Isn’t it odd how when you spot something unusual, you come across the same thing almost immediately after? Well, actually, it’s not that odd at all—it’s just human nature to read too much into simple coincidence, while ignoring the vastly larger number of times when it doesn’t happen.
Anyway, just after writing an article about a couple of godly games turning up at the same time, I spotted a pair of unrelated but similar small diving games on Kickstarter. And that’s a mere month after noting two expansions for heavier diving games hitting the crowdfunding scene pretty close to each other: Endeavor Deep Sea: Uncharted Waters and Hidden Ark: Wild Oceans. Just coincidence, that’s all. And it’s another coincidence that the new ones are games with rhymey names…
Risk the Abyss
Risk the Abyss, a cosy a 1–4 player dice game designed by Marq Chontos and published by Ground Control Board Games, has just landed on Kickstarter and was fully-funded within a day.
Play involves moving your diver around a grid of 4×4 ocean tiles to catch fish and collect treasure, returning to the surface to stow them away on a boat. The tiles are drawn from 3 different piles: the surface, depths (2 rows) and abyss—the farther down you go, the more lucrative the rewards.
On your turn, you roll 6 dice, rerolling as many as you want up to 2 more times, Yahtzee-like, then performing the actions appearing uppermost:
· key and harpoon symbols let you collect treasure or catch fish—if your diver is on a tile showing locks or hearts, you can pay the number of key and harpoon dice respectively to take the tile;
· anchors and flippers let you move around the map;
· radios move the boat at the surface or allow you to zip back to the boat immediately; and
· oxygen lets you keep your collected tiles is a lightly metaphor-breaking manner (perhaps the connection is that if you have insufficient oxygen, you can’t carry everything you’ve collected)—until you stow your booty (see later), you need to spend an oxygen die roll to keep any of your tiles beyond the first.
The boat is a token moving across the top of the ocean grid which you can visit (using either flippers, if you’re directly below it, or radios if you’re farther away) to stow your collected tiles; once aboard, the tiles no longer require oxygen to be spent.
At the end of your turn, any empty tile spaces are refilled and play passes to the next person. Game end is triggered when one of the ocean decks is empty, and the game is over after the final round is completed.
Scoring is a combination of absolute values shown on tiles (for fish), randomly selected values (clams) and counts of various other tile types (for treasure).
The game, even in its prototype stage, looks well made, with attractive wooden meeples, linen cards and natty dice; best of all, it’s tiny, just a smidge over the size of an Altoids tin—and yes, the game does come in a tin.
The campaign page includes the rulesheet and a how-to video, though no reviews or playthroughs. This is Ground Control Board Games’s first crowdfunding campaign, and game in fact, which the creators do acknowledge—precisely the sort of campaign I would tend to avoid. But, as I mentioned in my article on crowdfunding, if the project looks good and is inexpensive, it might be worth the risk. Frustratingly, though, UK shipping is currently estimated as 50–80% of the game price, and there’s VAT on top of all that. However, a Print and Play download option is available for much less. Amusingly, there’s a ‘pub game’ level pledge, in which you get a couple of coasters as well as the game (but only if you live in the USA—I wonder why that restriction exists).
I also appreciated the honesty of the creators in the ‘Why back now?’ section: ‘You don't have to. We don’t do Kickstarter exclusives. We don’t do FOMO. The game will be available on our website this Fall.’ So, there’s actually no reason to take any crowdfunding risk at all—well, other than supporting the creator!
Survive The Dive
The second game to hit Kickstarter is Survive the Dive, a card game by Tyler Mitchell. Much less information is available about this game, save that it’s for 2–5 players and the main focus of the 10–15 minute game is dropping bad news cards on other players, or playing defence cards against those attacks: ‘Save The Dive is a fast, brutal card game for divers and ocean lovers. The goal? Be the last diver alive.’ Oh, and it’s been ‘designed by divers’—well, OK, but I hope they’ve got some game design experience too!
I’m afraid I really can’t say much about the game, though it does put me in mind of Uno, but that’s solely because of the actions shown on the handful of cards appearing on the campaign page. Talking about the card pictures, I can’t even comment on the artwork, as the creator admits that it’s AI-generated placeholder material currently, but the final material will be human-created.
There are 2 variants of the game—standard and a ‘technical divers edition’—but little indication at all what the differences are. Terms cave diving, compression diving, CCR diving and wreck diving are mentioned, but nothing about what they mean for the game.
I’m afraid this campaign doesn’t work for me: too little preparation prior to launch and insufficient information available to potential backers. The current pledge level, admittedly after only a few days at time of writing, falls well short of Risk the Abyss’s first day funding, and this project has a significantly higher target. Still, production is UK-based, so there won’t be huge shipping and VAT surprises, making this on the less expensive of the 2 games for us.
Wrap Up
Risk the Abyss appears to be a nicely polished game, with the cute aspect of fitting in a mints tin, and the campaign is well-presented too. The only reasons I’m dithering about backing it are shipping costs and VAT.
I really can’t tell if Survive the Dive is a decent game or not, and I do think the creator launched the campaign prematurely. Having said that, I’ll be keeping an eye on it in the hope than more information will be made available before the campaign’s over.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
