BONUS: Deep Sea Adventure in Ripon

 Tyler and Anna are so good at getting us out of our house and over to theirs for marathon gaming, and it is always a marathon when we get together.  Currently "we" has included the two of them, me and David and our two youngest boys, Jacob and Caleb.  Our first game of the night is one we had not played before: Deep Sea Adventure.  It's not yet on our shelves, but this one is going on my wish list.  It's a very simple game to learn and to play, but after the two rounds we played I'm still not quite sure how to go about determining effective strategy on this one.  I love games like this - simple rules involving possibility of deep strategy.  This is one I want to come back to.  (I also like the fact that it comes in a nice, compact box!)
 The idea of Deep Sea Adventure is that of diving for treasure and trying to get as much as you can without being so greedy that you run out of oxygen and don't survive the journey!  The original set-up includes triangular, square, pentagonal and hexagonal tiles that are arranged by color - shallower water, lighter color - deeper water, darker color.  On the bottom of each tile is a number.  The lighter colored tiles hide smaller numbers (potentially as low as zero), and the darker the tiles get, the higher the hidden numbers.  Each player rolls two 6-sided dice, each die containing the numbers 1 through 3 only (2 each on each die).  You move as far as the sum of the numbers on the dice, jumping over other meeples as you go.  A pack of meeples together can allow you to dive deeply or to rise quickly (once you turn around), but if you get too greedy, the pack may start surfacing, leaving you at a disadvantage in terms of returning to the surface.

All meeples begin on the submarine at the surface, and after each player has had their first turn, the oxygen counter starts moving down toward zero.  It moves down the same number of tiles the player has.  Additionally, the player's roll is decreased by the number of tiles that player has.  You win by getting the most points (i.e. finding the most treasure), but the treasure does weigh you down in more than one way.  It causes the oxygen supply to be used up more quickly, and it causes you to surface more slowly.  Once another player returns to the sub, that person is out of the play and the number of tiles he or she has no longer decreases the oxygen supply.  So there are a combination of factors that make it tricky to determine the point of no return.
 We brought a number of games from our shelves with us.  One of these was Tsuro (which I just realized I haven't posted about yet, so that post will be next, and this is game 85 from our shelves!).


 We played their game of Guillotine, which we also have.
 And we brought and played our Balderdash  .  .  .  so quite a variety of games!  As you can see we've gotten a bit creative with our pawns, as we sometimes play with more people than we're "technically" supposed to.
 We finished the evening with a rousing game of 7 Wonders - including the Leaders and the Cities expansions.  I just love the beautiful mess that the table becomes in the process of playing this game, so I've included a couple of photos of this beautifully organized chaos.  (We played this again a couple nights ago at home.  It's definitely a family favorite.!)


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