The Drowned Table

After the wreck you wake at a table in a dry cabin, a storm at the window and a cup of bone beside your hand. The table keeps score and demands an offering in points, and a voice in the dark teaches you how to pay it. The voice will not say why you are here, and every depth you clear lets more of the sea into the cabin.

How a run plays

Each offering is a target score. Draw dice from your bag, load the cup, and cast. The dice tumble across the table and score where they land.

Scoring runs in a fixed order. The power on each die acts first, in the order you choose. Your best pattern in the final faces, such as a pair, a straight or a full house, multiplies the result. Then your Curios fire, from left to right.

You have a limited number of casts and discards for each offering. Reach the target before they run out, or the voyage ends.

Between offerings you choose a passage on the Sea Chart: an event, a market, or an optional harder offering that pays in better rewards. Routes split and rejoin. Every choice shows its terms before you commit, including the price of any curse.

A guardian waits at the end of every depth. Each one changes a rule of the offering, and that rule stays on screen through every cast.

What you collect

Over two hundred dice. Most are not cubes: there are knucklebones, bell jars, fangs, eyeballs, lamprey coils, d8s, d12s and d20s. Each die has a power. One pushes the die beside it across the felt. One counts as three dice. One shatters into shards when it settles and is whole again for the next cast. Keywords such as Soak, Chain, Growth and Bite name what groups of dice do, so you can build a bag around one idea.

Well over a hundred Curios, relics left by the drowned. Each one watches for a condition, such as an all-even cast, a straight, or a first cast with few dice, and pays out when it is met. Curios fire from left to right after your dice, so the order of the row is part of the build: an addition placed before a multiplier is worth more than the same addition placed after it. Drag a Curio to a new seat to reorder the row.

Dice and Curios come in five rarities: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary. You also carry one-use items. A message in a bottle changes your next cast. A Hadal Omen sets the weather for a whole offering.

Twelve keepsakes can be engraved into the centre of the table. Each adds one small, specific bonus to every cast: extra points on a certain face, a temporary Bone die each cast, a rougher table that slows sliding dice. You unlock them by playing. The game does not list how.

Eight cups set your starting bag, how many casts and discards you get, and how steep the targets climb. Win with one cup to open the next.

What is down there

The descent runs eight depths, from The Waterline, where the storm still shows in the cabin window, through The Watched Deep to The Abyss. As you go down, water comes into the cabin, daylight fails, and the round window shows only dark water and whatever glows in it. Things swim past the glass. At the deepest depths a very large eye opens on the other side of it and follows the lantern.

Presences come into the cabin, and they come more often the deeper you go. A presence can put out the lantern and hide the faces of your dice until a cast scores, pin a die in the cup, tilt the cabin so a die tumbles to a new face, raise the offering, or take a die from your bag until the depth is cleared. Its arrival is only a hint, but it shows what it will do before it acts. A Ward turns it away. Without a Ward you can pay 2 Discards, or let it come.

Between offerings the Night Market opens below the surface. Its keeper has gills and a dry way of speaking. She sells dice, Curios, upgrades and caches, and sometimes a Hadal Omen or a Ward. Every price is on the card before you pay. A market waits before every guardian.

When a voyage ends you keep the Brine Pearls it earned and everything you discovered. Spend the Pearls at the Reliquary on felts, starting Curios and charters that change how a new voyage begins, then sit down again.

Endless: The Open Dark

Win at The Abyss and you can end the voyage, or keep descending into The Open Dark with the same bag and the same Curios. The offerings climb, more guardians follow, and there is no last depth. A won voyage also opens Fathoms, harder ways to set sail that each add a rule on top of the ones before.

The Lexicon

The Lexicon is the rulebook. It covers scoring, every keyword, and a page for each die and Curio you discover. Items you have not found stay hidden, so the book grows as you play. Costs and effects are stated before you commit to them.

Also in the game

Three Captain's Logs. Each keeps its own save, Brine Pearls, unlocks and Journal.

A pencil-illustrated Journal that records the places you reach.

A Practice Table for testing dice without risking a voyage.

A run journal for each voyage, so you can see where a total came from.

The Daily Tide: one short voyage per day, the same chart and cup for everyone.

Over a hundred in-game achievements, some of them secret.

Reduced Motion, an optional overhead casting view, and faster scoring.

Early Access

The Drowned Table launches in Early Access on October 26, 2026. The whole descent from The Waterline to The Abyss can be played, and so can Endless. Early Access is planned to last six to twelve months, depending on feedback and polish. The base price stays the same when it ends.

In the game now:

Eight depths, their guardians, and Endless.

The dice, Curios, keepsakes, Wards, presences and Night Market described above.

Windows, with keyboard and mouse.

Planned for updates, with no dates promised:

Balance changes, and reworks of dice and Curios that overlap or are not worth taking.

More kinds of presence, and more ways for the cabin to go wrong.

More story at the deeper depths.

A new setting for Endless.

More recorded sound for the creatures in the deep.

Art in a single style. The opening stretch of the game has been redrawn in a heavy-ink style. The later depths, event illustrations, the Sea Chart, the guardians and the Night Market keeper are being brought to match.

Expect rough edges until then: mixed art styles, some placeholder sound, and balance that will move. Feedback and bug reports go through the Steam discussions.