Meltwater
BGG rank
BGG #6,226
BGG rating
7.1

Meltwater

2018

Rules assistance for Meltwater

Plain-language explanations of turns, card effects and disputed situations, with official source references and saved question history.

  • 2 players
  • 60 min
  • Complexity 2.3/5

For 2 players

Rules assistant for Meltwater

What would you like to know?

Answers come from the official rulebook, with the page to check.

Meltwater is a board game released in 2018 for 2 players and 60 minutes per game. It was designed by Erin Escobedo and its main mechanics are Area Majority / Influence, Hexagon Grid, and Action Points.

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About the game

“Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win.” ~Gen. Thomas Power, U.S. Strategic Air Command 1957-1964 19XX: The unthinkable happens. The world is scoured clean in nuclear fire. The oceans are poisoned for generations to come. One last patch of habitable land remains: Antarctica. The remnants of humanity huddle together in a fragile patchwork of research stations and refugee ships. But even here, the Cold War survives. And our civilization may not. In Meltwater, two players take command of the shattered remains of the superpowers, struggling for control of the ice. Simple diceless mechanics let players displace, corner, and isolate their opponent’s survivors. Here, hunger is a crueler weapon than gunfire, and the barren tundra can only support so many souls. And every turn, radioactive contamination pushes in from the coastline, shrinking the available space and forcing the belligerents closer and closer together. In the end, there is only either submission or annihilation, and whatever world is left. —description from the publisher

Designers

Publishers

  • Capstone Games
  • Hollandspiele

Questions and answers

Meltwater supports 2 players according to the catalogue. This is the publisher’s listed player count, so the game is designed for exactly that number of participants. Variants for other group sizes, if any, are described in the rulebook of your edition, so check it before setting up a different configuration.