Overview & How to Play

Deep Sea Adventure is a horrible idea! Who in their right mind would go scuba diving for treasure, while sharing ONE air supply with a bunch of other greedy divers?

Yep, so in this game, we, as divers, are trying to get the most loot from the ocean over the course of 3 rounds. Problem is, if our SHARED oxygen tank is at 0 at the start of anyone’s turn, they’ll die and drop all their loot for that round.

Every turn, players reduce the oxygen levels for how much loot they’re holding, then decide whether to dive deeper into the ocean for better loot, or to start swimming upwards for fear of the air running out. They’ll then roll the dice, and move that many spaces. When they land on a space they can pick it up, but they gotta be careful, because carrying loot is gonna make you breathe harder, using more oxygen.

You play these 3 rounds of diving in, getting loot, and resurfacing before the oxygen runs out, and whoever has the most loot after those rounds wins!

Pros

Deep Sea Adventure first and foremost wants to go on an adventure with you- the form factor is amazing! It’s gonna fit inside bags with ease, with no wasted space inside the actual box with its included plastic bags.

And it’s wooden pieces! There’s bright, directional meeples that represent everyone’s diver, and the dice are also wooden. Tokens are chunky, and super clear to see. From those to the rulebook, there’s very little complaints on physical elements.

This game is also easy as heck to play, where all you have to decide is whether you’re diving deeper, or swimming back to the submarine, then roll the D3 die. Wherever you land on, you can decide to pick up that loot.

Picking up the loot propels you into a different ball game though: now you’ll actually start breathing oxygen from the shared air supply, AND you move one space less for each loot you’re having. Because of this, you really gotta think twice about just grabbing every single loot you land on, which doubles as a cool thematic element of literal treasure slowing your diver down. But you won’t always be bogged down too hard, since there’s some ‘leap-frogging’ of other divers you can do when you pass them on the board.

There’s an unexpected amount of depth that always comes up. So you can only choose to change your mind once and decide to resurface—once you start heading back to the sub, you’re always swimming up for the rest of that round. You gotta be careful about when you time this choice, because if you do so too early, you won’t have much loot, and if you do too late… well yeah you’ll be dead like us when we play. Maybe you’ll take the safer play to drop loot, so at least you’ll surface with some points.

What’s cool is that when you decide to start surfacing, its not like you’re removed from the game at all. You can still pick up loot on the way back to the sub! So maybe you don’t want to pick up too much loot on the way down, because you can pick it up on the way up. Maybe you pick up everything if you’re feeling ballsy.

Deep Sea Adventure really ties players together through the shared oxygen levels, where you’ll be constantly monitoring those dwindling air marks as you decide to drop loot, or go up, as well as others’ treasure quantities. It’s really a lot of interaction without direct conflict, all in 20 minutes, where you can be goading on one another to go deeper to get treasure, while you run the other way to safety on your turn.

There is also this fantastic progression of rounds, where whenever you die and you’re holding loot, that loot sinks to the bottom of the ocean in piles of 3, and is actually treated as ONE loot for the purposes of breathing & movement. So if you DO make it to the bottom of the ocean, you can get some crazy rewards and have it not weigh you down too much, further upping the chicken game late game for potentially huge profits. But just remember, you’re at the VERY bottom of the ocean when you get the loot, you still need to re-surface.

Cons

Our main con, besides the oxygen levels being too small and this game really only being 3+ players, is that repeated playthroughs start to lose steam pretty fast. This really holds the game back because the game is so short. Every game is starting the same exact way, and since the decisions are so simple, there’s really not much variety in opening moves. A lot of the diversity here is just gonna come you trying different groups and easily introducing it to people and watch them freak out about dice rolls.