Deep Vents

About this board game

Deep Vents is a competitive board game for 2–4 players, with games lasting about 60 minutes, in which each player develops a hydrothermal ecosystem in the ocean’s unforgiving depths.

Hydrothermal vents provide heat and minerals to the near-freezing abyss. Players build around these environments by adding life and geological features, using microscopic archaea as the game’s currency and the foundation of a strange deep-sea food chain.

At the start of each turn, draft one tile from the five on display. Every tile you skip receives an archaeon, making the display increasingly valuable. Add your chosen tile adjacent to another tile in your ecosystem, then grow or trigger your tiles in order from top to bottom and left to right.

• Grow tiles by placing archaea on them, sometimes in amounts determined by other tiles.
• Trigger tiles by removing archaea to activate their unique effects.
• Attack opponents, gain shells for defense, move archaea to your personal supply, or decimate tiles so they become only a heat source.

Attacks can create dangerous shortages. If you cannot discard the required archaea, take a shortfall token and ten archaea before discarding what you can. You may spend ten archaea to remove a shortfall token, but having one restricts you to drafting only the first tile on display. Two shortfall tokens at the end of your turn eliminate you from the game.

Deep Vents ends when only one player remains or after eight rounds. If multiple players survive, score archaea and shells in reserve, along with archaea on tiles; the highest score wins.