Tide

Spatial rummy, in three formats

In Tide you can move anything on the table. Split melds up, recombine them, use a card someone else played, as long as it is all valid again when your turn ends. Melds sit as separate islands and can cross each other, sharing a card.

What you play with

• Two standard decks plus two jokers
• A 26 by 26 table
• Ace is low and worth 1. Jack is 11, queen 12, king 13

Melds

A meld is a whole unbroken line of cards read along one axis.

Runs

Three or more consecutive ranks in one suit, reading either direction. Ace is low only, so king, ace, two is not a run. Thirteen cards is the longest possible.

Sets

Three or four cards of one rank, every suit different. Two decks make it possible to try to repeat a suit, and that is rejected.

Jokers

At most one joker in a meld, so nothing stands on wild cards alone. A joker takes on whatever card its meld needs and carries that identity while it sits there. Free it by rearranging and it can become something else in the same turn. You are only asked which card it is when a set leaves more than one suit open.

What makes a table legal

At the end of every turn, all three of these have to be true:

• every card is on the board
• every line is either a single card or a finished meld, never a two card fragment
• every card belongs to at least one meld, going across or down

A card melded on neither axis is loose, and loose cards are not allowed. Unlike Anchor there is no requirement that everything connect up. Islands are fine.

Your turn

Do exactly one of these.

Rearrange

Submit the whole table as you want it to stand. The submission has to:

• keep every card that was already on the table, nothing goes back to a hand
• add at least one card from your own hand
• name every card truthfully, with only jokers given a declaration
• leave the table legal by the three rules above

Draw

Take the top card of the draw pile and end your turn.

Pass

Legal only once the draw pile is empty.

Opening

Until you have opened, you are fenced off from the table. You may lay only your own cards, into melds made entirely of your own cards, and you may not move or extend anything already out there. Those cards have to total at least 30 in face value, counting a declared joker as whatever it stands for.

Once you have opened, you can rearrange freely for the rest of the round.

Ending a round

A round ends when someone empties their hand, or when everyone passes in a row with the draw pile empty.

• Went out. The player who emptied their hand wins the round.
• Blocked. The player holding the smallest hand value wins it.

In Classic and Empty Hand, everyone else scores minus the face value of whatever is left in their hand, and a joker left in hand costs 30. The winner gets the sum of those penalties. Meld Score works differently, below.

Three ways to play

All three are the same game underneath. What changes is how a match is won. The grid runs through all of them: melds take up real squares, so the table fills, and where you lay something decides whether it can grow later.

Empty Hand

One round is the whole match. Whoever takes that round wins it.

Worth knowing: that includes a blocked round, where the smallest hand wins. Blocked is the ordinary ending rather than the rare one, so this is not a technicality about the name.

Classic

The traditional form. Rounds are settled by hand penalties and dealt again, to 200 points or five rounds, whichever comes first. Highest score wins. With two players nobody usually reaches 200 inside five rounds, so it comes down to who is ahead when the rounds run out.

Meld Score

Every meld scores as you lay it, the face value of the cards that came out of your hand. A joker scores nothing, or laying it as a king would be the best move available every single turn.

Extending a meld pays only for the cards you added, not for the meld you joined, and rearranging cards already on the table pays nothing, since neither left your hand. Rounds are not settled by hand value here, because those cards were already paid for on the way down. Going out still ends a round, which is what stops everyone else scoring further.

This is the only format that can end in the middle of a round. The match is over the moment someone reaches the target, not when that round happens to finish.

How it differs from Anchor