Daniel (@dungeondive) takes Deep Regrets out for a solo voyage — and comes back ashore disappointed. Billed as “the most unsettling fishing board game ever created,” it casts you as an angler hauling progressively more disturbing things out of the briny deep, managing madness and pushing your luck across a working week of Monday-to-Friday fishing trips.
The verdict is candid: the art is phenomenal — grotesque, clean, beautifully coloured — and it’s the one thing Daniel unreservedly loves. The game itself, in solo and co-op, falls flat. Stripped of the competitive mode’s hand-management, fish-eating, coin-flips and player interaction, solo play reduces to a cataloguing exercise: catch every fish, log it on the ocean survey, bank gold offset by regret cards, and spend the remainder on persistent rods, reels and dice across a campaign.
The core problem, Daniel argues, is the absence of conflict — not combat, but drama, tension, a rub. He’d hoped for a tabletop Dredge; instead the solo mode feels like an activity with no stakes. No ship to upgrade, no event deck, no checks to sweat over. He sketches the fixes the game wants but lacks.
It’s a rare negative review, delivered with characteristic fairness: a chance taken, no hard feelings, possibly redeemed by the competitive mode with friends.
Have you found a fishing or “cataloguing” game that delivers genuine solo tension, or does the genre always need a competitive edge to come alive?
