Rising Waters
$75.00
Winner of the 2024 Public Outreach Project Award from the American Society for Environmental History!
It’s spring, 1927. While some Americans dance the Charleston and drink bootlegged liquor, the Mississippi Delta faces a flood of epic proportions. Can you manage the rising waters to stay alive?
Description
Rising Waters is a cooperative game of survival, resilience, and community. Set in the Mississippi Delta during the devastating 1927 flood, players take on the roles of African American families striving to survive both nature’s fury and the injustice of the Jim Crow South. Working together through music, education, faith, and shared resources, they must strengthen levees, resist oppression, and endure the rising waters.
With its deep historical theming and engaging area control, set collection, and variable player power mechanics, Rising Waters is ideal for both educational use and casual play. Homeschoolers, teachers, and other educators will be interested in the accompanying Rising Waters Curriculum Guide.
Press Product Code: CMUP102
Funded by Kickstarter
A Scholarship and Lore: Games for Learning Series Game from Central Michigan University Press
Specifications
Components
- 1 double-sided Game Board
- 6 Player Boards
- 1 Community deck (100 cards)
- 1 Landowner deck (100 cards)
- 1 Weather Report deck (77 cards)
- 4 Player Aid cards
- 10 Community Goal cards
- 1 First Player marker
- 3 Track counters
- 6 Towns
- 27 Pawns
- 66 Cubes
- 60 Water Level Tokens
- 60 Levee Tokens
- 89 Flood Hexes
- 7 Relief Camp Hexes
- 10 Raft Tokens
- 1 Game Manual
Resources
- Listen to designer Scout Blum’s interview on the Beyond Solitaire podcast about RISING WATERS!
- To try the game for free, head over to Tabletopia.
- Check out the Rising Waters Resource Page for game errata, reviews, and a Digital Rulebook/How To Play Video.
Credits
Game Design and Development: Scout Blum
Artists: Lamaro Smith, Makiyah Alexander
RISING WATERS helps educators expand the perspective of the 1920s. The game centers African Americans to help players understand and empathize with their plight during the 1920s environmental disaster. Racism appears in the game through the appearance of Landowner cards like “threats,” “force,” and “race hatred.” Since landowners also controlled the labor in the area, the cards include “job offers,” which players can use to build or raise levees to protect from floodwaters. As another source of protection, relief camps helped African Americans gain access to relief supplies but were also some of the most racist spaces during the crisis.
Yet African Americans weren’t solely victims in the 1927 flood–as always, they maintained a sense of agency and sources of power to survive. In the game, this comes from the Community cards, which include blues, farm animals, church, garden, family, and education cards. The cards help players upgrade their abilities during the game as well as resist racism. RISING WATERS serves as a powerful illustration of the difficulty of African American lives in the Jim Crow South. Through the game, students and teachers will be able to have challenging conversations about the endemic nature of racism and how it complicates life during a crisis.
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