A Deep Dive into the Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Board Game

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a board game that lets you explore the ocean, just like in Jules Verne’s famous book. You get to be one of Captain Nemo’s crew members on his submarine, the Nautilus. Your job is to travel between the ocean’s surface and its depths, looking for new things, facing dangers, and seeing amazing sights. As you find old sunken ships, hunt sea creatures, and uncover the secrets of Atlantis, you’ll earn points by making smart choices and planning your moves carefully.

The game plays out over sixteen turns, with everyone taking their turn at the same time. In each round, players secretly pick one of three character rows. Then, they move the Nautilus based on how many movement points that row gives them. On their game sheets, they mark down what they discover and get points for islands they can see, sunken ships, forests of seaweed, hidden treasures, and whales they’ve hunted. If more than one player picks the same character, something dangerous happens. The only exception is if a player has the special Conseil card, which protects them for a short time.

This game has special bonuses for each character, a way to play by yourself, and different ways to score points at the end. All these things make you want to plan ahead and think about your moves. The game uses two maps, one for above water and one for below, which lets players dive and surface at just the right times. This makes the game deeper and more fun to play again and again. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a clever, small, and exciting game for 1 to 5 players.

To start the game, each player gets two sheets of paper. One sheet shows the ocean surface, and the other shows the underwater world. After the game, you can save these sheets and use the blank back sides for your next game. You’ll give numbers 1 through 4 to the four crew members at the bottom of your surface sheet. Place your Nautilus submarine on the middle space marked 19 on your sheet. Each player then picks a letter from A to E, drawing a ship on the matching spot on the surface sheet and a trident on the matching spot underwater.

You’ll set up a grid of nine cards, three by three. First, mix up the three character cards and put them in the left column. These cards have two sides, and each side gives a different bonus. In the middle column, draw three surface cards and place the deck of surface cards at the bottom of this column. In the right column, draw three underwater cards and put the deck of underwater cards at the top of this column. Finally, shuffle the eight danger cards to make a deck, then turn over the top two cards and place them next to each other. Put the round marker on the left space of the first danger card; these cards will show the 16 rounds of the game. One player is chosen to start and gets the Conseil card.

The game lasts for 16 turns, and each turn happens at the same time for all players, in 5 steps:

1] Pick a Character

Each player chooses a row of cards from the grid and writes the letter of the character at the left of that row into the box on their sheet for the current turn.

2] Face Danger

If any players picked the same character as someone else, they now have to deal with the danger shown by the marker on the current Danger card. Remember, the player holding the Conseil card is safe from this danger. Dangers can hurt the front, body, or propellers of your Nautilus, or even injure a crew member. The Conseil card then gets passed to the player closest to the current holder who took damage, moving in a clockwise direction.

3] Move the Nautilus

Move your Nautilus as many spaces as there are submarine symbols in the row of cards you picked. You must use all your movement points. Moving from the surface to underwater costs one point. You can’t go back to a space you’ve already been to on the same sheet during the same move. If you enter a space where you’ve already marked a discovery, the front of your submarine gets damaged, unless it’s a ship. If it’s a ship, you cross it out because you’ve sunk it.

4] Mark Discoveries

From the spot where your Nautilus ended its movement, you now mark the discovery symbols on both the surface and underwater maps. These symbols are shown on the cards in the row you chose. You can mark these symbols on the space you’re in or on any of the six spaces around it. After marking your discoveries, see if you are next to anything special. If you end up next to treasure, you can draw circles in your treasure chest area to use later. If you end next to a whale, cross out as many spaces as the whale’s value. If you end next to Atlantis, you can fill in the edge of the Atlantis space between your Nautilus and Atlantis.

5] Score Islands and Sunken Ships

If your Nautilus is on the surface at the end of your turn, you get 1 point for each island you can see in a straight line from your position. There can’t be anything blocking your view between you and the island. On turns that are a multiple of 4 (like turn 4, 8, 12, 16), you also get 1 point for each sunken ship you’ve found.

At the end of the round, move the round marker one space to the right. If the marker moves off the first danger card, flip over a new card. Also, update the market by taking away the top card from the surface market and adding a new card from the bottom. Do the same for the underwater market, but take away the bottom card and add a new one from the top.

After all 16 rounds are done, you add up your points:

Add up the points you got from each round for islands and sunken ships.
Get one point for each mark you made on the whale chart.
Earn points for any crew members who made it through the game.
Score all the seaweed areas you marked on your sheet.
Lose points for every hit your Nautilus took.
For Atlantis: The player with the most marks around Atlantis gets 15 points, the second most gets 7 points, and the third most gets 3 points.
Character Bonuses: The player who used each character the most times gets that character’s special bonus.

The player with the most points wins. If there’s a tie, the player with the most unused coins wins.

My Thoughts on the Game

When games where you ‘X’ and ‘write’ things down first came out, I really liked each new one. There was always a new idea or a surprising rule that made each game special. But ten years later, not so much. Not that there’s anything wrong with a game like this that doesn’t have something totally new.

I heard about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea at a game fair in 2025. What caught my eye was how it used two sheets, one for the ocean surface and one for underwater. Yes, it’s not a completely new idea, but it was different enough to keep me from getting bored with these kinds of games.

The game gives you lots of different goals, some for the short term and some for later in the game. This usually means you’ll be able to use more than one of the card pairs that are available. This is good because you really don’t want to get penalized too often for picking the same character as other players.

Of course, when you play with 5 people (which we do often), you’re going to get penalties almost every turn! It’s interesting that the game doesn’t change for more players, so you’ll just have a lot more penalties with more people. I wonder if the game should have a second ‘get out of trouble’ card when there are more players, but it doesn’t. The bonuses at the end of the game also don’t change; there are always three bonuses no matter how many people are playing, and they can be very helpful. So, good luck winning without getting one!

The turns usually go pretty fast. Most of the time is spent planning what you’re going to do. Once you’ve written down your letter, you usually already know what you’ll do with the cards. Sure, sometimes an unexpected penalty might mess up your plans, but we’ve found it’s best to just expect a penalty and then be happy if you don’t get one. Each round moves quickly, and our games usually finish in a little over half an hour.

As a group, we’re not very good artists, so each of us has come up with our own quick ways to draw things. I usually just use dollar signs for money and a ‘W’ for the sea creature, because it looks like a whale in the picture, and ‘W’ is short for whale. It might not look pretty, but it works!

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is definitely one of the more involved ‘X and Write’ games. It gives you a lot to think about in the 30-45 minutes you’ll spend playing it. It’s not exactly a game where you get points for everything, but there are many ways to score. The trick is to get the most points you can from all the choices you have.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Doug G.: Shelley and I really liked the new idea of having two pages, one for above water and one for below. It took a moment to get used to, but it was neat. Since we mostly play with two people, we didn’t get as many penalties as Dale mentioned, so we felt more free to do what we wanted than you would in a 5-player game. This game worked better for us than the earlier Around the World In 80 Days from 2024, and we’re keeping it. We talked about it on Episode 1019 of the Garrett’s Games podcast.