In the wild, most humpback whales feed by lunge fishing, which is relatively ineff-fish-cient. Some pods, though, have developed the "bubble net" feeding technique, where a whale dives deep below the fish and comes up, blowing a spiral of bubbles, confusing the fish and driving them into a tight ball, leading to a higher-quality bite!

This is what we are replicating in Bubble Net. Each player is competing against themselves to eat more fish than they lose out to sea.

Player boards are divided into segments that match the points of the compass.

Set-up: Place a Fish token on every marked space, and the starting Bubble tokens on their spots. Shuffle the Fish cards and place the deck in the middle.

On your turn, simultaneously with any other players, add one Bubble to the track. If the Bubble closes a segment, drive any fish present inward by one. All fish that are pushed into the very centre, which represents your Mouth, move into your Belly.

Next, place your two Podmate tokens. They cannot share a segment with a Bubble, but they close any segment where they are placed - a whole whale needs a whole segment.

The Fish respond: flip the top Fish card, and for every Fish icon represented, move all Fish tokens in that segment out by one space, unless the segment is blocked by one or more Bubbles, or a Podmate whale. Any Fish outside the spiral escape to the "Freedom" space, and can no longer be eaten.

Continue alternating moves between the Whales and the Fish until any player has made a Bait Ball (all Fish are within the center spiral), then all players Lunge. All Fish within the center spiral go into your belly, and any outside that area escape.

If there are more Fish in your Belly that escaped out to sea, you have won!

Bubble Net is a multi-player, meditative solitaire game that takes around ten minutes to play and can have as many players as have boards. Players share the Fish deck; each card affects all players, a bit like Bingo, so new players can join the game at any point, continuing when others reach the Bait Ball stage.

The interactive variant allows players to take on the role of their neighbors' Fish, with each person playing a Fish card from their hand face-down onto their neighbor's playing area before the Whales move, instead of drawing a single card that affects everyone from the Fish deck afterwards. Players may choose to score against each other instead of against themselves in this variant.

—description from the publisher

Games