This is another game that I got on artwork alone, I’m suddenly realising that I like darker artwork, with a horror twist but slightly more cartoony than realistic.
Though good art alone will sell a game to me.
Saw this one floating around on Instagram a couple of times and thought I’d reel it in and see what kind of catch I got…
Deep Regrets
Deep Regrets is an unfortunate fishing game about pulling progressively more horrifying things out of the ocean. Decide what to eat, what to sell, what to mount, and how many regrets you’re willing to carry, as you push yourself too far and spiral towards a conclusion in this strategic horror fishing game.
You’ll roll bespoke tackle dice at the start of each turn to determine your strength for that round and then decide whether you’ll stay at sea or return to port to sell fish, buy provisions, and recharge your energy.
Survey the sizes of shadows on the backs of 9 different fish shoals at three depths, determining what you think you can afford to catch and if you want to risk it for a potentially better reward. Flip fish, spend dice, add them to your collection – but beware of reveal and catch abilities that can have various effects on the game! As your eyes spy more and more horrifying things, you’ll collect Regrets cards – which drive up your madness but also give you access to more dice and increase the value of weirder fish. It’s a risk/reward scenario as you balance your madness, knowing that at the end of the game the player with the highest value of Regrets will have to discard their most valuable mounted fish.
Manage your resources, make strategic decisions, leverage madness to your benefit and suppress your Regrets as you try to catch the most valuable haul of weirder and weirder fish in this weird week at sea.
SOLO MODE:
In the solo mode (which you can also co-op), you’ll act as an ichthyologist on a mission to catch and catalog every fish in the sea. Over a campaign of dozens of games, you’ll try to reel in every last fish and document their attributes on provided catalog sheet. At the end of each game, you’ll have to discard an equal value of fish to the regrets you’ve collected and may have to let some fish go to return to another day. At the end of the campaign, you’ll have a catalog of all fish names, depths, values and difficulties that can be used by players in the multiplayer game to help identify what they might fish up!
Loved the vibrancy of the box art immediately along with the great feel to all the components.
Looked forward to digging in, which I did almost immediately and forgot to take photos of the first couple of sessions as I want to “catch ’em all”.
Talking about the components in the box you will get:
- 15 Bespoke Buoy Player Dice
- 24 Bespoke Buoy Tackle Dice
- 1 Omen Die
- 5 Boat Meeples
- 5 Madness Cubes
- 5 Fishbuck Trackers
- 1 Life Preserver
- 1 Day Tracker
- 1 First Player Marker
- 1 Metal Fishcoin
- 1 Cloth Bag
- 117 Unique Fish Cards
- 60 Regrets Mini-Cards
- 25 Dink Mini-Cards
- 5 Life Boat Cards
- 5 Can of Worm Cards
- 10 Player Reference Cards
- 10 Rod Cards
- 10 Reel Cards
- 20 Supply Cards
- 1 Instruction Manual
I spent ten game ‘weeks’ perfecting my fishing style but I was still five fish short of collecting them all, but the Centrepin Reel and the Narwhal Rod, cheap fish and multiple dinks really worked for me, oh and all the dice that you can have extra so loads of actions.
Since I needed two fish from Depth III and two fish from Depth II (along with one from Depth I) I used the Diving Bell to take me to Depth II and then a dice to sit me at Depth III to fish from there and above and concentrated on that, first ‘fish’ was the Amulet of Agatha, extra dice extra action.
Then it was the Orca (fair fish cost one less) then the one that made fair fish cost one less, that mean all fish cost two less midway through day one.
By the end of day three I had caught the four fish from the two lower depths that I needed and went up a depth to fish from the top two depths so that there were less chance of madness cards as I still had to land those fish.
By mid day five I had the last fish I needed and dinked the last few fish (unless they were nice and fair and gave good gold) as I was searching for the dinks that got rid of madness cards and this all worked out well and ended up with no madness cards in hand.
So in all it took me 11 in game ‘weeks’ to collect all the fish – this is going to be my base to see if I can do it better than this next time. I’ve also added the Lamentable Tentacles expansion to the base game now.
Enjoyed this game but I think I’ll get much more out of it in multiplayer.
