This report documents the design of Rising Tide, a tabletop game created by RAND gaming experts to help capture the dynamics of human decisionmaking. The game enables players to explore complex economic issues pertaining to the global economic system and international relationships and offers a repeatable experiment that allows players to encounter international economic competition at an active, visceral level.

Rising Tide

Designing a Game of International Economic Competition

David R. Frelinger, Jenny Oberholtzer, Stephen M. Worman, Kate Giglio

ResearchPublished Jun 23, 2025

The United States is no stranger to global strategic competition. For decades, the country has maintained a robust national economy through — and sometimes despite — international trade and political engagement. This report documents the design of Rising Tide, a tabletop game created by RAND gaming experts, that enables players to explore complex economic issues pertaining to the global economic system and international relationships. Players acting as countries, regional blocs, or multinational corporations confront multiple challenges related to economic health, including making and sustaining alliances and negotiating competitive globalization, while acting to ensure self-preservation. Participants can opt to play in a system that represents the existing world economic system and work to change the system in small or large ways, or participants can play in an entirely new system to explore what could happen.

Although the Rising Tide game materials are not available to the general public at this time, the exploratory experience of designing and testing the game may be of interest to people who are interested in how international dynamics could evolve if different legal, economic, business, and military decisions, policies, and relationships are put into action. By incorporating additional political and cultural details in future iterations of the game, Rising Tide could evolve into a valuable tool for navigating the complexities of geopolitical uncertainty and substantial change.

This report is the third of a four-part series in which RAND researchers considered different aspects of U.S.-China economic competition. Part 1 presents economic and institutional analyses of U.S.-China economic competition. Part 2 presents the results of a participatory foresight exercise to understand the long-term path for ensuring U.S. economic health. Part 4 describe another economic competition game that explores the dynamics of multiple countries trying to ensure their own economic health.

Key Findings

  • Most players achieved at least one of their initial goal sets by looking after their own well-being. Rather than focusing on one another or even on the international economic system, these players spent time investing in their allies, feuding with Russia, and taking care of internal policies and citizens.
  • It was difficult to entirely transform the international economic system, although this is a choice in the game. The option to change the entire system was tried only twice. When the players were asked why there were so few attempts to undermine or change the international system, they noted that they had cared about their own economies, actions, and goals. Unless changing the economic system was on their to-do list or would help them reach desirable outcomes, players were not interested.
  • When given the choice to act in a competitive or cooperative manner, the players chose to cooperate. Some players chose to behave aggressively, but most focused on other options over the course of the test games. The cooperative players chose to build the strongest economies they could under given circumstances. Competitive activities and punishments were largely focused on responding to behavior deemed actively aggressive. Basic trade disputes were resolved through vigorous discussion and peer pressure rather than through attempted overthrows of the international system. The only military actions were the result of early aggression by one country (mimicking recent historical events) and a punishment in response that had been clearly telegraphed beforehand.

Recommendations

  • Create a sizable gaming team with some subject-matter expertise. The play test of the game relied on available RAND staff, and only a few participating staff members were senior personnel with deep expertise in the entity they chose to play. A more senior or more specialized group of experts could perhaps have provided more-realistic insights and could have more comfortably explained how and why they made the choices they did.
  • Set multiple game objectives rather than one or no game objectives. The first edition of Rising Tide is designed to provide subject-matter experts with a framework to engage as a chosen entity within different international economic systems. Although a particular system is not set in the game, we found during the testing phase that having pre-set objectives for the players was necessary because they gave players something to strive for. However, there needs to be balance; pre-set objectives can easily end up as overdetermined win conditions.

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Frelinger, David R., Jenny Oberholtzer, Stephen M. Worman, and Kate Giglio, Rising Tide: Designing a Game of International Economic Competition. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1947-3.html.
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This research was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and conducted within the Acquisition and Technology Policy Program of the RAND National Security Research Division (NSRD).

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