by Scott H, 5 October 2025
Being born in the 70s, the fear of the Cold War lingered. Dr. Strangelove may have been the decade before, Red Dawn the decade to come. But the idea of the United States and the Soviet Union going to war lingered to the point that I often went to be thinking that Soviets were going to sneak into the county and, oddly, start not on any of the coasts but in Ohio and, more specifically, my house.
click images to enlarge
Eventually, I outgrew those concerns. But we’ve always had a morbid fascination with the idea of that war happening. And I’m not alone in that. It has lived on in our popular culture. Video games like Command and Conquer Red Alert or Fallout; television shows like Silo or, well, Fallout. And in our war gaming niche of the board gaming hobby, just about every wargaming company made some cold-war-gone-hot game. Here are a few examples.
All of those games, however, had reoccurring theme: survival. Somehow, someone lived through the war. Be in in a Vault, Silo, or some other non-buried plot armor, people made it. Whether they lived to fight in some other dystopian nightmare where things repeated themselves or to craft warnings for the next generation, akin to Japan’s tsunami stones, there was a tomorrow.
Enter Meltwater
The war happened and the planet is effectively gone. Almost everything and every person has been killed or likely wishes they had been. The few remaining survivors have gone to the only place that wasn’t completely irradiated: Antarctica.
Antarctica is a less than hospitable place during the best of times. Per Wikipedia, the average temperature is a balmy -10 Celsius (that’s 14 Fahrenheit for those who abhor metric) along the coast. But these are far from the best of times, so it’ll make do. Plus, there are some scientists who had been trying to figure out things like climate change when global warming quickly escalated and then deescalated into nuclear winter. And word is, they’ve even got stockpiles of food.
Unfortunately for those well-meaning researchers, what’s left of civilization are small pockets of the United States and the Soviet Union. They’ve all shown up on opposite shores, they’re hungry, and they thoughtfully brought along a few battalions of armed troops to keep things interesting. Those armed only with knowledge try to convince everyone that we’ll all be just fine if we could all just get along.
There are, after all, dozens of boats on the horizon from who knows where, chock full of civilians just wanting to survive. And since the radioactive fallout is slowly making its way deeper and deeper into the continent, working together to stop the radioactive creep is a very pressing need.
On both sides of the last place humanity has left, the sentiment is the same: sure, we’ll get right on that just as soon as those other bastards are dead.
Meltwater: A Game of Tactical Starvation picks up where other WW3 type games end by dealing with the aftermath. Can you deal with radiation slowly killing off the last inhabitable lands on the planet? Can you convince enough civilians, neutral or otherwise, to join your cause? At bottom, none of those questions matter. Instead, the only question tha matters is can you make sure that, in the end, you die last?
General Gameplay Loop
While this review isn’t the time or place to go through all the rules, a brief understanding of the general gameplay loop is helpful to have. Each round (except the first), you’ll start by checking to see if any hexes are currently starving. If they are, people need to move and if they can’t, they die. You then get four actions, which range from marching your pieces around the board, threatening the enemy into fleeing, convincing neutrals to join your cause, attacking enemy soldiers, or spending your entire turn teaching some of your civilians how to shoot. After you’re done with your actions, radiation and neutral civilians start showing up. Hopefully that radiation doesn’t show up where your people are at or, if it does, hopefully you’ve got someone to retreat to cause if they can’t, they once again die. I’m sure fatal radiation poisoning is a smidge better than starvation, so they’ve got that going for them, which is nice.
Rinse and repeat until one side is eliminated. Yes, there is a note in the rules pointing out that anyone could concede the game at any time and everyone will live happily ever after (relatively speaking, of course). So, sure, you could save what little of humanity has survived nuclear war and should we as a species ever face that decision I hope it’s the one we make. But this is a game and quitting on turn one makes for a rather terrible game, so let’s not do that.
What you get with Meltwater
While I had previously heard about Meltwater, I hadn’t been able to track down an original copy. From looking at photos on BoardGameGeek, it appears to have been a rather well produced game. Component wise, Capstone channeled their inner Spinal Tap and turned things up to 11.
The first thing you’ll notice is the cover art. The new art is up above. Here’s the original for comparison.
People on BGG, like much of the Internet, have opinions on this change. Some felt the original box art was somewhat cold and calculated, which fit the theme of the game. The new art, with the decaying skull under the ice sheet, they feel, cries out that this is a game about Cthulhu. On the other side, the new art catches your eye in a way that the old are did not. I’m sure both sides of this debate would agree that the other side is entitled to their wrong opinion.
But both sides do have a point. People shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but the reality is that they do. And the new art really catches your eye. I used my teenage son to make a judgment call. Before playing the game, he was immediately drawn to the new art. It made him curious about the game. And that’s a good thing, right? More on that later.
The components have also been upgraded. Gone are cardboard chits, in are wooden bits. The dirty/dead radiation markers are now double-sided yellow discs, radiation symbols on one side and skulls on the other. There are also discs that can be used to show where radiation and civilians will be entering Antarctica during the Doomsday stage of the round. Here’s a comparison.
These components are very nice. They could, however, do with minor improvements. If you look at photos of the new edition, you’ll see all the wooden meeples standing up on the board. And they can do that. But just barely. They fall over rather easily. After a few attempts at playing the game with them standing up, we laid them down. Whether vertical or horizontal, however they look good. It just would have been nice if they had slightly larger bases so they weren’t so prone to falling down. Regardless, standing up or laying down, they look great.
On any given turn, you do get to see where the radiation and civilians will be showing up at the end of the current and the next turn. The game comes with two sets of reminder tokens so you can mark those areas, allowing players a strategic ability to know what’s coming and plan accordingly.
The problem is that the two sets are identical. And while you can just look at the cards to see which set is coming now versus what’s coming in the future, had they been painted differently, this would have made it much easier to know at a glance what was happening.
Fortunately, I had some red and blue paint handy, so problem solved. Blue discs and boats mark what will happen on the United States’ turn, red on the Soviet Union’s turn. A simple fix, but a fix that I felt compelled to make.
The game does come with two player aid cards. They work but they could have been better. They did a fine job of reminding you what actions can be taken during your turn, but they did not eliminate needing to go back to check things in the rules from time to time. In the first game I played with my son, we completely forgot that attacking someone causes a hex to become dirty/dead, something that made attacking less devastating.
There isn’t too much mechanical complexity to the game and you’ll quickly outgrown the need for the play aids. But they could have been better. It should come as little surprise that people on BGG have created a rather nice player aids for the original rules.
Something like that on the back of the rulebook probably would have been much better than the two cards that came with the game. In fact, that is what the back of the original rules did (or at least what the rules available on BGG did).
And that leads to the rulebook. There are plenty of threads on BGG and Capstone has gone out of its way to make sure questions get answered. The rules have been reprinted and there is now a version with an FAQ and rule clarifications baked into them available online (PDF)
Unfortunately, the rule that ended up the most confusing had to do with the spread of radiation and neutral civilians. During this phase of the game, two new radiation markers will show up on the board along with one neutral civilian, as dictated by that turn’s active card.
Here’s the original rule:
First, for each Radiation Hex coordinate on the active card, place a radiation marker on the corresponding map hex. That hex is now Dead.
If the indicated hex is already Dead, then instead place the marker on the closest available dirty hex. If multiple dirty hexes are “closest,” the current player choose from among these candidates, but must choose a hex with no units if possible.
Then, place a neutral civilian on the map hex corresponding to the Refugee Hex coordinate. If that hex is Dead, instead place the new civilian in the closest available hex. If multiple hexes are “closest,” the current player chooses from among these candidates, but must choose a hex with no units if possible.
And here’s the new rule:
Place a radiation token in each of the first two hexes (marked by radiation). Check for Dirty hexes after placement. A Dirty hex will become a Dead hex during this phase if: 1. the card places a new radiation token into that space (or) 2. radiation spreads and there are no empty hexes. Place a single radiation token into any new Dirty hex.
Place a refugee from supply in the third hex (marked by the refugee silhouette). If any units are already present in the hex, place a civilian of the same color. Otherwise, place a Neutral civilian.
Radiation Spreads
Then, if there are two radiation tokens in a single hex, flip one to the Dead side and move the second token. Move it to a closest hex without a radiation token, if possible. Make sure you keep this second token on the radiation side.
Radiation tokens include Dirty hexes printed on the board. In this case, you will need to place a token on the Dead side in the space indicated on the card. Then, move a second radiation token to an open hex, as described above.
Radiation spreading may create newly Dead hexes if there is no available empty hex.
As the newest rules from Capstone indicate in bold red text, “In this way, Radiation or Dead hexes will occur every turn. This resolution is different from the original game.” And it really is different. In the original, radiation creeped along, turning hexes dead along the way. In the new ruleset, radiation spreads quickly and non-coastal dead hexes only appear towards the end of the game.
I’ve played both ways and they create very different games. Personally, I like the original rules better, but both lead to fine games. And since the components work equally well for both the new and old rules, you can play with whichever rules you want.
There are other rule questions that linger and get clarified in the FAQ attached to the newest rules. Especially for those of us in the war gaming world, these types of errata are, for better or worse, par for course. We’re used to them and shrug them off.
Capstone, however, has games for sale at Target. This could and probably should be one of the games Target carries. But the folks buying games at Target are not used to going online to get rule clarifications. These issues with the rules, I fear, will not go over well with that audience. And even taking a step away from Target to your favorite FLGS (mine, so happens, is the Capstone Games store in Cincinnati, definitely visit it if you’re in town), I don’t know that Capstone’s usual customers are going to shrug this off as easily as you or I will.
Is tactical starvation fun?
While I think it’s safe to say real life starvation, tactical or otherwise, is awful, here it is a depressingly good time. I played a few games solitaire to get a feel for the game before introducing it to my 16-year-old son. He currently loves Root, Pokemon, and Magic: The Gathering. We used to play a lot of War of the Ring together. Currently, we’ve been playing Warchest and Pagan Fate of Roanoke. We’re about evenly matched at most games.
Remember up above when I said the box art grabbed his attention? It totally did. And it kind of left him a bit disappointed that some Shoggoths didn’t show up to devour everyone.
He got over it as he realized that radiation was the real monster. He managed to quickly figure out where radiation was going to show up and how to use it to push my civilians into starvation. Given how well and gleefully he shoved the radioactive monster at me, I am both proud and somewhat concerned.
And we had fun doing it.
This is not a game that takes itself too seriously nor one that overstays its welcome. It’s quick, it’s brutal, and it’s over. And that’s a good thing. This shouldn’t be a long game and, frankly, if it was it would probably be terrible. But for a game that’s maybe a step above a filler, I think it knows its place and fills it quite well.
The issues with the rules that came in the original box were unfortunate. If, however, you’ve been considering Meltwater, those should not concern you. The newest rules linked above solve those problems and you’re equally welcome to use the original rules, which are available on BGG. In fact, I encourage you do so. The change in how radiation spreads is different enough that it’s almost two different games.
Other than the Shoggoth, which was found on www.deviantart.com, almost all images were taken from either BGG or my kitchen table.
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