Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
“Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives?
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Read the full game description
“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