Tidewater

A village on a tidal flat. Every six turns the sea comes in and takes everything below the waterline; six turns later it goes back out. The low ground is fertile and roomy and temporary. The high ground is safe and cramped. So you are never designing one village — you are designing the one that works when the water is out and the one that survives when it is in.

How it plays

• Two maps, one board. Heights 1 and 2 are the contested band: dry and productive at low tide, underwater at high. A dashed marker traces the high-tide line at all times, even when the sea is nowhere near it, so the risk is never hidden from you.
• Tidal or permanent. Clam beds, salt pans and weirs are cheap, work one phase only, and shrug off being submerged. Cottages, granaries, kilns and seawalls work in both phases and are destroyed by water — putting one below the line is the signature mistake, and the game shows you a red flood preview rather than letting it happen quietly.
• The weir is why high tide is worth having. It fishes the incoming water, so it pays only while it is under the sea. A village built for low tide alone starves in the second cycle.
• The seawall is the pivot. It lowers the local waterline by one across three cells, which converts the top of the contested band into land that is permanently yours, and it previews the new shoreline live while you choose where to put it.
• Thirty turns to the Harvest Festival, and you need twelve people and a full granary standing at the end of them. Without a granary your surplus spoils at every tide change, so storage is not an upgrade — it is how you carry anything across the cycle at all.

Warm isometric tiles at a 2:1 ratio: sand, mud, grass and rock in an evening palette, with the sea drawn as a translucent sheet that darkens where it runs deep. Your tidal buildings do not vanish when the water arrives — you watch them sit under it.