Oil Rock - How to Play. Clear, Concise, Complete Board Game Tutorial
Transcript
Expand the oil industry from mining, refining, logistics, meeting demands. After all, you're an oil baron, and it's the industrial revolution in Oil Rock.
And today, we'll be teaching you how to play Oil Rock, game designed by Marco Piola Caselli, and published by Cranio Creations.
And hey everyone, it's Stella.
And Tarrant, welcome to Meeple University.
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In Oil Rock, players are oil magnates in the early era of exploration trying to strike it rich by drilling that good old Texas tea. Round by round, players will pick actions from the wheel, aiming to explore and expand, buy improvements, and then drill, refine, and more, all in the aim of gaining the best resources, and the most points. Whoever can reach the highest score after four rounds of play will be the winner. To set up, lay out the board. At four players, put the six-piece hub and spoke, or the five-piece otherwise, aligning the outer triangles with the spokes.
Find all of the action tiles for your specific player count, and lay them randomly in the gaps. Note that a couple of the action slots are blank in the two-player game. Shuffle up all of the gold tiles, and lay one face up in each of these slots. These will be round end scoring objectives for rounds one, two, three, and four, respectively. Randomly lay out the 12 region tiles, and then take the railway bonus tokens, and randomly place each face up on a matching colored region. You're going to see these three colors across a lot of the game's components with yellow always being the cheapest and least valuable, green being intermediate, and this very dark blue being the most expensive.
Shuffle the full deck of improvement cards. This includes cards in the three colors of yellow, green, and blue. Deal a face-up market of cards numbering four more than the player count and arrange them from lowest value to highest based on the number in the lower left corner. This always lays them in color order, yellow, green, blue. Each player takes a player board and all of their player pieces. You'll have a set of nine drills flipped face-up in their matching colored wells from lowest number to highest. You'll have six briefcases, each face-up on a space below its matching colored well. You'll have a stack of six refinery tiles. Arrange these with the white numbered side face-up in a stack in numerical order.
There are six player action markers, three assistants and three managers. Set all six aside for now. You have six offices, each placed on one of the lower two slots of an extraction well on top of the drill. There are six extra action tiles placed face-up beside your board and six turbine tiles beginning color side up. Next, players must choose which of the oil barons they'll represent. Randomize players on the turn order track. Lay out one more character than you have players and each player picks one in reverse turn order. Flip it to the page labeled progress level one.
This corresponds to your token and the progress track. Players begin on this darker starting space stacked in reverse turn order, meaning that on this track, whoever is on the bottom of the pile is considered ahead. And so here, blue is first in turn order and last in this stack tiebreaker. This track has victory points. All players begin with zero and here the stacking order does not matter. Make supplies of the resources. There are tools, coins, and coal in single and multiple denominations, patents, and oil barrels in yellow, green, and blue. Starting resources are a tool, a coin, and a coal, plus an extra coin if you're second in turn order, or an extra coal if you're third, or a patent if you're fourth.
Finally, in reverse turn order, players place their engineer and train. Both must be placed in the same single yellow region not previously chosen by another player, and that player gains the resources on the railway bonus token. You're now ready to play. I have many wells flowing at many thousand barrels per day. I like to think of myself as an oil man. Now, give me that milkshake.
Give him a couple of small roles on YouTube and he thinks he's Daniel Day-Lewis. Oil Rush plays in four rounds and each round results in six phases.
First is income. Players gain the resources and workers from their character notebooks. Second is actions. One at a time, players will choose actions from the wheel, resolving them immediately to expand their oil empires. Everyone will take a total of three turns. Third is extract. Players produce oil from each of their wells. Fourth is refine. Players run their oil through the refineries they've built, converting them to resources or points. Fifth is goal. Players score points for the current round's goal marker.
And sixth is end of round, in which you'll reset parts of the board and markets, and rotate the outer action wheel one step clockwise. The aim of the game is to score the most victory points, represented by the star. A bronze star always represents points gained immediately, and a gold star represents points gained at game's end. So now, let's look at each phase in detail.
Starting with income, the first step to fuel your oil industry.
In phase one, income, you get whatever's shown in the phase one bar of your character card. This will be some number of resources and exactly three workers. At progress level one, this will be three of your weaker workers, the assistants, but later in the game, you'll be leveling up and replacing some of those assistants with managers. Whatever it is you get, these are the three workers you'll be placing this round. The second phase is actions. Here, each player will take a total of three turns, one at a time in turn order. On your turn, you'll place one of your workers on the wheel and resolve actions where you placed.
If you're currently holding both assistants and managers, then you must place an assistant. Managers can only be placed after all of your assistants are on the board. An assistant can be placed on any empty action space. Then resolve the action on that space, and if there are multiple components, resolve them in either order. A manager may be played in exactly the same way on a single action space, or may be placed in an empty circular space around the rim of the wheel. In this latter case, the player resolves both joining actions one after the other. If any of the adjoining action spaces are occupied by other players' workers, each such player gains one step on the progress track.
You do not gain bonuses for yourself in this way. You may also choose to spend either type of worker to take a copy action. You must lose one step of progress to do this, and can't choose if you're on the lowest space. Pick any single action triangle occupied by an opponent, resolve the action on that space, and give that opponent one step of progress. You cannot copy an action which you had previously taken. If you copy with a manager, you're still copying just a single triangle, not one of the circular double spaces.
Now we will take you through how the main actions work.
First, we'll have a look at how you explore and spread your presence around the map. The first action is to move your train. In this case, it's by up to two spaces. At this point, your engineer may or may not be in the same tile as your train. For each movement step, move your train to an adjacent tile. It doesn't matter whether there are pieces there or not. Pay the coal cost to enter that color of tile and gain the railway bonus on that specific tile. Once you're finished with all of your steps of movement, you may then choose to move your engineer directly to any one of the tiles your train was on during this turn.
That could be its origin, transit point, or destination. Your engineer does nothing else for now. A variation on this action is rapid movement. There's oil in them there hills and you can quickly drive your train straight there. Moving to any other tile on the board and paying only the coal cost of the destination while also gaining only the destination's railway bonus. You may then move your engineer either to the destination or origin. Once you've found and want to produce some oil, you'll need to set up a local office to manage your operations and that is done with this action.
Take the topmost office from any one well of your player board. Choose where to build. It must be in the tile with your engineer or with your train. The tile can be any color. It does not have to match the well from which you took the office. But you must pay the office's tool cost which increases based on the color of the tile. Having paid, place the office on the highest scoring space within that tile and gain the branch bonus showing in the hexagon below. Each player may build at most one office per tile. So, you've found some oil, you've set up your office.
Now it's time to drill.
When you take the drill action, pay tools based on the cost of the topmost uncovered drill tile in one of your three wells. Remove the tile revealing a new barrel. You'll now be able to gain this during phase three. Oil is not much use until it's being refined. When you take the refine action, you build your next refinery. Take the top tile from this stack and place it top-to-bottom in your column of refineries for the first six times you take the action. For the seventh through 12th times you take the action, flip the topmost unflipped refinery over to its darker colored side.
When you trigger this icon, it lets you build the refinery for free. This action, on the other hand, would let you build one refinery for free and then up to two more at a cost of three coins each. So, for example, paying six coins to build three refineries. You may also improve your refineries with turbines. When you gain a turbine, pick any one among your unbuilt turbines from the tiles you gained at the start of the game. Pay its coal cost and then flip it over and place it onto the turbine slot of any refinery, either built or unbuilt. Once you've decided where to put it, it remains for the rest of the game and this increases the output of the refinery it's joined to.
The next actions relate to improving your equipment and technology.
Anything you can do to gain a competitive edge.
When you gain the light bulb, you'll increase on the progress track. Now, often this will come as bonuses from different effects, but you could also take this action from the wheel, giving you one free step and the ability to buy up to four more at a cost of two coins each. We saw a couple of cases before with the wheel interactions on how players can increase or decrease on this track. Anytime you move and land on top of somebody else, stack yourself on top. Remember, whoever is on the bottom of a stack is considered ahead. As soon as your marker crosses over a progress level icon, flip your character over to the next progress level.
This will increase your income and improve your choice of workers starting from next round. And from level three onwards, it will also give you a special player ability. Your notebook will tell you whether this resolves in phase three, four, or five of the round, and if you choose to resolve it, you must do so at the very start of the relevant phase. Should you ever move backwards on progress behind a level marker, you are not required to regress your character to its earlier stage. And there are good end-game points on offer for reaching the end of this track and further immediate points for each step you'll try to move beyond the top.
With this action, buy an improvement card. Pick any one card among those in the face-up market, pay its cost, take it without replenishing, add it to the column above the matching colored well, and immediately gain one point for each visible barrel within that well. Here, it's two points. Yellow cards cost coins and will give you some sort of ongoing benefit when you take a specific action. Green cards cost tools and they'll give you a once off benefit. Blue cards cost coal and give you a personal end game scoring objective. You may also collect patents from actions or other bonuses.
Having collected them, patents may be spent in one of two ways. The first is to open briefcases. Pick one, pay its patent cost, gain its immediate benefit and discard it. You may do this at any time on your turn and any number of times that you wish. Second, you may spend three patents to take an extra action. Choose one of your six extra action tiles, resolve that action as if you'd just chosen it from the board, and permanently flip the tile down into the slot corresponding to the current round. This limits you to taking each extra action at most once and to at most one extra action per round.
You can do either of these during your turn in phase two, but you can also do these patent actions in phases three, four or five. And if multiple players wish to do an extra action during this time, resolve it in turn order.
And those are the actions you can take during the actions phase.
Now it's time to operate your industry in phases three and four, oil extraction and refining. Phase three is oil extraction. For each visible barrel in each of your wells, gain one matching colored oil. Phase four is oil refining. Each of your refineries shows you to its left the barrels of oil required to run it. The refinery tile itself, as well as any turbine that is paired with it, show you the benefits you get from running that refinery. You may run each refinery at most once per round. Decide how you're going to distribute your barrels.
And note that you can always spend a higher quality barrel as if it were a lower one. This would be a valid feed to run this refinery. Gain all the resources, track advancements, and points that you produce. And discard the barrels. Two other things of note. Firstly, you have enough storage to hold at most one barrel of each color between rounds. If I ended my refining phase like this, I would need to discard one yellow barrel. Secondly, each player has a basic refinery which you can use any number of times during this phase. Put any number of barrels into it and add up its power value, which is one for yellow, two for green, and three for blue.
This would be a value of four. Half that value rounded down and gain that many resources of your choice. Again, remember in these phases, if your player power allows you to take an action, you do so at the start of the relevant phase. And that if you've not done so already this round, you could spend three patents to take an extra action. This could be particularly helpful in the fourth round after you've just gained your last big influx of resources, but have no future round to spend them on actions. Phase five is to score the round's goal. Each round's goal token shows some feature of the game. And you'll now immediately score the points for how many times you've achieved that up to this point.
Here, for example, it's five points per yellow drill that you've built by the end of round one. Here, it's four points per blue improvement card you've built by the end of round two, and so on. Flip the goal down once it's been scored. Now, move on to the end of the round. From the improvement cards, discard the two with the lowest numbers that remain, replenish to the starting value of player count plus four, again arranging from lowest number to highest, retrieve all workers from the board, rotate the outer action wheel by one step clockwise. This changes which action pairs are linked to the different manager spaces.
And reset the turn order with furthest back on the progress track going first, and furthest ahead going last. After the fourth round is complete, the game is over. To the points players have gained during the game, players now gain the points next to their ending position on the progress track, the points next to each of their constructed offices, from each of the three wells on your player board, the highest points total next to a drilled space, so here it's 10, two, and two, the points from the objectives on all of your blue structure cards, the points on the right-hand side of any refinery row where you have both built and flipped the refinery and built a turbine.
Here, row one has no turbine, row three is unflipped, so only row two would score its two points. And then gain one point for every leftover patent, and one point for every three leftover resources. The player with the highest score wins, and if tied, furthest ahead on the progress track breaks the tie.
Thanks for watching. And if you like this video, maybe you'd like to watch this next one. Have a great day. Bye.