Diver Go!
- Board's Eye View
- 2 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Designed by Mashiu, Diver Go!, from Itten, is a memory and dexterity party game for 2-4 players where players are diving for treasure but without getting wet. It's played with a box of gold, silver, bronze and iron coins (actually all plastic, of course). Some of the coins are cursed, however: marked with a splash of turquoise on one side.
The coins are shaken up in the box and a player has 20 seconds, as measured with the supplied sand timer, to peruse the coins before attempting their 'dive'. To dive, they cover their eyes with the cardboard diving mask so they are actually drawing coins blind; reliant on their dexterity and their memory of the position of the coins and the known cursed coins to avoid. If you pick up more than two cursed coins, they are set aside and will be worth negative points at the end of the game.
Players are looking to retrieve a mix of coins that will satisfy the requirements of a reward card from those on display, and if none of the coins you cash in for a reward card are cursed then your reward card is worth double.
That's pretty much the nub of the game. In addition to the memory and dexterity aspect, there's a push-your-luck element for players who draw one or two cursed coins. Do you use them to buy reward cards or do you use uncursed coins for this? Using only uncursed coins will mean a reward card is worth more but accumulating three or more cursed coins will lose you points...
The number of coins you dive for is determined by the card you grab in a free-for-all at the start of each round. We weren't enamoured wih this aspect as grabbing at cards almost invariably means damaging them. In our plays at Board's Eye View we experimented with simply bidding 1-5; bid low and you get fewer coins but an earlier dive and so possibly easier pickings; bid high and you pick up more but go late. Diver Go! is essentially a party game tho' so most players will be playing for the fun of the memory and dexterity challenge rather than mithering overly about keeping score.
Itten have included rules for solitaire play and alternative 'easy mode' rules for playing with younger children. These dispense with both the card grabbing and the reward cards. Instead, players simply declare before each dive whether they will retrieve 1, 2 or 3 coins. If a player accumulates three or more cursed coins, they are eliminated. In this 'easy mode', the game is won by the first player to collect six uncursed coins.
Diver Go! may be silly but we've had a lot of fun playing it. And, perhaps it was the concentration it demanded, but this may be the first nautical treasure game we've played where nobody slipped into comedy pirate accents while playing.
