In 2023, a video game called Dredge hit a collective nerve with its story of trawling the seas for an increasingly horrible and disturbing catch of fish. One of the people it inspired was horror fan and board game designer Judson Cowan, and he set about riffing on its inspiration to deliver a cardboard equivalent, a marriage of theme and delivery as yet untapped on tabletop.
Deep Regrets
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The result is Deep Regrets, and we’ve climbed aboard and sailed it out so we can check whether all’s shipshape and Bristol fashion. We also wanted to see how it compares to the top horror board games on the market.
What’s in the Box
Deep Regrets comes in a small box but it’s heavy with contents. Lifting the lid reveals a number of small player boards. There’s a main one to track the fish swimming in the three different depth levels available to dredge, a port board for when you sail back to dry land to sell your catch and equip your boat, the ocean madness board that tracks each player’s state of mind, and a number of double-sided player boards for tracking the status of your game. The sides are functionally identical, it’s just that one side has a sinister-looking old sea dog and the other side has… an even more sinister-looking old sea dog. That tells you a lot about what kind of game this is going to be.
Much of the weight comes from various decks of cards. There are three decks of fish, one for each depth, plus a deck of “dinks,” tiny fish you can gain if your main catch gets away. There are also decks of rods, reels and “supply” that you can buy at port. The biggest deck of all is the deck of regrets which you pick up for undertaking regrettable actions at sea. There’s also a cloth bag of custom dice shaped like fishing floats, various chunky wooden tokens and a metal “fish coin” used to flip and resolve some card effects. Finally there’s a paper pad for tracking your catches in the solo variant.
It’s hard to overstate just how evocative the visual design of the game is. Everything is decorated with art by the game’s designer, even the inside of the box lid. He’s a talented artist, creating detailed, imaginative visuals that strike a pitch-perfect stylistic balance between fun and creepy. Once you start flipping the fish cards, the chance to see new ones, or re-examining familiar ones for details that you missed becomes a major draw to replay the game alongside the fun of dice-rolling and decision-making.
Rules and How it Plays
The game is normally played over six days from Monday to Saturday. Each day starts out with you rolling your clutch of dice and placing them in your fresh pool: you start with three but can gain more, which have higher numbers than your starting dice. You then make one of the game’s key decisions, whether you’ll spend the day at sea or head to port. Everyone starts at sea, so we’ll go through the possible actions as you plough the waves.
Most of your turns at sea involve trying to catch fish. Each depth has three card piles, called shoals, and the card backs indicate whether the card represents a small, medium, or large fish, with bigger fish generally taking larger dice values to catch. You pick which shoal you want to fish in and flip the top card. Some fish have effects when revealed, such as the whiptail stingray, which allows you to reroll one die. All fish have a value in “fishbucks” in one corner and a difficulty value in the other. To catch a fish, you’ve got to spend dice equal to the difficulty.
This makes flipping fish a calculated gamble, as it’s possible you won’t have enough dice to reel in whatever horror you’ve hooked. If you can’t, you get to take a dink card as a consolation prize, which generally gives you a small bonus like the shrimp, which reduces the difficulty of a fish by one. In addition, not all fish are created equal. Some have values that are significantly different from their difficulty, while others can have both good or bad effects on you or other players when caught. They also come in two flavors: fair, which are normal, real-world fish, and foul, which are body parts, repulsive mutants, occult creations and worse.
However you fare in the fish lottery, the process is almost always enormously fun. For starters, there’s the big reveal, not only with the anticipation of matching the difficulty against your dice but of seeing what kind of freakish thing you’re up against and enjoying the art. There may be a reveal effect to resolve, many of which affect all players or otherwise mix up the expected catching process. Then, you may have an awkward decision about whether you want to spend multiple dice on it, whether you even want it at all, or whether it’s better to sacrifice a die and take the relative safety of a dink draw instead.
Spending days at port allows you to sell fish for their value and buy equipment. Rods, reels and supply cards all help your fishing efforts in various ways, and you can also buy additional one-use dice to roll, meaning you can land more and more difficult fish. But be careful with what you sell, because the value of your unsold fish is your score at the end of the game. You can also mount fish into one of three slots while in port, which multiplies their value by two or, in the top “prize catch” slot, three. Choosing which days to spend in port rather than at sea is a key strategic decision in which you’re torn between wanting better fish to sell or mount, and wanting to spend as much time on the waves for a bigger catch.
Landing foul fish generally leads to you drawing regret cards. Each of these has a numeric value between zero and three as well as a narrative tagline which varies from bleakly funny – “got a bad tattoo” – to seriously sinister – “partook of human flesh.” Depending on the number of regret cards you’ve accumulated, you may go increasingly mad, slowly reducing the value of fair fish, boosting that of foul fish and raising the maximum number of dice you’re allowed to use in a day’s fishing.
But there’s a major catch. While the number of cards you have is public knowledge, the values on them are not, and the player with the highest total value at the end of the game must discard one of those precious mounted specimens and the multiplier that goes with it.
Dice aren’t just spent on catching fish but can also be discarded to allow you to fish in deeper waters, which have more difficult targets and a higher proportion of foul fish. This allows you to manipulate an overall strategic curve. You can save dice, stay in safe waters, maximizing the value of your fair fish and resting safe in the knowledge you won’t be the one discarding when the game ends. Or you can dredge the depths, catching more and more appalling abominations, revelling in the horror and crossing your fingers that you’ll have fewer bleak regrets than your fellow fishermen when the game ends. Or try to chart a course between the two extremes, adjusting carefully depending on other player’s decisions.
On a tactical level, the game gathers momentum towards the finale. Initial fishing trips are fairly bland but as you begin to gain dinks, equipment, and a collection of fish, some of which can be eaten for an immediate ability, you can start to look for combo effects between the different cards. This snowballs as you get more and more of each, meaning you can pull off some pretty spectacular fishing turns late in the game, once you’ve learned to spot them. But each of these is laden with various risk vs reward decisions, most obviously that eating a fish means you no longer benefit from its value. In particular, once the regret deck runs out, additional regrets must be taken from other players, making for some very swingy turns.
While there are definite strategic and tactical choices of this kind in the game, it’d be overselling things to make too much of them. Fundamentally, this is a push-your-luck game where you’re eternally hoping for the highest dice rolls, the best fish card reveals, and for the fish-coin flips to always go your way. Experience and planning help, but anyone around the table can win, with that hidden regret value being particularly punishing. This cuts both ways, as it can make the game feel over-long at high player counts, and hardcore strategy hounds may find the game too lightweight to satisfy, but newer players will enjoy rolling with the punches in the knowledge that they’re in with a chance to win right up until the bitter end.
