Deep Regrets (KS Edition)

Deep Regrets is a game for 1-5 players that runs about 30 minutes per player.

An unfortunate fishing game about pulling progressively more horrifying things out of the ocean.

Decide what to eat, what to sell, what to mount, and how many regrets you're willing to carry, as you push yourself too far and spiral towards a thrilling conclusion in this strategic horror fishing game.

You'll roll bespoke tackle dice at the start of each turn to determine your strength for that round and then decide whether you'll stay at sea or return to port to sell fish, buy provisions, and recharge your energy.

Survey the sizes of shadows on the backs of 9 different fish shoals at three depths, determining what you think you can afford to catch and if you want to risk it for a potentially better reward. Flip fish, spend dice, add them to your collection - but beware of reveal and catch abilities that can have various effects on the game!

Each fish, item and character has been meticulously hand-inked by illustrator Judson Cowan, then colored by hand in Procreate. It's an absolutely gorgeous world with many, many dark surprises to uncover.

As your eyes spy more and more horrifying things, you'll collect Regrets cards - which drive up your madness but also give you access to more dice and increase the value of weirder fish. It's a risk/reward scenario as you balance your madness, knowing that at the end of the game the player with the highest value of Regrets will have to discard their most valuable mounted fish.

Manage you resources, make strategic decisions, leverage madness to your benefit and suppress your Regrets as you try to catch the most valuable haul of weirder and weirder fish on this thrilling week at sea.

Deep Regrets is a strategic horror fishing game for 1-5 players, aged 16 and up, running about 30 minutes per player. Decide what to eat, what to sell, what to mount, and how many regrets you're willing to carry as you push yourself too far and spiral toward madness and a thrilling victory at sea… or an untimely end to your career.

Inspired by stories like The Shadow Over Innsmouth, John Langan’s The Fisherman, the Hellboy series and video games like Dredge and Bloodborne (and maybe a dash of Scooby Doo), Deep Regrets is set in a fictional version of early 1900s Europe where Edmund Halley’s Hollow Earth theory just might have been correct. It’s a world of lonely anglers with heavy regrets weighing on consciences and gruesome monstrosities weighing on fishing lines. Unsavory takes on classic British and European folklore haunt the waters. Strange occurrences have upset the natural balance and made the seas a dangerous place for folk who depend on it for their trade.

Back in 1740, Edmund Halley set out on a doomed expedition north to prove Earth was hollow. His subsequent disappearance was met with the sudden appearance of a previously unknown island in the North Sea. The Scottish, who called it Rocabarraigh, established a bustling fishing village there, but in 1909 it disappeared again without trace - along with every man, woman and child on its mud-caked streets.

The fishing trade suffered the loss of hundreds of veterans that day, and it's up to you to step in and fill their waders, even if the seas are not as hospitable as they once were.

What did Halley do on his expedition to The North? What did he set in motion? What if Earth IS hollow and the denizens that dwell therein are eager to claw their way out? What if this is the — You know what? Not your problem. Just focus on fishing.

In Deep Regrets, you'll spend a week moving between sea and port, trying to pull in the most desirable creel of fish and fish-adjacent creatures. You'll need to manage your energy, resources, and regrets and push your luck to pull in the best haul possible. At the end of the game, you'll score the fish you have in hand, the fish you've mounted, and any Fishbucks you have remaining... and the player with the most regrets will lose their most valuable fish.

SOLO MODE:
In the solo mode (which you can also co-op), you'll act as an ichthyologist on a mission to catch and catalog every fish in the sea. Over a campaign of dozens of games, you'll try to reel in every last fish and document their attributes on provided catalog sheet. At the end of each game, you'll have to discard an equal value of fish to the regrets you've collected and may have to let some fish go to return to another day. At the end of the campaign, you'll have a catalog of all fish names, depths, values and difficulties that can be used by players in the multiplayer game to help identify what they might fish up!

The seas have enough plastic in them already, we won't be responsible for adding more. By avoiding and replacing components with biodegradable and eco-friendly alternatives, our aim is to completely remove plastic from Deep Regrets. While personal responsibility for protecting the environment is overshadowed by a handful of massive corporations causing the most harm, we – as a mass manufacturer of physical goods – have an opportunity to meaningfully change our impact on the environment for the better, and to pave the wave for others to do the same. Your support for this project sends a signal to other manufacturers, publishers and developers that the public holds them to account for the state of the world and its natural spaces.

Here's the changes we're making to standard manufacturing practices:

• Resin dice = Wooden dice
• Plastic minis = Wooden meeples
• Plastic baggies = Biodegradable corn starch baggies
• Plastic wrapped card decks = Paper bellybands
• Shrink wrapping = Unbleached craft-paper wrapping (just like they'd wrap fish in at the fish market!)
• Plastic organizer tray = Molded sugarcane tray (bagasse)

You might notice the omission of Stretch Goals from this campaign. Honestly, we just want to make the best game possible and we've structured the campaign goals to allow us to do so. Instead of using improvements as a worm on the hook to bait new backers, we're just committing to build the exact game that we want right off the bat, regardless of the number of backers. Fancy wooden dice, metal coin, linen cards, cloth bag and all. This means the shipping estimates are more accurate because the dimensions/weight of the game won't change and it means you know what you're getting from day one. No confusion about who gets what, no various versions of the game with different components - every copy of the game represents our unified original vision.