Rising Waters (2023)

It's spring 1927, and while Americans dance the Charleston and drink bootlegged liquor, the Mississippi Delta faces a flood of epic proportions. If battered river levees collapse, everything important to you will be washed away.

Rising Waters is a co-operative board game built around area control, set collection, and variable player power mechanisms in which players are members of the African American community who are confronting two powerful and arbitrary forces: nature and the racism of white landowners. Resist by drawing on hidden strengths like your family, church, music, plots of land, and education. Can you manage the rising waters to stay alive?

Rising Waters is played on a hex-based map of the Mississippi River and surrounding lands based on the area around Vicksburg, Mississippi. The game runs over a series of rounds representing different weeks during the flood, when players have opportunities to work cooperatively and individually to save their homes, families, and communities. During the flood, work together to keep your family and neighbors alive by minimizing losses during the flood. Players must also negotiate the arbitrary demands of white landowners.

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. If players keep below the maximum level of losses for a certain number of rounds, they've survived the worst of the flood and win the game!

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