Aquamarine is a print-and-play game where you play as a diver trying to discover as much as you can with the time allotted and air available in your tank. With my printed map and a pair of dice, I got to go under the water and explore this new game from Postmark Games.
A copy of this game was provided for the purposes of this review.
The premise of Aquamarine is as simple as being a diver exploring the ocean and discovering things from different sea life to shipwrecks. You do so through dice rolls, where all divers choose one of the values rolled to move through the map. Doing so consumes air in your tank, and every diver has three tanks and thus three dives. Be careful with where you dive as you can only move in straight lines and orthogonally. You’ll need to strategize in order to discover shipwrecks, beacons, fish, and flags in your path and earn points, plus be wary of point-negating jellyfish and path-blocking rocks. And some creatures are best found at night while others prefer the day, and this will affect your score at the end of the game.
Aquamarine is quick to learn and has the perfect amount of strategy. You can play with others, as many people as you wish even, but I particularly enjoyed playing solo, which I rarely do. I enjoyed how the solo mode didn’t change anything about the game besides adding in one more win condition. After my first game and seeing where I could have made better choices, I immediately played again to try and beat my previous score. This game will make you think but it isn’t stressful and I found it relaxing to play solo.
With a print-and-play game, you simply print the game map for each player and just need to add two 6-sided dice. You could easily use an app for your dice if you don’t have physical ones since all players use the same rolls each round. I ended up printing a nicer copy of the map and putting it in a page protector so I could use a dry erase marker and that worked really well. And if you have an iPad or other tablet you could easily use that for a digital method. The game is very accessible with all of these options, which also keeps it fairly priced. And you’ll receive multiple maps to add variety and replayability.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed Aquamarine. It has the perfect amount of difficulty and need for strategy. It’s very simple to set up and start playing and with the variety of methods for implementing the game, it is widely accessible and replayable. I definitely recommend Aquamarine to anyone interested, regardless of if you’re an avid gamer or not.
Aquamarine will be available on Kickstarter on July 19th and you can visit their page now to sign up for notifications when it is live.
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