 So deep see adventure This is a real simple game. It's a Japanese indie tabletop game. Yeah, our friend Chris has gotten obsessed with the Japanese board game Industry, so he's getting lots of Japanese games Including this one, which is a good. They're real hit or miss like all games are like all indie type board games But some of them have amazing aspects like there's a game called Buddha Babel, which oh my god I want to I want to not a great game It's basically just sort of like vote who wins really fast But the instruction manual is so gloriously hilarious in its English It is amazing and also the concept God with your tower that is too tall. Yep. You are you gonna win the game? You have to build the tower of Babel that is the tallest but isn't too tall because then it offends God It's uh, I feel like there's a really good game there, but it didn't quite execute But deep see adventure final judgment. Oh, so the other common theme I'm I'm picking up on because I see other people complaining about this too is that for whatever reason Japanese Indie tabletop people can't seem to write rules very well I'm sure they're probably well-written some of them at least I mean In English can't write rules well, but I'm sure if we knew you know Emily read the rules She could tell us a better ruling than the so from what I have gathered that does not appear to be the case The rules are just not as tight as I would expect from a game in general But Kickstarter games have the exact same problem I mean games period have this problem people don't write game rules tightly and well seems like the only games that don't have this problem are The like the people who write game rules well are gay our rules lawyers and rules lawyers usually bad at designing games It's Rainer kinesia and a few other people are the only people who write good game rules or people with lots of editors Yeah, and big publishers But even they fuck it up a lot deep-sea adventure is so simple and so quick and I always introduce it to people as the drowning game It's a drowning simulator. Let's go. That's correct. Basically. You get a bunch of I mean It has a conceit and the concede is pretty funny. You're a bunch of shithead Treasure hunters who all hate each other, but you're also poor So you get together and rent a terrible submarine You're all in the same submarine together with the same and you only have one air tank But you want to get more treasure than the other people because you're not sharing so on your turn You're sharing the submarine. We're not sharing a treasure There's a shared set of air on your turn you go down and there's all these tiles Everyone has no one takes a tank with them. Everyone's just got a hose connected to the submarine So if you breathe too much air, you will kill everybody So as long as you're going down and not picking up any treasure You game just goes on forever Just do whatever you want and your options on the turn is you decide if you're going to continue going down Or you're gonna fucking bail and run back up to that submarine Then you roll some dice you roll 2d3 to figure out how far you move in the direction You chose and then you can choose whether or not to pick up treasure on that spot The treasures get better the deeper you go However, as soon as you've picked up treasure every time it gets to your turn The air goes down by the number of treasures you are holding and that applies to every player There's a one more thing that makes it even worse So if I'm holding one treasure on my turn the air goes down by one There's only 30 airs if you got a lot of players. It's hard 25. It's not a lot of airs not a lot of airs at all But anyway Then you know when you roll the dice to move remember, it's 2d3. You don't move a lot You subtract one from your total movement for every treasure you're holding So if I roll the best possible roll a six and I'm holding two treasures I only move four spaces I'm holding two treasures and I roll a one or a two I don't move and my turn goes past the rules like to find out if you pick up Still use two air from holding two treasures And that is key because if the air runs out after the player's turn and ended the air Anyone who's not on the boat drops all their treasure to the bottom of the ocean and dies Yep, and then you play again you play three rounds everyone at the submarine goes back to the surface So anyone who's in it survives even though they ran out of air There's a little bit more about how you can just drop treasure and try to race back for the boat And how the lot like there's also positioning based on the other people So when you move if you step on someone else, you just sort of fast forward right past them So if there's a bunch of people in front of you It's really easy to get to the bottom of the ocean quickly to get more fancy treasures But if there's not a lot of people behind you It's really hard to go back up to that you need people in front of you whichever way you're going to move quickly with a low roll So you want people to be close to you But in in front of you on your way back to the submarine so you can get up there quickly Now this game take you if everyone knows how to play it Five minutes tops to play an entire game the thing that takes the longest amount of time is the dice rolling Yep, maybe ten minutes Teaching the game takes about two minutes and people just kind of get it and everyone I've shown this game to because I own it now Really likes it like everyone. I've ever introduced this to and I had them play it They just got really you can basically have all the fun of playing like infiltration It means 90% of the fun of playing in I had to say it I think this is better than infiltration. I mean because it's absolutely well I think infiltration has some complexities and some you know mere parts which make it sort of less pure and less good But it has a little bit more fun because it has extra bits like But it also has this meta of Doug it always goes kind of the same way. There's only two options on how that game goes, right? But anyway, so yeah, you can basically have all you know I think in terms of fun per minute per dollar per, you know unit It's better than infiltration This is like the perfect Busted out while you're waiting for the last person to come back from the bathroom to start a real game or Busted out when you're at a con and the room closes in a half hour You can get one more game out of the way or bust it out if you're on a literal submarine Yep, your divers bust it out like at the table at a restaurant. Yeah, so The thing I have noticed also is that when you play this game with people who haven't played it a bunch Almost everyone dies or everyone dies Yeah, first two rounds. Mm-hmm this game like everything's going fine And it's just you know, it's a press your luck game So and should I keep going should I keep going everything's fine as soon as one person decides to turn back all hell breaks loose Yeah, as soon as one person picks up two treasures all hell breaks loose Yep, the game is all about leaving Scott to drown at the bottom of the ocean as fast as possible Hopefully you're not the one who's at the deepest part of the ocean when people start turning around, right? You're at the deepest part of the ocean you should turn around first So that you get you know, it's like I'm the deepest right now I will grab a treasure turn around and I'll get a pretty good role because everyone else is right behind me And then I'll be on my way back and it'll be good times I've had a strategy here at the deepest part of the ocean and everyone else turns back and then it's your turn again Now this is a big gap behind you It's like wait for me and now you're dead if I'm way too shallow like I'm near the submarine going down and Other people have picked up multiple treasures. I just immediately turn around pick up all the shit treasures on my way Out just to try to kill everybody. Yeah, there's plenty of strategies like this There's a lot of depth to this game Despite how simple it is and I really like it And it's just like if you if you're the kind of person who plays board games with people This is like a must-have in your library So in general, I mean, it's a press your luck game. It's what it's almost a pure Press your luck game. There's plenty of press your luck games is like, you know Fresh fish is a press your luck game in many ways to a degree, but it's much more obscured and complex Right. The press your luck is only one aspect of it, right? But there's no thanks is a press your luck game in many ways press your luck is a press your luck game Yeah, the game show on TV No, except if you figure out the pattern and you're not the luck component goes away And press your luck is also a core like it is a mechanic either core or just sort of part of the game Like it's part of way more games than you might realize infiltration I've we just mentioned because all it really means is that you generally have the option like a real usually a Really simple dial where you can dial up your risk raw and it yeah And it dials up the reward at the same time. Yeah, you can just you know a lot of games You can buy reward potential with risk right in most games out there You know, you're always making these sort of decisions based on a risk reward analysis sort of thing, right? Like a hot I've got three moves available. There's the risky move that has a big reward There's a risky move with a shitty reward forget that one And there's a conservative move with an okay reward and you can sort of choose to But a press your luck game is different in that you can choose pretty much anywhere along the scale of risk and reward It's like a free roaming, you know needle not just concrete actions And you can you know keep pressing and then at some point you flip and you know this sort of this movement of Increasing the risk until you stop and turn around and give up on the risk, you know Like a deal or no deal and things like that now pressing your luck Like it's in most games where they realized or not like even wizard has a heavy press your luck mechanic Or at least a component because once you're behind you're not gonna win You can you got to go for increasingly desperate strategies to try to catch up So you just dial the risk all the way up in the last round. You're like, yeah, I'm taking 10 tricks Yep, you just go for it even though you've got almost no chance because that's a conventional heuristic of almost all games If you're losing you want to increase randomness or Take on additional risk to attempt to get a greater reward because you play conservatively and you're behind You're guaranteed to stay behind Like you can't overtake someone with a conservative strategy if they're ahead of you because they're gonna play Conservative strategy and at best you'll maintain your current negative lead So the hallmark, you know of a game that's specifically a press your luck game is the turnaround point Yeah, at which point do you stop increasing the rate? You know, it's like, okay rim one out of two chance of making a dollar Okay, I'll do it. All right now you have to bet you have to go all in on every bet or not bet So not a four chance the next one is one out of four chance the next one's one out of eight sixteen It's like at what point do you say? Alright, I'm just gonna keep my money and I'm not going to go all in again. Yeah, right? How do you make this decision, right? It's like, you know, you've already you know, it's like obviously no matter what the odds are in any game you're going all in on the very first bet even if the odds are really small because It's like if you don't win the first bet, you're you give zero, which is what you can't have less than zero Yeah, it's like turn one like a pure conservative strategy and wizard would be to always bid zero unless you have wizards Sure, like yeah, you're not gonna like you'll get your two points every round probably but you're not gonna win if anyone takes even You're also gonna take tricks by accident actually lose maybe Yeah, but but like always easier to avoid a trick right then to take you would never in deep sea adventure or infiltration on the first turn Just leave and be like oh back in the submarine Yep, that there's no reason to do that you might as well at least go out get the first thing You know go in infiltration go out pick up one day to token and go back So there's two things one and it's are you behind or not like the further behind you are? Yeah, fuck it like full sale, but there's also the before anyone has made a full declaration Like I step out and take a little more risk and then Scott sees it took a little more risk So he also takes a little more risk like let's go like this game is totally safe Until someone starts picking up treasure So at what point do you pick up the treasure and be that guy who caused the game to enter the Collapsing state you have to anal because everyone else takes their turn before you take your turn Right, so they could all turn back and then you're the last person to turn back Which could suck unless you're already the person who is in the rear in which case then it's kind of okay Because you'll be it right this is why in a lot of games You'll see so if you're all the way in the rear you have to look at the layout of people based on the dice They've rolled and say okay if I roll How likely is it that I will end up all the way in the front because about that happens everyone else will turn back And I'll be in deep shit. Yeah, so if I can start a land in the middle of everyone that would be okay I would go deeper But if I can't do that I should turn back now and leave them behind and make it harder for them to get back to increase You know and maybe take two treasures on the way back to make up for the fact that it ain't go D as deep as they did now It's a really satisfying mechanic and this part of why I bring up deep sea adventure if you want to really sort of Study how this works and what this does to bigger more complex games like say in filtration Play the hell out of deep sea adventure because you'll see people despite how really simple this game is get surprisingly invested in it and That is like that's one of the reasons why press your luck is such a powerful mechanic It causes you people to get invested the more you've risked even if you're not gonna win anymore like I've seen people play This game everyone else turned back and someone else like in the third round is behind Fuck it. They go way deep and sometimes they almost make it out almost almost unlikely. Yeah But while there have been times for example where people who are trying to make it out made it out Faster than they thought so once they're out They're not using up the air anymore and this person is like left outside And the only air they're using is their own. Yeah, they have complete control over what's going on It's not like the other people can come out of the submarine and breathe some air and use it up So now they know exactly like whether they can get back or not if they should put treasures down or pick them up Or what and now they can score with like a really deep treasure So some games like this almost have a sort of coalition building where there's the coalition of people who are continuing to press forward into Deeper risk and the separate coalition These are just implied coalitions of people who are Turned back who have decided the risk enough and are bailing and depending on which of those is the majority Is a big part of the dynamic of the game and then you'll see that exact same thing play out in infiltration For example, but there's all this other stuff sort of obscuring it like it obscures the risk reward even though really infiltration Not much more deep than deep sea adventure. There's a bit of randomness going on a lot more randomness But also like most of the things are not nearly as powerful as you'd expect them to be and you're very rarely Rewarded for going super deep, but the game rewards you with these other things like theme and mystery And you really want to see what those cards are. Yeah, if you go deeper This has been geek nights with rim and scott special thanks to DJ pretzel for the opening music cat Lee for web design and brand okay for the logos be sure to visit our website at front row crew dot com for show notes Discussion news and more remember geek nights is not one but four different shows sci-tech Mondays gaming Tuesdays and my comic Wednesdays and Indiscriminate Thursdays geek nights is distributed under a creative comments attribution 3.0 license Geek nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience, but unlike those other late shows. It's actually recorded at night