Pre-Order Store - Even Deeper Regrets: An Unfortunate Fishing Game Expansion
Created by Judson Cowan
Sail back out to sea – or head inland! – for even more disturbing fishing, deeper madness, and a wealth of new regrettable decisions.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Language partners and info!
9 months ago
– Tue, Jul 15, 2025 at 05:06:50 AM
Hello anglers!
Two updates in two days, what a rush! I wanted to send a quick update BEFORE the campaign ends to announce some new language partners and give greater detail about languages so all backers can make informed decisions about whether to back the Kickstarter for English/German or wait and get their native language via my partners at a later date.
Note that it's never too late to change your mind and I can always refund your order up until fulfilment (minus Kickstarter's 10% fees) if you prefer to switch to another language.
Italian and Spanish announced!
I'm very excited to have some ROMANCE LANGUAGES on board! I'm proud to announce two new partnerships!
Italian will be localised and published by MS Edizioni and Spanish will be handled by 2Tomatoes! Both are great companies with great track records and BOTH were responsible for bringing many of Leder's games to their markets - like Root and Arcs! A fun coincidence!
2Tomatoes also works with some LATAM markets, so Deep Regrets might make its way to Spanish-speaking markets in the Americas!
This Kickstarter: English & German only
The only languages available via this Kickstarter are English and German, and all games and add-ons will be available in both languages, including Shallow Regrets and Hideous Abomination (Tüftelmonster!).
All German games are published by Board Game Circus (who just won Kennerspiel Des Jahres!! Congrats!! 🎉), except Shallow Regrets - which is published by Button Shy but still localised by Board Game Circus's team, Translation Circus.
You will be asked your language preference at the start of the pledge manager and your entire order will be in the selected language. You cannot mix English and German for your rewards, they must all be in the same language to avoid complicating shipping. You can find more details on the Kickstarter campaign page.
All other languages: Post Kickstarter via partners
All other languages will be available later via our partners. Some will be available later this year, some will be early 2026. Here's a full list of language partners, expected availability times and where you can pre-order (if pre-orders are already available). In alphabetical order:
As of this very moment, Even Deeper Regrets is only available in English and German. Most of our other language partners have expressed interest in Even Deeper Regrets, but none have had any opportunity to review a prototype and agree to anything yet. My hope is that the expansion will be available in all languages the base game is available in, but it will be well into 2026 before that happens.
A note on the use of AI (or lack thereof)
I want to make a quick note that all of my contracts with language partners have a strict no-AI clause - all localisation work must be done by paid human beings and I aim to be in direct contact with the localisers doing the hands-on work to help answer questions. This caused some hiccups in negotiations with potential partners, but I stuck to my guns.
I believe that localisation is more than just translation and I will always trust the work of a person who is steeped in the culture and respects both the source material and target language to do a more meaningful job than AI, no matter how advanced AI becomes. As an artist, I also believe that replacing humans in creative professions is one of the most despicable uses of technology humanity could conceive.
What languages are coming next?
We're not done yet! We're in talks with a few Brazilian publishers about a Brazilian-Portuguese version and hope to sign a contract soon, stay tuned on that. French is still high priority but locating the right partner is an ongoing challenge. Hoping we can lock it down soon!
If you are a publisher interested in bringing the game to your market (and don't use AI to do so), please get in touch!
What am I playing right now?
It's barely been a day, calm down! Haven't had time to play a game since the last update (except an hour of Death Stranding 2). I've got a stack of unplayed games staring me down, I'll share something next update!
- Judson 🖤
Home stretch! Deep Regrets on Spotify! Art deep-dive!
9 months ago
– Mon, Jul 14, 2025 at 06:50:52 AM
Hello anglers!
It's the LAST FEW DAYS! The campaign is already a roaring success and anything that happens in the home stretch is just salty icing on a briny cake. It's looking highly likely that we'll eclipse the original KS in both backers and funding!
It's fun to set goals to aim for, sooooo - it would be fun to say I had a Kickstarter make ONE MILLION DOLLARS in Doctor Evil voice. Let's make that the unreasonable goal to shoot for! That's £730k. I think it's out of reach, but I've seen some wild stuff happen in the last week of crowdfunding!
Proooobably not.
Shout out to my Ukranian publisher
I want to give a quick shout out to Igromag, the publisher bringing Deep Regrets to the Ukranian market. They're an amazing company living under extreme conditions and unfortunately were directly affected by the invasion last week when their warehouse was destroyed in the most recent wave of a Russian drone strikes. Fortunately, no one was injured, but after the rubble was cleared, it seems they lost at least 1/3rd of their inventory - and are left without a warehouse and the harsh reality that moving their remaining stock might just put it at risk of further attacks. Here are some absolutely heartbreaking images from their Instagram:
Breaks my heart seeing Kelp like that.
So many wonderful games lost in an instant. I can see Kelp, Arkham Horror and Flamecraft in the pictures, to name a few. My games have not yet arrived in Ukraine, they are still with the manufacturer - which leaves me in a good position to help them recover financially and potentially help them find ways to import the games safely via my German partners, Board Game Circus or find other ways to help them get back on their feet. I'm in listening mode, waiting to hear from them how I can help most after they've dealt with the emergency.
The Ukranian community has come out in strong support of Igromag and they're getting help from a lot of directions. But you should go give them a follow! Even if you can't read Ukranian, your follow will help fuel the algorithms and help them build their organic audience and recover more quickly from this devastating loss.
Similar to Woody Guthrie's guitar, I believe that games are a machine that fights authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is a system of oppression built upon fear, the suppression of individual interests and aims to crush joy wherever it is found. I believe that playing games is an act of rebellion against authoritarian tenets. Thus, I believe helping Igromag continue to bring games to Ukranian gamers is of utmost importance.
Deep Regrets on Spotify!
In lighter news, the Deep Regrets soundtrack has finally landed on streaming services! Composed by yours truly with the incredible violin/viola performances of Michaela Nachtigall (who once played an Otamatone solo live on stage at The Game Awards). I'm a Spotify guy, but this short EP is now live on all major streaming services. It includes all the music from both game trailers plus a remix (in case you've always hoped Deep Regrets needed more beats). Check it out!
I should also mention that I have an official playlist for Deep Regrets that you can slap on while you play, if you're interested! It's a weird mix of stuff that I feel fits the mood I was going for in creating the game (and is very reflective of my personal tastes). No traditional sea shanties here, more like the soundtrack to a modern horror film - in fact I have quite a few tracks on there from modern horror films!
Thanks so much to everyone who provided input on the player aid I shared in the previous update. I've made a few adjustments to it, based on the feedback I received - included Make Port actions, removed the icon list and put in some fishing clarification and details about Regret cards. This hasn't been through proofreading yet, so look at it more for general content and trust that I'll sort out grammar/inconsistencies/typos before I put it live.
Here's the second pass! As before, your input is more than welcome!
Design deep-dive: The Artwork
For this week's deep-dive, I want to talk a bit about my process in creating the art for Deep Regrets - the inspirations, the process, the challenges!
The style and execution
My illustration style is born out of a lifelong love of cartoons, I think. Visually, I think it looks most similar to the Klasky-Csupo era of Nickelodeon cartoons, specifically Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.
Beautiful.
Partly, this is leaning into my limitations. I have a very unsteady hand and trying to draw with precision is difficult for me, so the waggly line style of Rugrats or Home Movies or Dr. Katz works well for me. And I try to embrace that imprecision, as well. I like asymmetry, so when I draw a mirrored pattern, I just draw both halves by hand and there are lots of imperfections - you can see this in the patterns on the Regret cards and Item backs.
Beautiful, beautiful asymmetry
I also prefer working in physical media to start because it forces you to lean into imperfections. You cannot redraw an ink line and the further you are into a drawing, the more stand to lose if you need to start over - so you learn to consider each line carefully and learn to accept and love imperfections.
I started doing this long before the whole AI art debacle, but now I love it even more. Part of the joy of creation is making mistakes and learning. You don't learn anything when you use AI.
I used to draw a lot as a kid, but I fell out of practice as I studied at college and moved into the graphic design field and was focussed more on working with mechanical precision. I did a lot of flat, graphic-style digital illustrations during this time, but I wouldn't call them 'drawing'.
Here's a krite (from Critters) that I illustrated like 10 years ago.
It was only in the last ten or so years that I got back into drawing and I revitalised my skills by starting a travel sketchbook. This is something I think everyone would benefit from doing! Here's the first page of my travel sketchbook, dated 2018:
And here's a more recent one:
You can see how much I improved in the span of four years, just from drawing all the time. Anyone can learn to draw from life, you don't need to be 'creative' to look at something and learn to reproduce it on paper. You don't need a steady hand, you don't need a strong 'eye'. You just need the will to learn and perseverance. It's also a great mindfulness exercise and you'll remember the moment you drew the thing in great detail forever - whereas you're very likely to forget the moment you took a photo on your phone.
Some of my other stylistic inspirations I draw upon:
Guy Davis. Key shout out to one of my all time faves. I absolutely love the way this maniac draws monsters (and anything else). He has the same sort of very loose hand that works well for me. The era where he drew for BPRD is my favorite stretch of comics ever created. He left comics to move into films and did the monster designs for a lot of Del Toro films.
Lovely monstrosities by Guy Davis
Obviously Mike Mignola is also a big inspiration for Deep Regrets with Abe Sapien and the Bog Roosh. Matt Groening's aliens from The Simpsons and Futurama. Rick and Morty's aliens by Maximus J Pauson. Scooby Doo's goofy villains. The list goes on!
Inspirations ahoy!
The Process
I always start in pencil to get a rough outline of the drawing down. I have card layout templates I use to show the rough outlines of cards and such that I can trace onto the paper before I begin, then I start laying out the composition.
Box interior art from Even Deeper Regrets
Once I have the rough layout done, I start laying in ink over top of that and I just erase the pencil lines when I'm done.
I then scan the line art and bring it into Photoshop to adjust the levels so that any remaining pencil lines vanish. I'll go in and retouch out any pencil/debris that got in the way during scanning.
Then I'll drop it into a template so I can see roughly where the art will sit in context in the game, add a palette onto it, and import the art into Procreate on iPad, where I can colour it in digitally.
A typical start in Procreate looks like this:
Then I begin by blocking in the whole subject.
I layer additional colours onto the blocking.
I use a transparent layer set to multiply in order to create the shadows. This is my favourite bit of the process because you get to decide where the light is coming from and bring volume and depth to the flat forms.
Finally, I'll add specular highlights to give a bit more dimension and dynamic range of tones.
Voila! A finished illustration!
Here's what that looks like in timelapse. You can see I changed my mind a few times about colours, trying to achieve the desired effect:
Finding horror in an already horrifying place
The biggest challenge when coming up with art for the game was designing foul things that were more horrifying or weird than what actually exists in nature. For example, here is the famous "Flying Spaghetti Monster", Bathyphysa Confera. It's a colony organism like the Man O War that's actually made up of hundreds of organisms working together. I mean, how do I top that?
A real looker!
So, generally my approach was to lean into the uncanny valley. That meant making the foul fish more human-like. Sometimes that meant adding human-like attributes…
Fleshy bits.
…sometimes it meant putting actual humans (or parts of humans) in the deep, where they shouldn't be. I still think "Human" is the most terrifying fish in the game.
Go on, eat the foot.
The uncanny valley isn't completely absent in the real world, unfortunately. This is a real fish that has a nose and lips:
Behold, the Red-Lipped Batfish
The question of scale
One of the other challenges was how I depicted scale. The fish cards have shadows on the back denoting their size and I wanted that difference in sizes to come across in the artwork. In other games, I see them work around this by just scaling all of the artwork to take up a similar amount of real-estate on the cards. Like in Finspan, the Whale Shark is the same size as the Anglerfish on the card. That looks nice from a consistency standpoint, but since this is such a theme-forward game I wanted to do something more immersive.
From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to break the frame with the art on as many cards as possible to imply scale. One of the lean advantages of being both the designer and the artist on the game is the relative ease of closely weaving the design and art together. It doesn't require the long dialogue or chain of approvals between an artist, an art director, and the game's designer. So, my aim was for small fish to have plenty of space around it on the card, middling fish to break the frame a bit, and large fish to break the frame substantially – sometimes to the point where they consume the entire frame (or literally break the design elements, in the case of the Great White).
Breaking the frame!
I love the way this works thematically! I love it so much that I want to use it in my next game, but the amount of UX/UI on the cards makes it less viable, so I'm now trying to figure out how to solve THAT challenge. A problem for the future!
I could go on forever about art. In fact, I have. I'll stop.
What am playing right now?
Aleph Null! Since I'm making a game about summoning and conquering your personal demons, I'm doing research into other games about summoning demons - including Aleph Null! This is a single-player game where you're aiming to summon the dreaded Baphomet and meet certain conditions upon his arrival to ensure he's not unhappy with you. I suspect having Baphomet unhappy with you is a bad thing. It's an extremely challenging solo experience with a steep learning curve, but the strategy is very interesting and game is very well designed with some really unique ideas. Plus, look at that incredible woodblock component you set the grimoire cards onto - 😘👌. I actually got to have a few beers with the designer, Tony Boydell (designer of Snowdonia) at UKGE last month - totally unaware he had made this game until we were chatting! We have a great conversation about demons! He's an awesome guy and he runs a very cool board game museum down in England!
That's all for now! Excited for this campaign to wrap up so I can get the games into your hands as quickly as possible! I'll speak to you on Friday, once it's all done and dusted!
- Judson 🖤
Halfway across this salty sea!
9 months ago
– Tue, Jul 08, 2025 at 05:00:44 AM
Hello anglers!
We've now fully passed the halfway point of this campaign - as well as £500,000 in funding! Just incredible! It's very likely this campaign might even eclipse the original game in total funding AND number of backers! Thank you all so much for your support!
All systems are still go and I'm hoping for a strong final third of the campaign!
Player aid feedback!
I've gotten a few different requests for an all-in-one player aid that specifically covers the phases of each day and the possible actions and free actions you can take in each location. I've been on working on putting this together to offer as a free PDF download and I wanted to get YOUR feedback on it!
Take a look at this and see what you think! Does it cover the most important questions you find yourself digging for in the rulebook? Is there anything else you'd prefer was included instead of what you see there? Any and all feedback is appreciated!
Player Aid Front
Player Aid Back
Using feedback from folks here, I'll refine this and then I'll be adding it to the files on BoardGameGeek for people to download and print.
Design deep-dive: Inland
This week's deep-dive is a look at the design of the Inland area of the expansion! Last week we talked about Clout, which is a big part of the Inland design, but I thought it would be cool to zoom the microscope out a bit and look at Inland as a whole.
The new inland board, in all its in-glory
There were two main reasons for including this new area:
A broader set of strategic options for players
A wealth of new wildlife and lore to draw upon
First and foremost, the idea was to offer players more control over how much risk they want to undertake. Since this isn't a traditional push-your-luck game, risk is mostly tied to how deep you decide to fish and how large of fish you choose to reveal in relation to the amount of dice you still have left to spend.
Inland was aimed at providing not one, but TWO additional layers of risk selection. The river has a broader set of difficulties associated with each shadow size and the fish have a broader general range of very bad fish, making it a bigger risk that fishing at depth I at sea. The Loch is just a lucky dip - you have absolutely no idea what you're going to get. There's no shadows at all, it's a single pile and some of the cards a REALLY bad in there. This is for the players that want to take the biggest risks, with the promise of the biggest rewards.
Where to fish?
Previously, players deciding where to spend the day might stay at sea if they had good dice and head to port if they had bad dice. There are plenty of other strategic reasons to choose one location over the other, but the design of Inland was to encourage these choices when based solely on your roll during the refresh phase:
All bad dice? Go to port to improve them and pick up some kit while you're there.
All good dice? Head inland so you can utilise every dice for fishing and not lose value to sinkers.
A mix of good and bad dice? Sail to sea! Use the bad ones as sinkers and the rest for catching fish.
The base game lacked a good option for players with a really killer roll, and hopefully this new area helps to solve it!
Who goes there?
The biggest thematic question was what sort of 'fish' to include. The game is obviously set in Scotland, and the wildlife in Scottish Lochs and Rivers are relatively limited. I made the decision pretty early to remove local boundaries from the denizens of the game, allowing all manner of monstrosities to creep into these waters. I wanted to keep the big Scooby Doo vibes of the base game going, and that meant getting swampy with inland - snakes, gators, that sort of thing. So this loch has a little bit of my youth spent dodging copperheads and spotting alligators in the swamps of the southeast US stirred into it. Thematically this is a further mystery caused by the strange end-of-the-world stuff going on with Hollow Earth and the events Halley set in motion.
Just a tad bit of Okefenokee in there
A balancing act
The hardest and longest part of designing Inland was in balancing the area so that it was not significantly weaker or stronger than Sea. Both options need to feel valid for winning so that players make choices based on the equipment they have, their personal goals and their appetite for risk - not based on which area is just flat out stronger. This took a while to achieve and there were a lot of things that contributed to creating that balance.
The key thing to consider here is that Inland does not require the use of dice for dropping sinkers, so you instantly have more resources to put towards catching fish. A benefit that must be counteracted with a drawback. The formula put simply looks something like:
Benefit: No dice required to drop sinkers = Drawback: More ways for players to lose fish
There are a lot of other ways balance is achieved. A single drawback turned out not to be sufficient to neutralise the benefit of not dropping sinkers. Here's a non-exhaustive list of the ways I made Inland scores equivalent to Sea scores when fishing with similar resources:
Clout fish have lower values, making scoring less certain if you're in competition for most Clout.
Crocodilians sometimes eat your middling fish, whereas sharks at Sea only eat your small fish.
Low value fish are MUCH lower value than at sea, there's a lot more "chaff" Inland. Some of the low value fish can't even be caught if you have more than three Regrets in hand.
The bad fish have effects that are worse than even the Depth III fish at Sea. Some will kick you out of Inland entirely.
Many of the best fish still come with strong drawbacks, such as discarding all your Clout or all of your other fish.
A lot of these effects work in conjunction to create an even playing field across Inland and Sea. You could spend your entire week in one or the other location and have an equally fair chance of winning.
The hunt for Nessie
Obviously Nessie had to be in the game. I couldn't, in good conscious, create a horror fishing game that didn't include the old girl. My design for Nessie is... an extrapolation on the only existing "photo" we have. She lives in the Loch, and it's not easy to land her. The hunt for Nessie takes its toll. You have to spend your life in search, and you have to be willing to sacrifice everything.
I don't want to spoil too much, but I designed the Loch to thematically feel like a place fanatics waste their life in search of something that might not exist. All I'll say is that there are some things out there that are NOT exactly Nessie and that you might while the game away seeking her out and only uncovering hoaxes.
That you, Nessie?
A unilateral improvement with no bloat
I'm very proud of Inland and what it adds to the game. My aim was to enrich the game and add strategic depth without increasing the complexity of the game or introducing a ton of new rules to learn and I think I nailed it. I honestly can't see myself ever playing without the expansion again, it just creates a much more robust experience and I really hope you all enjoy it!
What am I playing right now?
Molly House! Wehrlegig games are such a cool company. You might know the name from Cole Wehrle's work with Leder Games (Root, Arcs, etc). This is like Cole's little side project for surfacing talented new designers (in this case, Jo Kelly) and doing absolutely wild stuff that wouldn't make sense under any other publisher. I love that - complete creative freedom to publish whatever they want, buoyed by a dedicated fan base that supports their endeavours. Apparently what they want to publish is very heavy weight passion projects based on interesting, largely unexplored moments from history! Molly House feels like the coolest of the lot so far! You're playing as a member of the queer community in 1723, meeting in hidden houses and engaging in some good old-fashioned gender-nonconformity all while trying to evade the very harsh and hostile public eye of the era. I can't think of a cooler theme for a board game, and one that educates so well about the realities of queer history that many people would prefer to ignore. It all comes together so well, too! It's a fantastic and surprisingly heavy game with some very interesting mechanics and deep strategy! Give it a shot!
That's all for now! Speak to you next week on the home stretch!
- Judson 🖤
Smooth Sailing on spooky seas
9 months ago
– Mon, Jun 30, 2025 at 05:12:28 AM
Hello again, anglers!
We're almost one week into the campaign and we've passed 9,000 backers! That's incredible! It's looking very likely we'll gather more backers than the original campaign - and possibly have greater overall pledges! This is my first time Kickstarting an expansion and I wasn't quite sure what to expect - how many first time backers would enjoy the game enough to return for more and how many new backers had the buzz around Deep Regrets created over the last six months. The answer seems to be: a lot!
It's been interesting to compare the launch of an expansion to the launch of a base game. There are a lot of factors affecting performance beyond just that one difference, but It's interesting to compare the two launches. I do love transparency, and here comes a bit!
Pledges per day
Generally, this launch started much stronger - that's the existing audience returning to continue supporting the game. Then it tables off much more quickly than the previous one - if I had to speculate, I would guess that's due to a few things:
The first advertising campaign already caught all the folks who are most likely to love the game. It's harder now to find people who are interested in the theme/mechanics/art. There are plenty out there, but it takes longer to find them via Meta and Google advertising.
I didn't run much pre-launch advertising because my follower count and mailing list were already so large. This means my pre-launch audience was almost entirely existing backers (plus some folks that found it organically via BGG or from influencers posting about it). The live ads are doing ALL the heavy lifting in continuing to bring in backers beyond launch. And they're performing well!
The overall performance is still outpacing the last campaign, but I suspect they may roughly even out by the end, based on the current trajectories! Which is great, the first was a massive success!
You may not find this at all interesting, but I sure do! I have a marketing background and measuring performance is very intriguing to me. I'll share more developments as the campaign goes on. If you're curious to learn more about how I market my games, you can check out this talk:
Things are going smoothly. Almost too smoothly…
I had a LOT of learnings from the last campaign and I brought those forward to improve upon how I ran THIS campaign and... it seems to have helped a lot! I went back to see what I was covering and announcing in the previous campaign's updates and it was lots of additions of fulfilment centres based on demand. This time, with the help of the ever-vigilant Naylor Games, all that was sorted ahead of time! There will be fewer big announcements as this campaign goes on and... that's a good thing! It means I learned and iterated and it worked! It does mean the updates will be decidedly LESS exciting – SO, I've decided to use the updates to deep dive into some of the design of the expansion, and first up we've got CLOUT!
Design deep-dive: Clout
Clout is one of the most important new mechanics added to the expansion and designing it was interesting. My intent with this was, first and foremost, to create a system that was sort of the opposite of Regrets. Previously, winning with a Fair fish strategy was far less viable than leaning into madness. And it was less fun, also. The aim with Clout was to add a bit of interest to the sane side of the spectrum and to make it more strategically viable.
(As an aside: I've heard a few reviewers claim that Fair Fish was the obvious best strategy. I'm guessing they weren't taking enough risks and properly utilising Regrets as a currency and I suspect I would wallop them at the game any day of the week.)
The earliest manifestation of clout was pretty simple: some fish had Clout attached, if you caught them you got Clout tokens - most Clout tokens at the end got some points. There wasn't much more to it than that. No closed economy. No consideration given to the value of the fish that carried Clout. The whole thing felt a bit flat and a bit broken.
This of course came with the huge drawback that players who WEREN'T trying to go for a Clout victory would find it completely useless. That's when the idea of using it as a currency at Port came around. Suddenly, it was far more dynamic as a resource and you had strategic options on how you approached it. If you're way ahead - do you risk flexing your fame a bit to get some port discounts? Or are you afraid other players might get ahead in future rounds? If you're way behind, might as well just use the Clout for Port discounts - it's just free money at that point and you get to keep the Fish for points.
This created a new problem: Because Clout is now essentially a currency that can be spent at Port, all Fish with Clout suddenly had a much higher total value. The printed value of all fish with Clout needed to come down. So I scrapped my normal difficulty-to-value ratios and created a new scale that considered Clout, lowering the value for each Clout a fish carried (this wasn't a direct 1:1 swap of value for Clout, since Clout was not a guarantee of points). This created more risk. Fish with Clout were just worth less at the end of the game and collecting Clout became a bit more of a question mark around whether it would wind up actually benefiting the player at all. NOW it was starting to feel more like Regrets. It was a risk/reward scenario as opposed to just a flat benefit.
The final aspect to this puzzle was creating a bit more of a thematic tie-in. Obviously fame is a rat race and there's only so much to go around. As one person becomes more famous, others are forgotten and pushed out of the public eye. Sic transit gloria. This is where the closed economy came in. I actually REDUCED the number of components in the game to improve the gameplay. Previously, there were 25 clout tokens and 5 were added to the bag per player at the start of the game. Now there are only 20 and 4 are added to the bag per player. When the bag runs out, you pick another player and you steal Clout from them. Things get interesting.
I've done a bit of testing to find the extremes of Clout ratios. I tried going down to 3 per player - and that did create a lot of fun stealing from one another more quickly - but it was also VERY easy to abuse the system and it felt far too punishing for a player to collect a lot of Clout early game, only to have it all stolen away late game, leaving them with very few points. Five per player was basically not a closed economy at all: there was never a situation where a player could not just draw Clout from the bag and thus never needed to steal from others. Four seems to be the sweet spot. Theft happens much later in the game and players who are stolen from generally have a greater supply of Clout already built up, meaning they still have a chance to catch a few more Fair fish inland and claw back their Clout victory.
There is, of course, a meta game around Clout. This brings me to the final design decision around it: the decision to make it only available Inland. I've had a few folks ask why Clout isn't included at Sea and the answer is: it's important to the strategy that players are able to choose whether they decide to engage with Clout or not. If no one is engaging with Inland, a player can use that to their advantage jumping inland to grab even a single Clout, creating a dilemma for other players: do they stick to the strategy they've built around staying at sea and risk a 10 point guaranteed advantage for the sole player spending time Inland? Or do they jump over to try to get their hands on at least one Clout to even the playing field slightly, closing the gap by 5 points. Equally, it means if a LOT of players are spending time Inland, the competition for Clout becomes more serious and it's less clear who will take the crown and the game's end. Both are interesting!
Where we've wound up is a robust system that adds a wealth of strategic options to the game. I'll be honest, I think the addition of Inland and Clout to the game is just a unilateral improvement and I think once you've played with it, you'll never go back. It's not any longer and not much more complex, it just enriches the experience so much.
The most common FAQ about the Errata Kit
I've got all the details on the FAQs page, but I thought I'd mention it here because I'm getting the question a lot: Yes, if you own multiple copies of the base game first printing, you CAN get multiple copies of the Errata Kit. I've limited it to one per backer in the Kickstarter to avoid people abusing the system, but I'll be allowing backers to request additional copies in the pledge manager. This includes retail backers, who will be entitled to one copy of the Errata Kit per retail version of the game they purchased in the previous Kickstarter (or via distribution). Stay tuned for details after the campaign!
What am I playing right now?
The Gang! I love a good focused cooperative card game with exactly four letters and the definite article. Like The Crew or The Game or The Mind. The Gang fits that bill! It's Texas Hold 'Em but instead of competing, you're on a heist and trying to suss out who has the most valuable hands and rank them in order from highest to lowest - without revealing what cards you have in hand. The core gameplay is already interesting enough, but if you fail or succeed, challenges or benefits are thrown your way to balance the following rounds and those make things VERY interesting. It's a quick filler game that would fit in at the start, end or between games on any game night. Or just play it over and over, it's so quick to reset. Check it out!
That's all for now! Speak to you soon!
- Judson 🖤
6,666 Backers in 24 hours! 🤘
9 months ago
– Wed, Jun 25, 2025 at 06:32:30 AM
Hello anglers new and old!
If you're returning from a previous voyage out into the depths of Deep Regrets, welcome back! I'm so glad you've survived and are hungry for a second helping!
If you're just joining us, welcome! It's so good to have you aboard! We need all the company we can get on these uncertain waters!
What a day!
I could tell it was going to be big from that fact that we left port with over 10,000 followers but HOO-WEE was that a doozie of a first 24 hours! It gives me no end of pleasure that almost EXACTLY at the 24 hour mark, we had 6,666 backers (it was technically 24 hours and 4 minutes, but I'll take it). 🤘🤘🤘
And that was just over £260,000 raised in 24 hours, twice what the original Deep Regrets campaign did in the same period. Bonkers!
The funding goal was reached in 7 minutes, and within 2 hours we had more funding than Deep Regrets gathered in the first day total. Then we passed the number of day one backers about 30 minutes later.
Thanks so much to everyone who showed up early to help make it such a great day!
The leagues ahead
We've got 22 days at sea ahead of us and I, for one, am very excited to see where the Kickstarter goes in that time! I'll be keeping a regular cadence of updates during that time full of announcements and details about the expansion and to update you on the progress. But you just sit back, relax, and let me captain this ship. Your work is done, now you can just chill in the galley and wait for the games to arrive next year.
I'm very proud of the new content I've cooked up for this expansion and I'm so excited to get it into your slimy paws.
I'll keep the first update short, but I'll be back in touch in a few days!
What am I playing right now?
If you're new to my Kickstarters, I like to end every update with a shout out to a game I've been playing recently. I love supporting other great creators!
Smallfolk! This game caught a lot of attention at UKGE and I got to play a preview build of it recently with the developer. Big Everdell vibes but without all the bloat! It's a cozy tableau builder with an emphasis on strategy and different paths to victory with an absolutely stunning map and adorable character artwork. Off the back of playing and loving it, I got to chatting with Mo, owner of Roc Nest Games, and he asked if I'd be interested in having a character from Deep Regrets act as an alternate artwork for a card from Smallfolk as part of a pack of KS exclusive cards featuring characters from designers they love. The answer was a resounding YES, of course. And obviously it should be Frod. He'll be replacing the Kappa as alternative artwork. BEHOLD THE BEAUTY!
