Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders is a cooperative campaign that was on Kickstarter back in April 2022. This was the follow on to the original Tidal Blades game (which is really more of a head-to-head skirmish game). I knew nothing about the original Tidal Blades when I backed this: only that the components looked really cool. I backed it because it looked like it had a cool solo and co-op campaign.

I went all-in and got the base game (lower right), the stretch goals (upper), and the miniatures (lower left): See above.  This is the deluxe version with awesome miniatures!

The most important thing to realize is that this is a standalone solo or cooperative campaign game!  I.e., you don’t need the previous game at all!!! 

It’s a little confusing because the side of the box says “Part 2” (see above), but this is really just the next game in the same universe! Tidal Blades 2 continues with the ideas of the original Tidal Blades (which was NOT cooperative) but in a solo and cooperative game!

So, in some sense, this is still a skirmish game, as players play cooperatively against monsters in the game.  Honestly, this game really gives me a Gloomhaven (see review of Jaws of The Lion here) or Batman: Gotham City Chronicles (solo or cooperative mode: see our review here) vibe! Players move around on a map in a book and fight monsters!  You’ll see what I mean more below.

Let’s take a closer look!

Unboxing the Miniatures

As much as you really want to see what’s in the main box, I gotta show you the miniatures first.  They are fantastic!

The minis are washed, they are tri-color,  and they have 2 sets of bases!  These are some of the nicest miniatures I have seen!

The top part of the box comes with the monsters you fight: they are all notated on a sheet (and, eben better, are labelled where they are in the box!!!) at the top of the box.

Wow!  The monsters are all bluish and really great! See above!  Let’s take a look at a few!

These are pretty awesome!  Below the tray with the monsters are the Heroes and Boss Monsters!

The Heroes are light brownish, and the monsters are very purple: see below.

Let’s take a closer look at some Heroes (below):

The Boss Monsters are very purple! See below.

These miniatures are just awesome!

The game also comes with plastic bases for the minis so you can tell them apart.  The normal bases denote the normal monsters, and the sparkly bases denote the “mutant” monster (like the Elite monsters in Gloomhaven).  The “mutants” are just the tougher version of the monsters!

We also have really nice plastic Fruit and shells (replacing the cardboard from the base game).

See above as the colored hit point tracks match the colors of the base?  And the “sparkly” yellow one is the mutant!

These bases really make it easier to tell monsters apart so you can track the hit points.

Overall, the colors and bases are well-thought out and make each entity stand out on the table. See above with some monsters, characters, and a boss monster all in the same frame! 

These minis are just fantastic.

Rulebook

The rulebook is quite good.  But it has two major flaws.

The rulebook completely fails the Chair Test!  See above as it flops over both edges being almost unusable!  This rulebook made a fundamental error by being the same size as the box!

Much like Batman: Gotham City Chronicles, the solution is to use TWO chairs, and have the spine of the rulebook sit in between!  See above as we can keep the rulebook open and useful!  I do like that the fonts are big!  And the rulebook is full of good pictures!  It is easy to see the rules on the chair next to me … once there are TWO chairs!

The rulebook has a Table of Contents that make it easy to look stuff up! Nice!

The components pages are great, with every component having a picture and being well-labelled!

The set-up is nice (it’s over three pages), but some of the set-up is deferred to the campaign book. See above.

In general, I thought this rulebook was great.   There’s a nice glossary in the back (ya), but no index.  I’ll forgive the lack of index because the glossary and Table of Contents were great.

My other major complaint (besides the form factor) was that the combat wasn’t quite as well specified as I want.  We’ll discuss that below.

Otherwise, great rulebook!

Unboxing the Base Game 

This base box (and the minis box) and both pretty big!  My friends lifted the main box and were surprised how heavy it was! What’s in this gargantuan box?

See how tall the box is too (relative to a can of Coke)!

If you want, you can use the Foreteller app to read the “plot” as you go: this is a campaign game where a story unfolds and you may want to get some professionals reading it aloud.  I didn’t get the Forteller narration … and it was just fine without it (but it does have the option: sold separately).

There’s a LOT of stuff when you unbox (see above); we’ll go through the components as we discuss gameplay.

Gameplay

Each player (1-4 players) chooses a Tidal Blade warrior to play. See the six options above and below.

Each player gets a sheet with their character: see the six above and one (closer, below).

Each character sheet is for recording stuff as your character levels up during the campaign. Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders is campaign game! Characters will be leveling up; you will be making decisions about how to do that! This sheet will become incredibly marked up as you play…

See above as Caiman has experienced a lot and marked up his character sheet!

On the back of your character sheet are “tracks” where you will make choices about how you use experience points and other forms of up-levelling.   To be clear: each character is different! They have a different sheet with different cards and powers that can be activated!

But, what really distinguishes the characters are the combat decks: see above!!!  Each player has a different Persistent Power (see above) when they start, as well as a different deck!!!  (Well, some cards are in common, but generally the decks are different!!)   These decks will be augmented, culled, and clogged as you play!  To be clear, Tidal Blades 2 is not a deck-building game per se (as that implies you are dynamically changing the deck as you play), it’s what we called a deck-advancement game.  We made this distinction back in our review of Adventure Tactics: See that review here for more discussion of the difference.    Suffice to say, your combat deck only changes/updates  at the end/beginning of each chapter of the campaign.

What’s even cooler is that when you use of the cards during play, you activate either a row or a column on your board!  What this means, of course, is that you piggy-back on our previous turn! For example, if we just played Careful Strike to the board (top middle), we are allowed to activate ALL the actions in either the middle column or the top row!  Some actions give you shells (armor), some actions allow melee strike (swords), some actions give you resources (yellow/pink), some actions give you movement, and so one!

As your character takes excessive damage throughout the game,  you can take WOUNDS (see bottom right) which clog your board!  Now, if activate the last row or column, you can’t use anything from that last space!

This mechanism of playing a card to a row is central to the game!  What card you choose dictates your initiative (Stand Fast! gives me +1 initiative), your current turn, and what actions you might want to play on future turns!  And it’s really fun, because you feel like you have a lot of choices:

1) Which card do I play?  It affects my current turn and initiative!
2) Where do I place my card?  It affects which “core” symbols I block!
3) Which row or column do I activate?  What previous cards do I want to leverage?
4) Do I want to finish a row with 3 cards?  I may clear it, but I get a very powerful one turn!
Each turn is just rife of choice!

Each character also has spirit, focus, and some “shells” which can serve as armor or activate other abilities!  Armor in the game is handled by putting shells from your uncharged area into your blocking area!  So, if you want to play defensive for a round, you can choose the shells action! Yet another type of choice: defensive or offensive!

Players move around a map of hexes, fighting creatures! (Sound familiar? Gloomhaven, I am looking at you…)  See above.

The map books remind me a little of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, as you just set-up the board from a book of maps and go!  This map book was the key innovation in Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. What’s cool, is that Tidal Blades 2 furthers that innovation!

Players move around the map, but the stupid spiral binding gets in the way of the map in Jaws of the Lion!  See above.

What Tidal Blades 2 does is very clever! Rather than just one map book, Tidal Blades 2 has two map books (actually 3), but each book is rotated so that the spiral bindings are on the outside!  Instead, the middles just touch and make a contiguous surface!  See above!  The middle of the board, where a lot of action is, in untainted by the spiral bindings!  It looks more like a contiguous surface!

It’s really easy to set-up each chapter of the campaign!  Just turn the book to the proper pages!

Combats are decided by dice: every SWORD you generate from your cards gives you a die! Red symbols are a straight-up hit, blue CAN be a hit if you have advantage (if your compatriots are flanking), and yellow focus CAN be a hit … if you spend a focus point!  And that decides how much damage you do!

Monster combats are similar: all monsters perform the actions of their current card: see above as the mudcrabs move 2 (to the closest character) and then just do 2 straight damage! (This is modified a little by a damage die).

There’s all sorts of monsters with all sorts of abilities! Some poison you! (See above)

Each monster is tracked by a hit point track (see above) with the bases differentiating them.  The purple die (lower left) modifies every monster attack!

There’s a lot more to this game, but that’s the “flavor” of the game!

Campaign

Let’s be 100% clear: this is a campaign game!  It last about 18 chapters, and each game is about 2 to 2.5 hours (including set-up and tear-down: a lot of your time will be set-up and tear-down).

Each chapter describes in great detail which maps you need, which monsters you fight, and what the set-up is!  See the first chapter above! (Minor spoilers above).

There is a story unfolding (pun not intended) about the folds of time.  Each chapter begins with some text describing the story (picture blurred on purpose above).

After a few chapters, there will be Interludes which give you a chance to level up.  To be clear, there is SOME levelling-up after most chapters, but the Interludes offer significant levelling-up!

At these Interludes, Players choose where to go to “spend” their resources: the market? The floating gardens? It depends how you want to level-up your character. Cull cards? Add Items?  Add skills? Whatever you want!

Although this is a campaign, the Stretch Goals pack (see above) comes with 5 one-shot scenarios.

Since this is a campaign, and you have to mark up your sheet, I went ahead and made a copy of all the character sheets so I don’t have to sully the originals.  There are enough sheets in there that you “probably” don’t have to do this, but I prefer not to mark up the originals if possible.

Solo Play

So, Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders has two solo modes! (Congratulations for following Saunders’ Law!)  The simpler of the two solo modes is to just play two-handed: choose two characters and operate them as-if it were a 2-Player game.  This is the route I chose. And so should you!!

If you REALLY REALLY REALLY want a solo mode where you only play 1 character (but then still kinda have to operate some other pets/creatures anyways) with complicated exceptions, there is a second solo mode.  I usually eschew complicated solo modes because the exceptional rules are always SO HARD to keep track of!  Play two-handed: you’ll thank me for embracing the simpler mode … the simpler two-handed solo mode has NO exceptions to rules; you just play the game they way it was meant to be played.

At the time of this writing, I am eight chapters into the campaign!  I have seen boss battles, several maps, several different ideas (jumping, running water, flying, etc), and some really great miniatures!    Every new chapter introduces new monsters and new ideas and keeps the game fresh!

Playing two characters is juuuust about the right level of complexity.  Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming, since each character has their own deck with their own unique cards, but since the system is well-described and well-notated (seriously! The icons are VERY intuitive), it doesn’t make it too hard to context switch back and forth between the characters.

One drawback is that there is a lot of maintenance for the solo player: set-up, run character 1, run character 2, operate the initiative track, operate the villains, lather-rinse-repeat, tear-down. This is really where the vibe felt like Batman: Gotham City Chronicles: there’s just a lot of work to keep the game going!  But, it’s kinda fun!  Everything is so bright and well-notated! The monsters are well-tracked (with the bases and colored hit point tracks), and the rules are pretty solid (so there’s not much second guessing, modulo one issue).

I really like this solo mode: I hope to finish this campaign at some point during the year.  I am currently playing two campaigns: my solo campaign with 2 characters and a cooperative campaign with the other 4 characters (with my friends).

I fully expect this to make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2024: it’s that good!  There are just so many good choices!  Where do I go? What cards do I play?  How do I level-up my character? The choices keep me involved the whole time, even if there is quite a bit of maintenance per turn.

The solo game took longer to play than perhaps it should: the box says 60-90 minutes but I frequently was at 2 hours; I also tend to like a little analysis paralysis when I play by myself.  There’s no one around, so I can try lots of things without fear of wasting someone else’s time.

Cooperative Play

The cooperative experience is just in its infancy as we are only two games in, but my friends still keep wanting to play it!  “Let’s keep playing it!”  They really like it!

Every player has agency on their turn; the game is just too complicated for an Alpha Player to come in and ruin a player’s experience … there are just too many choices for a single player: the Alpha Player will be too busy figuring out his own turn!! At the same time, there’s plenty of cooperation and players plan when to flank (see below), which enemies to engage, which actions to take, when to defend vs. attack!   This has a good blend of agency and cooperation.

One of the things we DIDN’T like about the cooperative game Endeavor Deep Sea (from two weeks ago: see review here) was that the game didn’t “really” have any mechanisms for helping each other too much; players had a lot of multiplayer solitaire going on in Endeavor Deep Sea.  That’s not the case here!  Even you though you can choose to play multiplayer solitaire, you can also do quite a few things to directly help your compatriots!  You can spend shells to allow your friends to re-roll dice (if they run out of re-rolls)!  You can set-up flanking opportunities! You can use skills that help everyone within 2 spaces!  There’s a number of mechanisms where the sole purpose is to help your compatriots!  And that does increase the level of cooperation!  Even choosing the initiative order can be an act of cooperation!  And THANK GOODNESS there are no Communications Limitations in this game!  Just last week, we saw how the Communications Limitations ruined that cooperative game!  Luckily, you can talk all you want and work together in Tidal Blades 2!!

The only real negative for the game is that sometimes it can take a while to get back around to your turn (as there is no simultaneous play): players must play in initiative order.  Like any game with lots o choices, sometimes a little Analysis Paralysis can slip in and slow down the game.  It’s still not too bad, because you can always be talking with your friends or figuring your own turn out while waiting for others.

It’s easier to overlap turns in a cooperative game (like Tidal Blades 2) because you can ask your friends to leave the board “in a certain state” so you can preplan your turn!  In a competitive game, you always have to wait until the previous turns are over to re-assess the board every turn!  With a little cooperation, there can be much more overlap!  And we saw some of that overlap here in Tidal Blades 2!  It’s a minor point, but that overlap can make cooperative games (without simultaneous actions) move a little faster.

Overall, this game was a lot of fun cooperatively.   It’s a good blend of agency and cooperation, and there are many ways players can help each other.  It’s fun to talk and plan with your friends!

Flanking and Advantage

So, this is, at its core, a miniatures fighting game!  Which means you have rules for flanking and advantage!  If you flank  (players surround an enemy adjacently from opposite sides), you can get advantage (which allows you to turn the blue wave symbols on dice into hits)!  This is very cool, because it is a mechanism that encourages the players to cooperate and coordinate their attacks!  The best results come if you cooperate, flank an enemy and maybe get 50% more hits because you can gain advantage!

If you saw “Flanking and Advantage” and thought “What is this … 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons?”  You are not the only one who thought that!!!  But, these ideas in this game really do help improve the cooperation: they encourage an easy way to increase the odds of hits! 

What I Liked

The minis!  You can get the game and just use cardboard standees, but I would strongly recommend getting the miniatures! See above!! They are so well done, with the different bases, the beautiful sculpts, the different colors to highlight the different types!  I feel like they really made the game feel more thematic.  The minis add to the cost of the game (as you buy them separately), but I think in this case, they were worth it.

Combat Mechanism! The combat mechanism of choosing a card, then choosing where to put it, then choosing a row or column to activate is so cool!   Your choices affect your current turn as well as future turns!! This mechanism is at the core of the game, and it makes you feel like you have choices at all times!

Well-done Monsters! The monsters are pretty easy to run (modulo one problem, see below)!  The cards clearly specify what to do, the bases clearly denote which monster is which, and it’s pretty quick to set-up a game!  Heck, I spent more time putting plastic bases on monster minis than I did setting up the cards!  It really is easy and quick to SET-UP and RUN the monsters!

Not too much Randomness!  I was very worried that there would be too much randomness with dice deciding combat … but here’s the thing, there’s not that much randomness!  There is usually at least one hit per die and sometimes your focus shows (which means you may have to spend focus if you want extra hits).  See the dice above! If you roll XXX dice, you will probably get about XXX hits!  If you have extra focus to spend, or some special abilities, or flanking (see below), you may need much better!  It’s like having a baseline of hits, and you choose (by having focus, or flanking) if you need to do better!  I really like this system!   I usually dislike the randomness of dice, but how it’s done here works for me!

Easy-to-Read! The components are well-labelled, bright, and have very easy-to-discern icons!  This game is very intuitive and easy to read!

The Components!  The components (even if you don’t get the miniatures ) are fantastic!!  The dual-book system solves the spiral middle problem, the cards are linen finished, the dice are clear and beautiful, and the cardboard components are well-done … just overall the components are a joy!

Cooperation and Agency!  The game has many many ways to encourage cooperation, but still allow each character to have their own agency.   The card choice mechanism is very intense and full of choice; players are allowed to coordinate if they like (there are no silly communication limits)!!  Players must decide who goes after what!   Players must decide if it makes sense to flank!  But, you can’t really Alpha Player the game because each deck is so different, and frankly, each character is so involved (in a good way) to run!  Players will have intense agency on their turn to operate their character, while still having to work together to come up with a plan!  And that flanking mechanism I think really encourages finer cooperation: it’s so good to gain advantage, you just need to!

Loot 2.0!  In some ways, Tidal Blades 2 feels like it should be called Gloomhaven 2.0.   One of the things we house ruled in Gloomhaven was the Loot Rule (see discussion here: Top Seven House Rule for Cooperative Games).  Basically, stopping to pick up  loot  takes you out of the flow as you have to stop and use actual resources to do that.  The nice thing in Tidal Blades 2 is that you can a free action every turn to “interact” with one item!  So, maybe you can’t pick up three pieces of fruit or five rewards, but you can move by something and pick it up without needing to spend one of your precious actions.  Granted, you may still have to spend movement, but usually a reward (when you kill an enemy) comes out right next to you, and you just pick it up!  We enjoyed this free interaction SO MUCH more than Loot in Gloomhaven!

What I Didn’t Like

Wait, What Am I Unfolding?  I love story in my games (it’s why I like Astro Knights: Eternity better than the original … it has a compelling story!!), but the story and the writing here feels … forced and a little turgid.   And I like story!   But it felt like Tidal Blades 2 were trying to hard to have their own “surfer-techno” lingo, and it just didn’t work for me.   I tended to just skim over the exposition and head straight into the scenarios.

Enemy Movement:  As easy as the monsters are to set-up and operate, the AI for the monsters movement is a little weak.  There’s some nonsense about “clockwise heading north” in the case of ties, but the description in the text and the picture don’t match (for me anyways).   In the end, the final rule for specifying things is done using “Fastest Initiative”: the character with the fastest initiative is the tie-breaker … that tended to be my goto rule!  Many times, that was the tie-breaker (when it was really unclear) for us because it just make things easier.  Otherwise, the enemy movement phase becomes an overwrought “look at all possibilities”, which isn’t fun.  Gloomhaven did a better job at specifying the enemy AI, but at the cost of more rules.

The AI basically works, but if you focus too much on it, the game can become overwrought.  I worry that zealots for rules will make playing this less fun as you spend the entire game getting the AI rules “just right”.  And that’s fine if that’s what you want, but I think most people won’t love that.  Just play the game; it’s good!

Bases didn’t Work? Some of the mutant bases didn’t quite work: the miniature just kind of “slipped” out the base: see the video above.  It wasn’t all the mutant bases, and most of them worked, but it was weird that some of them didn’t work!

Reactions

Rich: This is probably a Top Ten Game of the year, both solo and cooperatively! I am keeping my solo campaign alive as I still venture cooperatively with my friends!  There is just so much to like!  This feels like the next evolution of Gloomhaven!  This is a 9.5/10 for me. I just wish the AI was better and the story was better: that’s what keeps it from a 10/10.
Sara: I really liked it! Let’s keep on playing it!  It’s probably a 7 for me!
Andrew: Ya! Let’s keep playing it! A 6.5 or 7 for me!
Teresa: I loved the minis and how the game worked, 7 or 8 for me! It was like a better Gloomhaven, and not nearly as dark!

Conclusion

Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders is a fantastic game!  I still am not quite sure what we are unfolding (I think we are unfolding space and time), but there are so many things to love in this campaign miniatures skirmish game!   The components are first-class, the miniatures are stellar, the cards are easy-to-read and intuitive, the combat system has so many great choices, the leveling up is fun, and the campaign is really interesting! In some ways, Tidal Blades 2 is the next evolution of Gloomhaven as Tidal Blades 2  evolves the map book ideas, the Loot rules, and the combat with the row/column mechanism!

The card “activate column/row” mechanism works so well, that I think it elevates the game significantly.  It’s such a unique mechanism and makes the player feel like they can do so much! I expect to see this mechanism in upcoming games because it just works so well.

This is a 9.5/10 for me, with my group rating in highly with 7s and 8s as well. This will make our Top 10 Solo Games of 2024 and the Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024!