens representing 4 friends for each symbol (sun, stars, clouds, lightning, moon, rain);
- 8 scoring boards (you only need 6; please recycle the other two!).

PREPARATION: draw randomly 36 tiles and place them face up in a 6 x 6 grid.
Above the grid, line up 6 piles of 6 tiles each, drawn among the others.
The side on which the six piles lie is considered to be the sea; from that side the backwash is coming.
Each player chooses a symbol, and takes all the friends with that symbol.
Starting with the player who can hold his breath longer, each player takes one of the friends of the player to his right, and places him on one empty tiles (of the 36).
Each player puts one of his friends tokens on the “zero” of his scoring track and the cleaning may begin!

Example. Starting position in a three player game.

THE GAME. The game is played in turns in clockwise order.
At his turn, each player may perform ONE of the following actions:
- move one of his friends;
- collect ONE seashell;
- collect one OR MORE pieces of rubbish;
- pass.

MOVE ONE OF YOUR FRIEND
The player chooses one of his friends (a token that is in play with his symbol: at the start of the game, only one is available) and moves him on the grid of one, two or three spaces (whether containing a tile or not) in the same direction. You cannot move over a friend belonging to another player; you cannot end your movement on an occupied tile.

COLLECT A SEASHELL
If one of your friends is on a seashell tile, he may pick it up, provided that no friends belonging to other players are adjacent to that tile. (See below: the tide).

COLLECT ONE OR MORE PIECES OF RUBBISH
One of the friends may pick up the rubbish tile on which he stands, and all the tiles of the same type connected to that one. (See below: the tide).
All the tiles removed must be kept face up in front of the player.

Example. One friend (red circle) collects four identical tiles, the one he is currently standing and three connected ones. He doesn’t pick up any other since they are not connected.
Each tile is represented by a colour.

THE TIDE
Each time one or more tiles are removed, the tide pushes more tiles on the beach. Perform the following actions:
- in the 6 x 6 grid, starting from the lowest line, each tile with an empty space beneath moves down to occupy that space;
- for each column, shall there be a space beneath the piles, take the top tile of the pile and let it “fall” into the column across the empty spaces.

Example. After the friend has collected all the tiles of a certain type, the piles “fall” towards under. First, each tile is moved down one space; then, if it is the case, the top most tile of each of the six piles falls down until it touches another tile.

CHECKING THE COLLECTED STUFF
Once the tide effect is over, all the friends at work meet with their coordinators to hand off what they collected on the beach. At this check point, several things may happen:

SHIRKING
If after the tide one or more friends stand on an empty space (i.e. without tiles), then they are shirking: they don’t want to work! They must take a penalty: they must discard one seashell (if they have at least one) putting it back on the top of one of the six piles. By doing this, keep in mind that no pile may ever be composed of more than six tiles.

THREE SHELLS
Cleaning the beach is the goal of this game, but in the process you may also find beautiful gifts from the sea: the seashells!
If one of the players gathers three seashells, they must give them as a present (a necklace) to their partner. They must discard the seashells (they are NOT put back on the piles) and his friend token will be removed for one turn (he is delivering the necklace!).
On the next turn, though, the friend will come with his partner who will be helping him in the cleaning operations. Therefore, the player will have one friend token more to play with (see: PLAYING WITH MORE THAN ONE FRIEND). All the friends of a player are always placed into play by the player on his left.

RECYCLING
If during the checking phase a player holds at least one tile per each of the garbage types (bottle, cigarette, watermelon, bag) he has performed a Recycling operation, and the coordinator will award him with one bonus point (keep score on the board).
Two tiles of his choice are put back on the piles (even the same pile) without exceeding the six tiles per pile limit; the remaining two tiles are removed from the game.

DOUBLE RECYCLING
If during checking a player holds at least two tiles per each of the garbage types he is said to have performed a double recycling.
This player will be awarded three bonus points and entitled “meritorious environment friend”. Similarly to what exposed before for the recycling, the player must place four tiles back and discard the other four.
Alternatively, the player may choose to receive only 1 point (instead of 3) but recruit another friend instead: the new friend may enter play starting from the player’s next turn (player sitting to his left will decide where, as usual).

SPECIFIC COLLECTION
If during checking one of the players has at least 3 identical cigarette tiles, or 3 identical watermelon tiles, or 4 identical plastic bag tiles or 5 bottle tiles, he will be awarded one victory point.
Of the tiles forming the collection, one must be returned to one of the piles, the remaining are discarded.
(the tiles needed in order to score this point are represented by the clouds depicted).
IMPORTANT! When one of the players completes a specific collection, all the other players will participate to the collection. All the other players must remove from the game one of their tiles of the same type (provided they have at least one).

END OF THE GAME
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!
- 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.

PLAYING WITH MORE THAN ONE FRIEND
Shall a player play with more than one friend on the board, at his turn he must choose and move (and be able to collect with) only one of them.

PLAYERS WITH A SCORE OF ZERO
If a player ends the game with a score of zero, he has proven not to have respect for the environment. In this unluckily event, all the other players must call a relevant organisation in order to have the player actually participate in the next beach cleaning operation!

Download the page with game materials, in PDF format!