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 a face-down tile OR taking a face-up tile.  If the tile shows bubbles you MUST go down to the next level down.  If it's a food item (it has points), or it's a pebble, you have to option to take it and go back to the surface, ending your turn, or dive down to the next layer.

The tiles on deeper levels are worth more points, but there are more predators down there.  If you flip a tile showing a predator (any creature with no points shown), you are trapped: leave your penguin on top of the predator tile and your turn is over.

The trapped penguins are not entirely gone, though.  You can skip any layer where you have a trapped pengiun, supposedly because that penguin is distracting the predators.  When your third penguin is caught, though, you bring all penguins back to the surface and can take one face-up tile with you from any layer when you had a trapped penguin.

When any layer has had its last tile turned face up, you flip the "1st player" marker to "LAST DIVE" and each player gets one last dive.  Then the game is over.

That's about it.  You can't help but say silly things as you move your penguins deeper into the ocean.  Once learned, you can swim through the rounds in a matter of minutes.

The one remaining quirk is the scoring system.  The first time, we just added up our points, and I'm sure you could just do it that way.  But the official way is to line your food in columns by color (yellow, green, red) in the order that you caught each one.  At the end, any rows with one of each color score the full points, and the rows below that score half.  This encourages you to dive deeper at the beginning, so your first catches will have the highest scores.  But you might not come back with anything on those deep dives.  It's dangerous down there.

It takes some fiddling to set this up, but the box comes with enough zip baggies to organize the tiles by level, and a bag for all the 3+ player tiles, and an extra bag.  So next time, just dump out the bags for layer 1 to 5, arrange the tiles into a sensible mess, grab some penguins and go.

This is a keeper.  It's a marvel that after the hundreds of games I have played -- probably over 1000 in my lifetime -- I still run into games that are unlike anything else.  Sure, there are probably some games that ARE similar, I just haven't seen them yet, and the way our brains store memories and categorize the world, when we do see another, we will think of it as being "like Deep Dive".