Z-Man Games will release Lowlands, a board game where island farmers must balance their own agricultural needs against community preservation, in June.

Designed by Claudia and Ralf Partenheimer, the game casts players in the role of farmers eking out a living on the stormy coast of the North Sea. With the constant threat of flooding and storms, the community rallies together to build and maintain dikes to keep back the water. But each person committed to building and maintaining dikes is one less person home tending the family livestock and crops. Players must balance their pool of farm workers to complete tasks for the farm as well as supply labor to maintain the dikes. If not enough labor is committed to the dikes, they will be compromised, and players will have to take dike breach tokens which affect players’ scores negatively at the end of the game.

The box includes 1 main board, 2 sheep market boards, 3 resource markers, 85 sheep, 6 3-sheep tokens, 1 phase marker, 1 first player marker, 64 fences, 66 resource cards, 12 flood cards, 36 flood pieces, 13 dike segments, 5 progress tokens, 1 value marker, 30 dike breach tokens, 56 coins, 4 farmer +2 tokens, 1 sticker sheet, 1 scorepad, 1 appendix, 46 farm expansion tiles, 4 farmyard boards, 4 income boards, 4 reference sheets, 4 dike point markers, 12 farmers, 16 building markers, and a rulebook.  The game is for 2 – 4 players, ages 14 and up, and plays in 50 – 100 minutes. MSRP is $69.99.