Deep Madness is a cooperative board game for 1-6 players that features incredibly detailed miniatures, truly immersive horror experiences, fast-paced gameplay writhing with tension, and deeply strategic challenges. Drawing inspiration from the works of H.P. Lovecraft as well as numerous films, books, games, and television series, this is a game that has evolved to truly become a world all its own.
Besides the massive number of highly detailed models, the beautiful cards, the high-quality accessories, and the unbeatable value, what makes Deep Madness a game you cannot miss? Here’s a brief look at some of its core features and game mechanics:
1. Deep Madness features immersive gameplay in an original world with engaging stories, deep lore, and numerous call-backs to many of your (and our) favorite movies, books, television series, and video games. It has a cohesive narrative (with each scenario serving as a chapter in the full story), terrifying micro-stories on each madness card, and backstory on every consciousness and investigator card. Every detail serves to plunge you deeper into the Kadath deep-sea mining facility, experiencing the hellish nightmares right alongside the investigators. Deep Madness is the game horror fans have been waiting for.
2. DM has 18 vastly divergent scenarios across all its expansions. Every scenario blends story, setting, and gameplay to form unique objectives, rules, and strategies. Thus, each scenario is a radically different experience, forcing you to approach each one from a new perspective and playstyle.
3. DM contains 25 investigators with different backgrounds, personalities, and stories. Every investigator is uniquely designed, with each one bringing a new strategy to the game. Different sets of investigators will solve a scenario in completely new ways.
4. No player is insignificant in DM. Each of your decisions can mean life or death for your entire team, but there is rarely an obviously correct answer. Close communication with your teammates, adjusting your (and the team’s) strategy as the game changes, is the only way to survive.
5. DM currently showcases 28 common monsters and 14 Epic Monsters. Each type of monster has a unique skillset (or AI) from every other monster, creating wonderfully rich and terrifying possibilities in every new game. Even when playing the same scenario, deploying varying combinations of monsters can make the game play completely differently. Players need to adopt different strategies to defeat (or escape) every kind of monster.
6. The order of investigator and monster activations is dynamic in Deep Madness. The monsters don't act after all of the investigators do. Instead, they alternate with the players. This can cause some of the monsters to act before several (or most) of the investigators, and the farther back the investigators are in the activation track the more dangerous the situation is for them. Throughout the activation phase, investigators need to stay alert and constantly reassess the situation.
7. The game board will change and have varying effects throughout the course of a single game. As the game progresses, investigators will find that the quiet, empty rooms they come across are becoming bloody, horrific nightmares full of unthinkable creatures and awful effects. The consequent negative effects in these freshly "devoured" rooms will remain all the way to the end of the game. There is no way to predict what room will be devoured in which order, either: it is determined randomly throughout the game.
8. As the rooms are randomly devoured, so the monsters also spawn at random. Monsters may appear in any devoured room rather than at only a couple of rigidly fixed, predetermined points. It is not at all uncommon for a horrific monstrosity to pull itself out of the ground right beside you. This random monster spawning mechanism fills each round with uncertainty so that there is a constant tension as you are playing. However, at the same time there is a certain level of predictability in that only one space on a devoured tile can spawn monsters and only a set number of spawn cards are resolved each round. This allows you to expect and even strategize for the unexpected.
9. As if the tension wasn't already thick enough, DM also features a ticking clock. Each game round you move closer to the end of the devouring track, and if you reach it your entire team will be instantly consumed. On top of this, each investigator has a limited number of actions, and each of those actions needs to count every turn if you want even the slightest hope of winning. Each turn the intensity mounts, because every turn takes you palpably closer to the end.
10. Deep Madness also features a variety of unique game mechanics. Flooded and Oxygen rules require you to choose the right location for and timing of your actions, because if you aren't careful you will asphyxiate or drown. The Sanity/Madness mechanism, meanwhile, requires you to balance staying sane with achieving feats you couldn't otherwise accomplish. The unique hatch locking mechanism also showcases an important rule in DM: the goal of the game is not to kill monsters. It is to survive. And sometimes the most effective way to do that is to run away and hope the door holds.
11. Last but not least, in case you hadn't guessed already, this game is HARD! (And, as they say in programming, this is a feature, not a bug.)
