Deep Regrets

Intro

“If yer planning on sailing those waters, ye best heed this advice. When the water goes calm, silent and still, can barely ‘ear it lapping at the hull, ye best pray to whatever gods ye believe in. They say creatures… Unnatural things thrive in them waters.”

Deep Regrets is a simple to learn dice rolling market game about fishing increasingly TERRIFYING things out of the ocean. The deeper you go, the scarier they get but the bigger the reward.

Theme & Mechanics

Players have the choice of whether to be at Sea (to catch stuff) or at Port (to buy and sell stuff). Actions at Sea are driven by the D4 dice and the depth of the ship. Players will choose whether to go deeper in to the sea or fish.

Meanwhile at Port players can choose to sell their fish which will allow them to buy upgrades, or they can mount their fish for additional end game bonuses.

Along the way, players will collect Regrets. The number of Regrets can send you mad, but with madness comes some potential benefits.

Deep Regrets is a relatively light push your luck style game.

Gameplay Overview

Setup – There are four parts to setting up Deep Regrets, and the modular nature of the boards means that it can be adapted well to the game space available. Setup is pretty straight forward, with the trickiest part being separating the Depth cards in to piles of 13 cards (a number selected on purpose I suspect!).

At Sea – Players will use their rolled die to catch revealed Fish or to go to deeper waters. This is where the game really shines. How do you know which Shoal to reveal? The backs of those Depth cards are giving more information than first meets the eye. The size of the shadow tells you the size of the Fish on the reverse, which can then be cross-referenced with Reference card to get a likely cost. So if you only rolled 1s and you’re at Depth II, a Large Fish might be out of your reach.

Revealing and Catching the Fish are the main ways you, and your fellow players, will collect Regrets. Some Fish have abilities that trigger at different times and can impact both the player that triggered, but also other players.

The layout of cards is easy to understand, even though they have a lot of information on them. The artwork is outstanding too. It sets the scene beautifully and carries on across all aspects of the game.

There are three size of Fish (Small, Medium and Large), and two types (Fair and Foul).

Abandoning Ship will earn 10 Regrets but allows a player to go to Port immediately and complete their day there. This can be a really useful tool, especially towards the end of the game when you might want to Mount some fish.

At Port – players can Sell Fish, Shop or Mount Fish. How much is a fish worth? That depends on the Fish and your Madness. Your madness is ruled by your number of Regrets. Which is a neat mechanic, although you do need to keep an eye on it.

The Fishbucks you earn can be spent in the Shop to buy some excellent upgrades, including additional single-use die (again the number of die you can use depends on your Madness). There is only one of each Rod, Reel and Supply with each being pretty powerful and really changes how a player can approach the game.

Lastly you can choose to Mount Fish on to your player board, giving end game scoring bonuses.

Turn Structure and Gameplay- The game lasts one week, as marked on the Port board. Each week is made up of seven days, and each day has four phases. At the end of the week, scoring will take place to determine the winning Angler. Players take their turns until they Pass, when they can collect a Dink, and will collect another Dink each time play passes them again. Which means that there is almost a reward for passing early, again a neat little mechanic. In a 2 player game, this doesn’t come through as much, but in higher player counts it really can.

Dinks – mini-cards that live up to their name. They can give small helpful nudges to help a player, although some of them are useless as an old pair of boots.

Regrets – Throughout the game players will collect and discard these. While the number of them is public, the value of them is known only to the player. The number of Regrets also determines a players Madness. Deep Regrets is not about avoiding Regrets, it’s about managing them – a lesson in life perhaps? The Madness track also defines the Sell value of Fish- adding or subtracting a value for Fair or Foul Fish. This track also determines the max dice a player can use. For me, this was the most finicky part of the game – remembering to check this track and keep it updated as players gain and lose Regrets.

End Game – At the end of the last day the end game is triggered. All players now reveal their regrets and add up the Value of them. If you have the highest value, you’re going to lose a Mounted Fish. Add up all the Fish in Hand, Mounted Fish and Fishbucks (1 point for every 2 Fishbucks)

Artwork & Components

Both the Artwork and Graphic design are excellent in Deep Regrets. All the components are easy to understand, colourful and deeply thematic. Some of the Fish cards are truly the stuff of nightmares!

Worth noting that the game uses biodegradable and eco-friendly alternatives to completely remove plastic from the production. This has not been at the expense of quality, though. All the components feel great. The cards have a good weight to them, as do the wooden D4 dice. The meeples of various shapes and sizes look and feel great too. I personally love the Fish Coin and wish there were more opportunities to use it!

Final Thoughts

Despite the name and theme, it’s not a deep (or complex or strategic) game, but it’s a lot of fun. Verry accessible and could easily be played with non-gamers. Hardcore gamers, might not like that about it, though.

Deep Regrets is easy to teach – players will be up and running pretty quickly. It has a lightweight rules framework and easily understandable cards. The action selection is not complex.

There’s enough player interaction to make it fun, but it’s nowhere near a ‘take that’ type of game. I think this plays best at 3+ players, although 2 player is still good fun.

The way the dice roll, which Fish are available and what upgrades you have mean that no two games are likely to be the same.

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Deep Regrets is a game about fishing the briny deep, managing your regrets and ensuring you
have the right tackle for the job. What attracted me to it was its amazing art style and the fact
that it reminded me of one of my favourite video games from the last few years, Dredge.
Managing your equipment, selling your catch and mounting your trophies is the name of the
game and the whole time, you must also manage your ever-increasing madness. Yes, it gives
you bonuses, but it can also be brutal in end-game scoring. Welcome to Deep Regrets!

The Set-Up

The set-up in Deep Regrets is not trivial but does not take too long at all. Give each player a double-sided player board, a Fishbuck tracker, 3 player dice, 2 reference cards, a Can of Worms card and a Lifeboat card. Each player then places their boa meeple, or Beeple I suppose, at depth one on the sea board. You always spend your first day at sea!

After that, you need to set up the sea board, port board and madness board. The Sea board is where you will be doing most of your work. It shows 3 depths to fish with 3 shoals in each. Each shoal needs to be made up by shuffling the cards for that depth and making 3 piles. Each pile must have 13 cards, these cards contain an all manner of weird, uncanny and scaly monstrosities….. Oh, and some fish too. After that, shuffle the small Dink deck and place it on top of the Sea board, in its designated space.

The port board, which is where you will go to upgrade, sell and mount your fish, will need to be set up next. Shuffle the 3 piles of upgrade cards and place them below the shop they refer to. Reels, rods and supplies can be bought with your hard-earned Fishbucks. Then place the day tracker on Monday for a normal game and Tuesday for a shorter game. After that, place all the tackle dice in the bag and leave them nearby, along with the Omen Die, Life Preserver and Fish Coin. Lastly create a deck of regret cards consisting of 10 random regret cards per player.

The madness board is simple, just place everyone’s madness tracker on the top of the board. You will use this board to track the number of regrets you have, your madness level and its associated quirks. More dice and discounts can be gained, but beware, too many regrets may make you insane and lose you some sweet, sweet endgame points. Lastly, give the first player marker to the player who has had the most regrettable day, which is a conversation piece by itself!

Day Phases

Each of your in-game days are split into phases. Come on, you have played board games before, you know there are going to be phases.

These phases are Start (which is skipped on the first day as it’s more of a clean-up), Refresh, Declaration and Action. In the Start phase, you will discard any uncaught revealed fish, advance the day tracker one day and gain any day bonuses. Oh, and don’t forget to pass the first player token.

Players then move onto the Refresh phase. Here you refresh your dice by rolling all the dice in your spent pool, plus any you wish from your fresh pool. You are hoping for big numbers to hopefully catch some big fish. After that, you can fill up your fresh dice pool, up to your max allowed on the madness tracker, with the dice you just rolled, placing the remainder in your spent pool. Then, the player with the most on their fresh dice pool throws the life preserver to a player of your choice. It’s a little bonus for basically being rubbish at rolling dice, which is nice.

Phase 3 is the Declaration phase (which you also skipped on the first day). Here, you pick your equipment and decide whether you will spend the day at sea or at the port. Just bear in mind the first day is always at sea and if you were at port yesterday, you must return to the sea. Picking the right location each day is crucial to maximise your fishing time and purchase your upgrades.

Lastly, it’s the Action phase, where you will be spending most of your time. Here, all players will go round and round, taking actions. Once done, you pass, meaning you cannot eat any of your fish or use any items until the next day. Passing gives you a small bonus of a Dink or discarding a Regret card at random. You get this bonus every time you are passed in turn order and when there is one person left to pass, they get at most 2 more turns.

The actions you can take vary depending on whether you are at Port or Sea, along with a list of free actions in each destination that do not cost your turn.

At Sea

While at sea, your options are to fish or abandon ship. Fishing is the main mechanic of Deep Regrets but at any time you can flip your Lifeboat card and return to Port. This is costly as it adds 10 to your regret value but may enable you to mount more fish for some juicy bonus points. Beware, it’s costly but can save you in a pinch.

Fishing then, first, you must cast your line. That is, select a shoal to fish and either hook the top card if it is revealed or flip it over and reveal it. This will be your chosen fish to try and catch. If you flipped a fish and it has a ‘reveal’ ability, denoted by the eye symbol, then carry out its instructions. Picking a shoal can be tricky but you have a small amount of info on the back of the cards. The shadow size indicates the difficulty range, so you can slightly predict what you may get on your hook!

After that, in order to catch the fish, you must spend dice equal to or greater than its catch difficulty. Spent dice or moved from the fresh pool to the spent pool, unless they are tackle dice bought from the shop, in which case they are returned to the dice bag. Once caught, carry out any ‘caught’ actions on the card, denoted by a little hook icon and then add the card to your hand. It can be sold or even eaten if it has the ‘eat’ action icon on it.

If you cannot or choose not to catch the fish, you return it face up to its shoal, discard one fresh dice and take a Dink card for your trouble. You can also carry out any of the free actions, which do not cost your turn, such as using your Can of Worms to peek at fish cards in the sea, eating any caught fish that have an ‘eat’ ability or using dinks/items for their effects. The main free action you will use will be the ‘Drop Sinkers’ action, which allows you to discard a fresh die to go down one depth in the sea. The deeper the sea, the better the reward but be careful, the harder the blighters are to catch too. Plus, there’s some weird stuff down there.

The Madness Tracker

Before we go over the port actions, I feel we need to go through the Madness tracker, it will give more context to some of the Port actions.

As you take more regret cards, from various game mechanics and actions, your madness level will fluctuate. You move your madness tracker around the board to keep track, more madness gives you a larger dice pool, a decrease in fresh fish prices, an increase in foul fish prices and right at the last level of the tracker, a discount at the Ports stores. Madness is adjusted in real-time as you discard or gain regret.

Regret cards come in various values from 0 to 3 and trying to get high on the madness tracker without having the highest regret score is one of the game’s tricky mechanics, not in a rules sense but trying to judge what regret score your opponents have is certainly not easy. Good Luck!

Fresh fish are your standard fish that appear more at the higher depths, and foul fish are grotesque monstrosities that appear in abundance at lower depths. Managing your madness and getting the best prices and therefore points for your fish is vital to success.

Port Actions

The port is where you will be buying gear, selling fish, mounting fish and bartering to your heart’s content. When you first arrive at Port, you can refresh your dice, similar to the Refresh phase, giving you more opportunity to roll better results, as you will be rolling again in the morning, giving you twice as much chance to get those high numbers. Long with that, you can refresh your Can of Worms card and discard a regret card.

Similar to the sea, you have free actions too, which are using the life preserver to get a $2 discount, using items, using Dinks and eating fish. Your normal actions are selling fish, which means taking any fish from your hand and selling them, taking into account any price adjustments from your madness level. You can also mount a fish into one of the three locations on top of your board, these are your prize catches that will get point multipliers at game’s end.

Along with these fish-based shenanigans, you can visit any of the game’s 4 shops. You can only visit each of them once per round, though, so bear that in mind. Each shop has levels depending on how much you want to spend and spending more money gets you more choice and increasing rewards. Buying rods, reels, more dice and supplies will give you a leg up on your fellow sea-farers.

End Game, Comparing Fish and Scoring

It’s that time, you have got to the end of the week, you are soaking, tired and sick of fish! It’s time to score up and see who was the best on the Briny Deep.

Firstly, you must work out who has the highest regret score and get all players to add up all their regret cards. The player with the highest must discard one of their mounted fish, which can be brutal, as they come with score multipliers. Unlucky for some! Don’t forget to add the 10 from the used Lifeboat card, it’s easily done.

Next, you check all the fish in your hand and adjust their score depending on where you are on the madness track. You add to this your mounted fish, adding multipliers from your board and also adjusting them depending on your madness level. You also get a point for every $2 you have left. Which fisher-person has the best score wins, with ties settled by the lower regret score.

There you have it, you fished, you upgraded, you failed and you went mad. All in a days work for a brave seafarer!

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