Deep Dive (Flatout Games, 2023)
We never get tired of trying out new games. When we opened Deep Dive yesterday and saw all the sheets of pieces, I was worried that it might turn out to be too complicated for our quick, casual play sessions. It turns out that there ARE a lot of pieces, but the gameplay is simple and just a bit different from anything we had seen before. All those pieces represent five different layers (depths) of the ocean, with the lower layers in darker shades of blue, and with one to five pips showing which layer each chip belongs to. For less than three players you start by taking out all the tiles with a (+) sign on them, since those are for 4+ players only. Then you remove some number of tiles from each depth to balance the number of players, then group up the tiles for each depth face down, and that's it for setup. Each player gets three penguins. On your turn, one of your penguins dives in to the tiles at Layer 1. At each level you have to option of flipping ...