Deep Regrets
Gameplay Overview
Deep Regrets is a darkly funny, atmospheric horror-fishing game where players cast their lines into three escalating depths of an increasingly unsettling ocean. The core loop demands a careful balancing act: do you play it safe as a sane, upstanding sailor, or do you surrender yourself to the lucrative pull of absolute madness?
Each round begins with a roll of your player dice. If you stay out at sea, you can expend full dice to descend deeper into the fathoms, or allocate your values to reel in the fish lurking in the waters. A brilliant design element lets you see the shadows on the backs of the face-down fish cards—tipping you off to whether a catch is small, middling, or large, which directly correlates to the dice total required to capture it.
When you land a mutated, horrifying "Foul" fish or encounter certain aquatic events, you must take a Regret card. While tracking up the madness scale seems dangerous, it is actually a highly powerful strategic engine: the madder you get, the more dice you add to your pool and the more cash your monstrous Foul fish sell for at port (though your clean, "Fair" fish simultaneously plummet in value). Back at port, you can sell your catch, mount trophies onto point-multiplying plaques, or purchase supplies, rods, and reels to build out a custom player engine. However, if the game's finite pool of Regrets runs dry, players must start stealing Regret cards directly from each other—and if you finish the game as the most maniacal player at the table, you stand to lose one of your prized mounted catches during final scoring.
Published
2025
Status
owned
Players
1 - 5 Players
Review
We had an absolutely fantastic time playing this together, and Madeline completely demolished Ollie in our very first round! Her winning strategy was a glorious descent into chaos: she decided at a certain point to go completely crazy, hoarding Regret cards without a single care in the world, which allowed her monstrous Foul fish to pile up and supercharged her gameplay until she was incredibly powerful. She completely took the victory because Ollie simply wasn't keeping close enough track of how dangerous she was becoming by going mad.
Our onboarding experience did hit a few bumps. When we first opened the box, we found that the game was actually harder to understand while reading the instructions than it was to physically play it. The rulebook is so deeply wrapped up in its atmospheric lore that we experienced a bit of a knowledge gap—we understood what actions we could legally take, but for the first couple of rounds, we struggled to grasp why we would want to choose certain directions. We ended up having to pull up a YouTube video to watch a playthrough to get our bearings, though once we got moving, the game's internal logic took over and everything clicked.
We also noticed a few subtle mechanical balancing quirks specific to playing at a two-player count. Because the endgame penalty at higher player counts forces the maddest player to forfeit their absolute best prize fish, scaling it down at two players to losing your least valuable mounted fish made going fully insane feel a bit too safe and consequence-free. In a two-player setup, the burden of managing the tug-of-war over the central regret cards falls entirely on your single opponent to police, whereas a 3 or 4-player count would naturally have more contenders balancing that mechanic out. However, we are really curious to see how this evens out in future plays now that Ollie knows not to let Madeline run away with the madness tracker!
Ultimately, the strengths of Deep Regrets completely outshine those minor structural speed bumps. The amount of information hidden in the card shadows is a beautifully clever design choice that makes risk management feel calculated rather than random, and the game exhibits an incredible level of logical cohesion—the mechanics genuinely belong to the theme rather than feeling like a generic system that was just skinned with a horror motif. It’s a wonderfully rich, silly, yet highly strategic experience.
Try this if you like...
Embracing thematic, cartoonishly spooky aesthetics
The artwork by Judson Cowan boasts a stunning, highly saturated macabre cartoon style packed with gorgeous details and hilarious lore.
Calculated risk over blind luck
You enjoy push-your-luck mechanics that give you agency. The clear card shadows and known depth probabilities ensure your gambles feel like smart, calculated choices rather than wild shots in the dark.
Managing madness as a resource
You get a kick out of unconventional RPG-style loops where letting your character go completely unhinged directly fuels your mechanical power.
High-quality, immersive components
Features an exceptional table presence, highlighted by unique custom dice shaped like old wooden buoys and double-sided sailor boards (Fair vs. Foul).
A rich, narrative-driven table experience
Perfect for a gaming group that loves to inject personality and storytelling into their sessions, laughing together as their captains slowly unravel at sea.
