You were born to fish, but recently, things have been going awry. The fish are funny, or maybe you're funny? But you need to fish, and you kind of like the funny fish, maybe too much. You need more funny fish, you need funnier fish, you need more funnier fish. We check out the Deep Regrets tabletop game in our review.

Deep Regrets is full of well-designed, thematic components. Gone Fishing

Deep Regrets is a fishing game for 1 to 5 players that takes place over a week. Each day you'll decide if you want to fish or make port, which presents an interesting tactical choice over the course of the game. If you're in the port, you can't fish, which is what the game is eventually scored on. But if you just fish and don't go to port, you can't unlock rods, reels, and equipment that will make catching higher-scoring fish possible. 

You can also mount fish in port, which increases their score, but you won't be catching high-scoring fish until near the end, so you'll have to plan when you visit port, maybe once early in the game to get better equipment and then at the end to mount your highest-scoring fish, or just once in the middle, or not at all, and just maximise fishing for all 7 days?

Some examples of the Deep Regrets fish at different levels and shadows, showing the increasing difficulty of catching them.

When you're fishing, there's a choice of 3 sizes of shadows across 3 depths, for a choice of 9 piles of cards to fish from. You catch fish by spending dice that are rolled at the start of the turn. You pick an area to fish, turn over the top card, and have to spend dice showing values equal to or more than the fish value. The shadow size and depths give you a rough idea of the fish's value that might appear there, so you know the odds that you will be able to catch a fish you draw.

To move down depths, you spend a die to go down, which gives you fewer dice to fish with, and you also move up one depth at the end of each day, so you should only go down to the 3rd depth if you're committing to it for a few days, as it will cost you 2 dice to get to it, and then a die each day to move back down to it.

To catch a fish in Deep Regrets, you need to spend dice equal to or over the value of the fish, any excess value from the dice is lost.

The fish themselves start off normal at the higher depths, but as you descend, things start to get weird, for you and the fish. As you find more mutated fish, and probably sell them, you gain regret cards, which have a little flavor text to allow you to develop your own narrative, but also a value between 0 and 3, which affects your final score. 

The game also starts to take a turn with the Ocean Madness tracker, which tracks how many regret cards you have, and then starts to skew the fish values, putting more and more value, for selling and scoring, on fouler fish the deeper you go, and also increasing your maximum number of dice, to allow you to fish for longer, and for better/fouler fish.

A trip to the port in Deep Regrets can net you valuable supplies, but costs you a day of fishing. A Rod For Every Occasion

What I like most about Deep Regrets is that there isn't just one way to play, and you can explore different tactics for approaching the game. After the first few games, I promised that I was going to try fishing normally, only going for fair fish at the higher depths, to see if it was a viable tactic, but every time I got a whiff of the power of having more dice due to some regret cards, I'd sink straight in and find myself at the lowest depth, competing for the foulest fish. Not sure what that says about me.

Things also happen at different player counts, solo or cooperative play sees you trying to survey the ocean, recording the fish that you find. At 2 or 3 players, games are quite civil, with enough room for everyone, but at 4 or 5 players, things can get competitive quickly, and it's easy to overfish an area, and it's harder to work out who's winning, which tends to push you harder.

The artwork and components are fantastic, and very on-theme with a fish coin and a little life preserver. The fouler fish are detailed, and the flavor text on the regret cards can build to an amusing linked narrative as you try to piece together a life that could have been lived better. The rulebook is also very well designed, with a nice flow that gets you playing quickly, and is easy to refer to during play.

Each regret card tells a story, but combined, a narrative of an interesting life. Deep Regrets Final Thoughts?

Deep Regrets is an amusing fishing game, with more depth than it would appear at first glance. The variety of choices gives you a number of ways to approach your fishing week, and it's very easy to get drawn into a battle at the lower depths, trying to catch the foulest fish. Great, well-designed components complement the immersion, and the regret cards give you a great storytelling opportunity beyond the simple scoring of the end game.

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The copy of Deep Regrets used to produce this review was provided by Asmodee UK.