One man, one company,
no compromises
Tettix Games is one person. Judson Cowan — American, raised in North Carolina, transplanted to Edinburgh — does everything: he designs, composes the music, writes the rules, manages the marketing, ships the orders. It's not a budget choice. It's a philosophical one.
Before games, Cowan spent decades in advertising. Creative director at several agencies, years in-house at Skyscanner — one of the most used travel apps in the world. In between, almost by chance, he drew an illustrated map of Lordran, the world of Dark Souls. He posted it on Reddit. It exploded. Today, that map is officially licensed by FromSoftware and still on sale.
But advertising wasn't enough. And Dark Souls wasn't enough. Cowan wanted to make board games — and he wanted to do it all by himself.
The name Tettix comes from ancient Greek: it means cicada. Cowan loved cicadas as a child, and when he formed his band he named them Cicada — but another band already had that name and fame. So he switched to Tettix: "enigmatic, short, and sounds a bit like Tetris." When he opened the games company, he kept the same name.
Today, Tettix is a band, an illustration studio, and a game publishing house. One man who can't stop creating things.
The first game published by Tettix is called Hideous Abomination — a monster-building game for all ages. Then came Deep Regrets. And with Deep Regrets, Cowan kept everything in his hands until the very end. Every line is drawn in real ink, then digitally colored in Procreate. No AI. No external illustrators. No shortcuts.
How a game that starts halfway
is born
Deep Regrets doesn't originate from a game idea. It stems from an obsession with a genre — marine horror — that Cowan felt was underrepresented everywhere. The Fisherman by Jon Langan, The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers, the video game Dredge: three things read and played in sequence within a few weeks. By the time he finished Dredge, the previous project was already in the trash.
"The genre of the sea as horror is vastly underrepresented. I'm doing my part to change that."
The central mechanic — the Regrets — had to be rebuilt from scratch during playtesting. At first, they were a universal scale: when someone accumulated too many, everyone suffered the consequences. On the table, it was a disaster. Playtests always said the same thing: the Regret cards seem useless. They don't weigh enough.
Cowan threw out the universal system and built individual tracks of madness. Regrets do two opposite things simultaneously: they give you more dice — more power to fish in deep waters — but they lower the value of normal fish and increase that of monsters. The crazier you are, the more you have to risk to earn.
And in the end, whoever has accumulated the highest value of regrets loses their most precious trophy. Not the number — the value. You can manage everything perfectly and lose in the last turn due to a single wrong card.
Every decision in this game is a potential regret. Catching the monster gives you power — but brings you closer to the abyss. Selling it at the port earns you money — but leaves a permanent regret. Even doing nothing costs something.
Why you keep fishing
even when you already know how it ends
There's a moment in every game when you know exactly what's about to happen. You have too many regrets. Your most valuable trophy is on the line. The rational choice is to wait. But the boat is already at sea. And there are still three cards to turn.
What happens next isn't stupidity. It's one of the most documented mechanisms in decision psychology.
When we perceive ourselves to have more power — more dice, more options, more resources — the brain automatically lowers the threshold of acceptable risk. In Deep Regrets, each regret literally gives you more dice. The game makes you feel stronger precisely as you approach loss.
It's not push your luck in the traditional sense, where you know you're taking a risk. It's push your luck where the system actively convinces you that you're playing better. Cowan's mechanic is not just thematic: it's a faithful replication of how the human mind works when it accumulates resources and overestimates its ability to manage them.
After three games of Deep Regrets, you already know who at the table can't stop when they should. And you probably know that person outside the game too.
Ref. Wilde, G.J.S. — Target Risk, 1994 · Kahneman, D. — Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011
Cowan built a game that rewards you for being greedy — until it stops doing so. And that distinction is the hardest thing to learn. Not in the rules. At the table, when it's already too late.
One man, real ink, and a game that makes you feel invincible — at the wrong time.
Deep Regrets is available on Frogames with Lamentable Tentacles included in launch promo.
https://frogames.it
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In deck-building, you choose. In this, you don't.