Deep Sea Adventure Review – Drowning Because Your Friends Are Greedy

Welcome to your Deep Sea Adventure! Where you play treasure hunters, searching the ocean floor for untold riches. However, it’s been a while since you found something worth selling. So you’re sharing the submarine, and the oxygen within, with others sharing the same goal. Will you return to the surface a millionaire?

Or blue and bloated on a beach somewhere?

Starting a game of Deep Sea Adventure is as simple as putting the submarine board in the center of the table. Then creating a breadcrumb trail of treasure tokens, starting with the lowest-scoring tokens, and graduating to the highest-scoring.

You start your turn by reducing the amount of shared oxygen players have, one tick per treasure you hold. Once this runs out, the round is over, and any treasure divers not in the submarine, lose all their collected treasure.

Next, you need to decide if you’re going deeper into the ocean or returning to the submarine. Keep in mind you can only change direction once per round.

Then you roll dice, moving the amount rolled. Skipping over occupied spaces and moving one less space per held treasure. So if you held two treasures, you would need to roll a three or you wouldn’t move at all.

Finally, you choose whether to pick up the treasure you landed on, drop a treasure you currently hold, or pass your turn to the next player.

If you make it back to the submarine before the round ends, you keep any treasure you took with you. Otherwise, your treasure falls deeper into the ocean. Creating a stack of tokens at the end of the trail.

After three rounds, whoever has the most treasure wins!

Rolling in the deep

Deep Sea Adventure is a gamified siren song tempting you to the bottom of the ocean. Where each tier of treasure tile is so significantly better than the last, it’s almost always worth the risk. Unless you know you’re not making it back up.

This choice of turning back stops Deep Sea Adventure from becoming a roll-and-move luckfest. You can roughly calculate how many turns you need to get back. Based on average dice rolls, rate of oxygen depletion and how many tokens you’re holding.

Yet, there are several factors you can’t calculate.

For example, what other players are going to do. Given you skip over occupied spaces, a perfectly timed movement can see you traversing great distances. Making your return a certainty. However, if you fall behind, then you have a better chance of learning to breathe underwater than making it back.

You need to be frustratingly precise in deciding when to turn back. As the punishment for miscalculating is devastating. Sometimes, this means you only get to take one step off the sub before needing to return.

Whether you return to the sub or not, the trail of treasure tokens is shortened after each round. Increasing the temptation, and ease of getting to the bigger rewards. This ensures anyone can steal the game in the last round, as long as they turn back in time.

Unfortunately, if a player sees this (or anything else they don’t like) they can sabotage everyone by picking up more loot tokens. Therefore, they require more oxygen on their turn. This can be painful for everyone. Especially at a higher player count, when the oxygen already drains so quickly as to make the game less fun.

East meets West in board gaming

Deep Sea Adventure is a push-your-luck game both in terms of figuring out how deep you’re going, as well as the dice you roll. This creates chaotic moments where logic is damned, and you roll exceptionally well – or poorly.

During these moments lies all the excitement of a casino game.

Or it would if that’s what Deep Sea Adventure was all about.

Instead, this game isn’t about big payoffs and crazy outcomes, it’s much more subdued. Rewarding small victories, and mild achievements, where if you can get one treasure back to the ship – you’re doing alright.

This minimalistic approach is seen throughout Deep Sea Adventure, from box size, to design, and components, there’s no wasted space. It’s a fascinating look at how culture can influence the design of a board game.

However, this Japanese minimalism didn’t gel with our Western sensibilities. Whether it was our bravado, stupidity, or stubbornness, we always charged headlong into the deep. Treating Deep Sea Adventure like a more lively push-your-luck game like Diamant. Of course, doing this meant we found our watery grave nearly every round.

This is the duality of Deep Sea Adventure, a game that wants you to push the envelope and suck you into the depths. But punishes you terribly for doing so.