Is your family learning about the ocean? Or do you love semi-cooperative risk-assessment games? Are you short on space but would like another game suitable for older kids? Deep Sea Adventure could be just what the doctor ordered!
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The premise of Deep Sea Adventure is that you’re a group of poor treasure hunters. You’re all competing for treasure, but your budgets force you to share a submarine and an air supply. The farther down you go, the better the treasure could be, but the more air it takes to get back up.
Game Components
There is no board but a submarine tile, 32 ruins chips, and 16 blank chips. The chips are laid out in a line (often curving; it doesn’t matter how, as long as there is one clear path), so the “board” changes every game. The ruins chips are of four types:
- Level 1: 0-3 points each, triangles
- Level 2: 4-7 points each, squares
- Level 3: 8-11 points each, pentagons
- Level 4: 12-15 points each, hexagons
There are 8 chips of each level; 2 of each point value. Chips are separated by level, turned face-down, and mixed up within their levels. Then they are laid out. Level 1 chips are first, then 2, and so on. So while the Level 1 ruins chips are easy to collect, they’re worth little (if anything).
How to Play Deep Sea Adventure
On your turn, begin by reducing the air available in the submarine by the number of ruins chips you hold. Declare if you will turn back to the submarine. Then roll the dice and advance your pawn. However, you have to subtract the number of ruins chips you hold from your roll, so it’s possible to not get to move very far at all.
When you finish moving on your turn, decide if you want to keep the ruins chip. However, you can’t look at it until you get back to the submarine. If you do keep the ruins chip, replace it with a blank chip so the length of the “board” stays the same.
A game of Deep Sea Adventure is composed of three rounds. Each round is composed of each player making one trip outside of the submarine. You can go down as deep as you want and collect as many ruins chips as you want, but if the submarine runs out of air before you make it back in, you lose all your treasure and it piles up on the bottom of the sea.
Cooperative and Competitive Gameplay
The combination of cooperation and competition in Deep Sea Adventure is very realistic. There are many times in life in which we have to cooperate to get anything done, but we’re each competing, too. Castle Panic has this element (if you keep score, which we don’t always). Add this to the strategy, math, and small size of the game, and you have yourself a winner! Just don’t play it around little ones as there are mostly small pieces.
