Deepsea Desperation

The days of easy drilling are long gone and oil companies are searching in ever deeper, riskier and more fragile places just to secure our daily fix of capitalist cog-grease. The battle is on to protect these areas from the next 'Deepwater Horizon. It's Greenpeace vs. the Oil Company, trying to establish marine reserves in the very territory the other player wants to exploit. Through a mix of strategic lobbying, exploration, occupation and reserve creation, one of you will triumph. But beware: too many blowouts and you'll have a deepwater slaughter on your hands. And if all the animals die, you both lose! You only need some coins and 2 dice to play. Everything else is included in the PNP files. Game play takes place on a grided map of the ocean, containing squares of varying depths of water. One player takes on the role of environmental activists, Greenpeace, while the other, the role of a Big Nasty Oil company. Greenpeace is trying to establish marine reserves in the very places that Big Oil is trying to drill. You see, oil (in the form of coins) is available everywhere, but severely limited in shallow and medium depths. So once the easy oil runs out, the oil company is pushed into deep water. Drilling involves rolling two dice, one after the other. If the second number is larger than the first, this drill results in profit (coins equal to the difference in the two numbers) but if you roll a double, it's a blow out. Blow outs are more damaging in deeper water and any blow out might affect surrounding wildlife (animal counters are distributed randomly for each game). If any one species gets totally wiped out, both players lose. Each player has 3 strategies to choose from each turn and there is enough variation to ensure that no single outcome is guaranteed (although a lot of animals consistently die).