Oceanos

In Oceanos you are a daring, deep sea explorer, searching in the unseen depths of the ocean to find marvellous creatures and treasure. Will you be the best submarine Captain in the sea, or will your opponents grab that top spot?

Oceanos is a card drafting game with a twist. In the game, your goal is to collect as many points as possible by building your reef and your submarine. At the start of a round, the Captain deals two or more cards (depending on what level the turret of your submarine is, see below about upgrading). You all then choose one of those cards to add to your reef and then pass the unused ones back to the Captain (a position which moves around each turn). The Captain then chooses one of the cards they were presented with and adds that to their reef. Once you have repeated this process five times you score, getting points for animals in your reef and from the propeller of your submarine. After you have scored you move onto the next lower level of the sea and continue your exploration in the same manner.

Throughout the game, you have the possibility of upgrading your submarine's various parts, which allows you to do all manner of things from: being able to have more cards to choose from, to being able to take more than one card for your reef and getting extra points when you score. Another interesting element of the game is divers. On some cards there are treasure chests, when you play a card with a treasure chest you can choose to put one of you limited number of divers onto the card (you can get more divers by upgrading your submarine). However, as you play through three different levels of the reef you can choose to not place a diver and see if you can place it deeper down and collect more treasure. At the end of the game all divers surface and you collect all the treasure from the divers card and the cards above it. This means that there is the potential to get a lot of points if you hang on to your divers until the end of the game, but you can only place them on a treasure card, so do you risk it and keep your divers in your hand or do you play it safe and get the guaranteed points?

We received this game just a few days ago as a review copy and we were delighted to see when we opened it the amazing artwork on the submarines and cards in this game. We were even more delighted to see that inside were all the bits you need to make 5 submarines! My sister and I immediately got into popping out all the cardboard pieces and we soon had in front of us an array of submarine parts. After reading the rules we jumped into playing it. It took a good ten minutes explaining the rules to my Mum and Dad (this game is slightly complicated due to all of the rules about upgrading you ship and all the bonuses you got from that). It was really cool how you could upgrade the different parts of your submarine, and I took great pleasure in maxing out my propeller. Another of the things that I really enjoyed was how you built up your reef, and how you drew cards from a different deck for each different level. The one thing that did come up as we were playing was how some of the submarine parts didn't fit together very well, meaning that sometimes it was a bit of a struggle to get the bits to sit flat on the table. Apart from that, the experience was really enjoyable and my family and I had a fabulous time.  Overall I would rate this game 8/10 and recommend it for anyone who is slightly older.