Game Review: Deep Sea Adventure

Deep Sea Adventure designed by Jun Sasaki and Goro Saaki and published by Oink Games, Inc.

In Deep Sea Adventure, one to six players are explorers in search of valuable treasure. They have a rickety submarine with little air for their excursions. Players push their luck, trying to dive deeper for the better artifacts. Whoever brings the most loot back wins the game.

The game contains a submarine board and thirty-two artifact chips. These chips are divided into four categories, with the later groups of eight worth more. The chips are laid out in a path below the ship.

The initial set up

The game plays over three rounds. In each round, the players take turns rolling dice to see how far they can move. The two dice have one, two, or three pips, so the biggest rolled number is six. At the start of the round, the players move and decide if they want to collect the artifact on which they land. If they do collect (but the early stuff is only worth zero to three points, so not too valuable), they replace the artifact chip with a round blank chip. On the players' second turns in the round, they have to subtract air from the submarine (one air per artifact that player has) before rolling the dice. Also before rolling, they have to decide if they will turn around and go back to the ship. Whether they go on or go back, they roll the dice and subtract the number of artifacts from their dice roll (the artifact weighs you down) and move that number of chips. So carrying a chip depletes the sub's oxygen and slows down the explorer.

Middle of the first turn

The ship running out of air

If a player is worried about running out of time, when they are on a blank chip, they can choose to return an artifact to the track to make them move faster. Giving up an artifact lessens the amount of treasure they have but speeds up their return to the ship. Once the oxygen runs out, the round ends. Anyone who made it back to the sub can look at the value of their chips. Those players who didn't make it back return their artifacts to the end of the line in stacks of three chips. All the blank chips in the line are taken out and the line is shortened. So the second and third rounds give even better opportunities to score big.

Second round

The game plays from two to six players with more players generating more tension. Early in the round, it's tempting to travel as far as possible along the path. Coming back to the ship is a lot harder than going out. In addition to the individual players moving slower, the rate of oxygen depletion gets faster. I've had a lot of games where I only scored points in the final round because I was too greedy and never made it back to the sub the first two rounds. Still, the game is exciting and plays rather quickly, so the fact that your character may drown a few times isn't so catastrophic. The game plays in less than half an hour and is a lot of fun for our family.

Recommended.