Deep Dive

The Game

Deep Dive is a game about penguins hunting for food. You play a clan of penguins, and your family members dive deep into the ocean to look for food. The deeper you go, the higher valued the prey you will find. However you need to remember you are prey too. There are larger predators out there - killer whales and sea lions. If you run into them, you won't be able to hunt. You need to run (well, swim) for your life. 

Every player gets three penguins. 

The tiles in the game are divided into five colours, representing five different ocean depths. On your turn you send one of your penguins diving to hunt for food. You always start at Level 1 - the shallowest level. You flip over a face-down tile. If it is food, you may decide to keep it and end your turn, or you may decide to dive deeper. If it is a predator, your turn ends, your penguin is temporarily locked on that predator tile, and you return empty-handed. If you decide the food you find is not good enough and you want to dive deeper hoping to find something better, you simply reveal a tile from the next level. If you are lucky, you can keep going until you find a highly valuable food tile at Level 5, the deepest level. 

Penguins which run into predators become temporarily stuck like this. Sometimes you run into air bubbles. If this happens you must continue to dive. You might also run into rocks. You can decide to pick up a rock and end your turn. On a future turn, you can spend the rock to directly dive to any depth. You don't need to start at Level 1. 

When you collect food tiles, you must arrange them in a grid before you. There are three different colours. A row can have up to three tiles and they must be in different colours. Tiles in the same column must have the same colour. If you have a complete row, you score points based on the sum of the tile values. An incomplete row scores half that. So you will try to collect colours evenly. The tiles in the photo above are currently worth 17 points. 

When penguins hunt, they can claim food tiles previously passed over by other penguins. You can collect colours you need this way, and sometimes the point values are decent too. This is a risk-free endeavor, since the tile is already face-up. You know what you are getting. 

The game ends when all tiles at one level have been flipped over. Usually it will be the first level. Players collectively have some control over how soon the game ends. You can roughly calculate how soon it will end, so you know how much time you have left to complete your rows.  

The Play

This is a push-your-luck game. You want to dive deep and find high valued food tiles. However taking risks too often may not be good, because when you run into a predator you essentially waste a turn. Luck is certainly a factor, but sometimes you can mitigate that. Sometimes you can decide how big a risk you want to take. There are situations when you have safe choices, even though they may not be attractive. 

When we played, everyone disregarded the rocks for most of the game. In the late game I was first to start picking up rocks and using them to directly dive deep. When others realised how lucrative this could be, everyone started clamouring for rocks. Using a rock takes two turns, one to claim the rock and the other to actually deep dive, but since you can bypass several levels, you are reducing your risk and going straight for the higher point value tiles. 

Players need to collect food tiles in different colours, so not every tile has the same worth to every player. At different times, people may be prioritising different colours. You have to watch this, and try not to leave behind colours others want. 

Many penguins were locked by predators. Running into a predator is unfortunate, but the game gives you some compensation. The next time your other penguin visits a level which has your own locked penguin, you may choose to skip that level and go straight to the next one. This reduces your risk exposure. Also when all three of your penguins are locked, you get to claim a face-up tile from one of the levels they are at, before they all return to your hand. 

We used an expansion. That third tile in the second row is a wild card and has all three colours. 

Near game end, we started grabbing these low valued prawns from Level 1 which had been ignored most of the game. We were now desperate enough to use them to complete some rows. If we didn't manage to complete rows with high valued tiles, their total values would be halved. At this point we still had prawns in all three colours. 

The Thoughts

Deep Dive is a simple entry-level game, good for casual players and families. The push-your-luck aspect is exciting. There is a fair bit of luck. This works well as a children's game too.