Drillers Review: How It Plays & Final Verdict
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to Board Stupid. My name is Wayne.
I'm Matt.
And this is our review of
Drillers by CGE.
Absolutely. So, join us as we drill down deep into this game. But first,
Drillers is out now, so you
Do that. And then join us after the jump, yeah?
Drill. Whatever. Okay, before we start, just a little bit of a caveat about this video because this is a prototype copy. We received it a while ago. We've been playing it for a long time. And yeah, life got in the way, and well, the review's out now, so but Yeah, it's the components, some things might be different from the retail copy that is actually out now, so you can actually buy it. But, Wayne, what is Drillers?
Drillers is a one-to-four player Eurogame where you are going to be playing in a far future as pilots of mechs digging deep into the earth into abandoned mines to try and recover minerals. This is all done through the power of deck building, Matt.
Yes. Basically, you picking up minerals and you deliver minerals. You gain money delivering minerals, and you can buy more cards, so you can go back into the mine and drill more. Drill more and keep going like that until you got a lot of money, and eventually you might be the richest one and the winner of Drillers.
That's basically it. And so, as we said, this is a deck building game at its heart, Matt, with a couple of peculiarities. One of the interesting things about Drillers is that you always see the top card of your deck, which I find quite interesting. And the game encourages you to go deeper and deeper into the mines cuz that's where the more valuable points are, the more valuable valuable minerals are, the more valuable actions that you can take. Um however, you can't stay down there indefinitely because the game has this interesting system where you're utilizing fuel as your primary resource to do actions.
Yes.
Uh and what I like about this is the multi-use cards. Um your cards can be used in several ways. You can discard them to get more fuel, sort of burning them in your engine, I guess. Uh or you can use them for their effects. And their effects are mostly twofold. They're either moving up and down the mines, around the different levels, or guess what?
Drilling.
Drilling.
Those are the two the two main things that that you can do.
Yeah.
Uh and of course, there are um you can throughout the game, there's going to be an open market with cards that you can buy and you can get more powerful cards. So, I'm going to be very straightforward. It's like more drilling, more moving.
Movement and drilling.
Some of them is instead of going to be more um let's say technical cuz you will be able to repair. That is an action that you can basically how you shed your your cards out. You trash cards from your from your hands, the ones that are no needed anymore. Some of them will have malus points. You want to get rid of them and just have a lean better deck so you can do you can do more things more efficiently. Uh some of them will uh related to your um drones. Uh drones will let you do uh some special action like selling or selling minerals or buying cards not in the markets. The market is the top of the of the board. The drone will let you do it even if you are deep down in the mine. So, it's kind of like it's kind of like uh um yeah, a little a little help by the little by the little drones. Uh and talking about that, so why is this important? Because of course, you cannot drill and pick up all the minerals. You will have to go down, fill up your your your store the storage at the back of your mech, and eventually come back upstairs, come back into the into the surface, sell, repair, get more fuel, change your cards, and then go back again.
Yeah, and this is the cycle of the game. You have two essential phases of the game. One is your sort of general actions, which is digging into the mine, moving around, getting minerals and stuff. And then the other phase of the game is when you're on the surface doing all of the extra stuff, upgrading your mechs, and and bloody bloody blah. Um There's some interesting stuff that I want to touch on that in the game. As you dig down into the mines, you have these various events that will trigger. They're really cool. And these are going to be almost unique to each game. There's a deck of these in in the box.
quite a number of cards, yeah.
And and they'll get revealed as you get a deeper into the mines. And they'll give some sort of effect. They could maybe reward you for staying in that area, or they might punish you for staying in that area, or they might have something that happens when you reveal that particular card for the first time. And these are really cool, and they can really help with your combo building throughout the game as well. Furthermore, when you are drilling, you're drilling for a couple of things. Obviously, the minerals that you want to pick up. But you can also choose to drill deeper into the mine because these levels are initially blocked at the start of the game.
will they will come out while you while you drill. So, you need to drill either sideways
into the wall
to to get the minerals down and then pick them up, or drill down to go to the to the to that At the start of the game, just a couple of levels are going to be available. You want to go down.
Yeah, absolutely. And all of these are ways to get ways to get points. They're all kind of first come first serve points. If you drill into the wall, you'll get the points for doing that. You get a tile for it, but then it spills out minerals potentially for everyone else to pick up. If you drill downwards, you might have to use a lot of your actions to drill down, but you get big points for doing that.
a big bonus. So, every time you drill either the the floor or the or the wall, you're going to take one of the tiles that are related to that level, you're going to add it to your board, and then basically that's going to be helping out for your scoring toward the toward the end of the game. And talking about the board itself, so as you can see that there is a lot of like knobs and but it's basically you will have the fuel track that is literally like helping you tracking what you're doing. So, I got 13 fuel, I need to spend this card cost me five, I go down by by five. While the movement and the drilling one kind of like just helping you to visualize what cards have you played.
Cuz at the start of your turn you can play all the cards that you that you have in your hands if you want. You can keep one two for the for the next turn, but it's usually like a good things to to play them all cuz you're going to have and and basically if you say, "Okay, this card give me three drills and this card give me two drills." You just go up to five on on your on your board and it's just like a reminder
It's a tracker. And it's important that because it's not like you have to play one card and resolve it fully before the next card. No, you play all your cards, you track all of your drill power and move power, and you can use them then one at a time or individually or or a couple here and a couple there. It's very flexible in terms of what you do on your turn once you've played your cards.
Absolutely. And then on the on the other side of the of the player board is basically where you you can you got your storage that it's at the bottom of the of the board that is like how many minerals you can actually carry around. And of course once you upgrade your mech once you go up on the on the surface, you can make that storage bigger. Same things for the fuel, you can upgrade your tank so you can have more fuel to do more things. And then at the top of that is all the minerals that you're selling. Now this part is going to be for the end of the game. So whenever you sell the the minerals you're getting the corresponding money that that you can spend for the cards then and then you at the end of the games is going to be scoring you points of how many of each type of minerals you got you got three for each type of mineral all the rest is going to go in the overflow and when the overflow and the and the tiles of the top of the board are going to meet that is basically the end of the game.
trigger Matt, should we talk about the production of drillers?
Let's go.
So one of the things that I like about CGE is that their productions are normally pretty good and also quite modest cuz you can imagine if this was a Kickstarter game all these kinds would be metal and be like five different sculpts of minerals and this and the minis would be three times the
Yeah or you get like 20 different bears.
Yeah blah blah but this is actually a very modest production decent price point and the production pretty good.
Yeah it's it's really good so let's talk about card themselves the the cards those are the heart the heart of the game the things that you you going to use the cards are very cool to see all the all the all the artworks are pretty cool and funny you got this kind of like always like this cheeky to a little like jokes or something something like that but they are the the UI is is very very clear.
UX
reminds me a lot about Anach what the guys did with Anach with their cards they're not the same cards but they're very similar in terms of like readability and everything the the boards the play boards are great.
Very good.
the fact that you can track what cards you've done you don't have to do like oh did I play three drills did I play two did I use one now you just need your little finger to keep moving the knobs up and down depending on on what you do the minis we do this is in the prototype we have this like 3D printed some of them miss some missing a life, some of them. Uh but this that's the only basically um plastic. I'm not sure if if in the final version it's going to be a real wood cuz the guys normally do we'll double check them and we'll and we'll tell you about. Usually CGE is is very good.
I mean, production is great. It looks great. All the color is very colorful despite the the theme being this futuristic stuff. I I like this I really like this style of the mech. There are pieces of all the things from the past. One is a a piece of a bus, a piece of a plane, a piece of a boat. Put them together and all the idea behind is is really cool. The theme is is a theme. You just drillers like is is a pickup delivery.
Essentially, yeah.
With with the with cards. So, it could have been very much anything else, but I think they nailed it with the with the art style, the theme, and the gameplay. Everything feels very coherent.
Yes, definitely. With a dashboard and everything with the player board and that. I think, yeah, it's it's a really coherent theme. Like I said, I love the UX. I think the the way that the cards tell you what they do and how they work is is really excellent. And I think, you know, we've seen not enough of that, I think, in a quite a few board games.
But
But
saying all the production of a part, should we have a look on what we feel about drilling into the mine?
So, let's talk about who this game is for and how we feel about it. Matt, in terms of its complexity, where do we put Drillers on our complexometer?
In our complexometer, I think this sits very much in the middle between being an intermediate and and an advanced game. I lean more toward the intermediate.
Yeah, I'm probably more toward the advanced side.
This is because okay, the the the general mechanics is this like moving, drilling, playing your playing your cards, upgrading your deck, keeping track on like how you can upgrade the your mech and stuff like that. Um, there is a little bit this not mega mega complex. The complexity comes more like okay, I got this card. How can you maximize the the card for scoring point? Which which um gems do I need to take? Which floor do I need to drill? You get a little bit of AP when you got It can be more AP probably don't get any. But you can get your cards like all right, what I do with this card?
exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. I'm I lean slightly towards the advanced side. So that's probably somewhere in the middle of both of
probably say I'm right there in the middle.
Yeah, because there are there are layers to the game. It's not just a a pure deck building game. You also have a an engine that you're running. You're having to pick up and deliver things. You've got trying to upgrade your deck at the same time. You've got a movement element. Um, yeah, it's but the flow of the game is is quite nice. Um, but as you say you can get stuck and we have experienced this where you've played all your stuff. You can do things in any order and that can slow the game down a little bit. Because you have so much flexibility you can choose to use one point of movement, one point of drilling, you know, and then and then you know, really sort of micromanage your turn.
Yes.
Which you know, some people are going to absolutely love. I mean I'll be really cool for some people.
Yeah, so so that my my feeling a little bit.
All my clients do a halt, you know, and like sort of 404 error not yet.
Yeah, but but if you like that kind of like mental process and I did you should going to love this.
Oh, you're going to absolutely love it. Yeah, yeah, sure.
And the other little critic criticism that I got about the game is about the the level of interaction. Now, beside someone's buying a card from the market that you wanted or someone drilling a floor before you you doing it or or getting the specific gem that you needed to fulfill the thing, there is no really much any interaction. And it's very kind of like random interaction cuz when he's not going to take that gem because I need it, he's probably going to take that gem cuz he needs it as well. So, there is not even that level of of blocking. The things that each mech every mech can be on the same floor. That means there is not like a spatial issues with that. The only spatial issues is is the movement like how many points of movements do I got and so on. So, the the the interaction is limited, but the game flows is so like goes so well that kind of like fair enough we we keep playing and then at the end I'm going to be, well, I've done really well.
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. Yeah, I think what we found is once you start to play it a few times you can overlap turns quite well because there is there is so so such limited interaction. Once I get to the surface and I'm doing all my stuff over here, Mac can just do his entire turn. Next person can do their entire turn with very little like sort of layover. So, if that's an issue for you then you probably won't go on with it because it is quite limited in terms of its its interactivity
with the space.
If if you're looking two mechs fighting each other for a gem, this is not this.
play by I can't steal Mac's gems. Yeah, and say drill into my player.
That could be cool. Maybe maybe in the expansion. Maybe in the expansion.
So, on the positive side though, I do really like the upgrades sort of market cuz some of the stuff is awesome and how you can create your own mech to do very specific things. There was one card that I really liked which allowed you to burn gems, minerals,
To keep to get to keep going. Fuel. Yeah.
Because there's a certain point in the game where some of the gems, the lower the lower value gems, they're not really worth anything anymore. But, if you get those early on your way down the mine, chuck them in the in the in the tank,
Yeah.
you can maybe keep digging. There's some cool combos and stuff and concepts that you can make with the deck, which I think is really cool.
Yeah, there's a lot of cards. So, there are four type of cards that you can that you can take to to upgrade some will help you drilling, some moving, some doing those stacky ones, and then you got the mega special one that you need some specific items to to buy them. But, some of them are really powerful. For example, the our latest game I got the teletransportation.
Yeah.
I was literally teletransportation between teletransporting between levels, and I could like achieve way more than before, but it cost me a lot of money that card. So, you need to plan for that. The the stack of each one of the upgrades is quite big. Cards. So, it's kind of like it's difficult that you will always going to get the same things every game. So, each game is it felt every time we played it felt very different.
Yeah, you're building a deck in a slightly different way. And what I also liked about the game is that the paths to victory felt fairly even, cuz you can kind of do one of two major things. Drill for the tiles, which is drilling into the walls or drilling down to get like a big points that way, or just pick up a load of minerals and score that way. And and that and they kind of I think by the end of the game that we found that they they scored very evenly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, if you're drilling down to the next level, yeah, you're getting a a lot of points for that, but then you're leaving the floor open for everybody else to to take to take the the bigger gem. Um no, on that is is really cool. So, um I would say if you like this kind of Euro where there is a little bit very tiny interaction, but kind of like the flow is good. It's fine. I will say if you're a fan of CG in general, of especially that mid
The mid and weight stop.
waist up like Arnak, um you you will really like this.
Yeah, I think you will. Yeah.
But, what do we think about it? Let's go to the final thoughts. So, um final section of this review, uh very simple. Is Drillers fun?
Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's pretty fun.
Yeah, it's it's really fun.
Yeah, I had a good time playing Drillers. Uh there's things I liked and things I didn't like. I very much like the deck building. I think that is really cool about the the flavors of the cards and how you can utilize them in different ways. I like the different paths to victory, which is awesome, and I really like these event cards, which keeps it interesting. And the whole concept and and theme and vibe of the game, I really enjoy it. I think it's super cool, super fun, this sort of dieselpunk type
Yeah, super cool. That's super cool.
Yeah, I think that I think that's that's that's right. Love that. Um pick up delivery thing is really cool. What I didn't like so much is the sort of limited interaction levels, and sometimes the game grinds to a halt while someone like puzzles out their turn. So, but on the whole, I have enjoyed Drillers.
Yeah, I I I do agree with you. So, I I really enjoyed it. I think like well, deck building is one of my favorite like mechanics. So, give me a deck building, I'm I'm happy. I did like the puzzle of like, okay, I'm building my deck. I've got these resources. How can I maximize or the puzzle that every turn you got with the cards that you've been dealt is pretty cool. Um you always can see the the first card of the next turn, so you kind of like, all right, this turn I'm going to do this, this, this, this. I know that for sure next turn I've got this that I can use. That is that is pretty cool. Um and I think not all the games needs to be about interaction between players. So, this is good. It It works well at different player accounts because again, not having that interaction, you can play it at two players and still having the same puzzle, the same combination the same problems in your head to deal with the with the cards.
You can still build a very cool deck. You can build your combos and and so on. So, it does work at multiple
Yeah, I actually think at two players this might be better cuz you just kind of you do your thing and then you have a very quickly rapid change.
I'm going to say three.
three? Cuz we played when we played it at four, it felt there were a few new players. There's a little bit of that waiting when people go like, "Oh my god, I don't know what to do." even if you had the entire
round
rounds to think about it. That is that that is fine. That is normal. While at at at three, you still got a little bit of that, but there is more stuff happening on the board. There is more.
minerals coming out on the board.
Exactly. So, I think that that is cool. But, overall, the question is is it fun? It is fun. It's a really good product. If you are on the market for something like this, for something that looks really cool, plays really smooth, and it's got these two these main mechanics that if you like, you going to really really good time. So,
So, that was our review of Adrenaline by Czech Games Edition.
Yeah, they did it. They did it again. They did it again. I'm really happy with them because this CGE keeps they went after on the they took the road of like more heavier stuff. So, they went from Codenames then Settlers of Catan, then they went all the way the other side with with Whiz War and and now they are back within the middle with drillers that is what I said that I think it's
I like this for CGI.
Very good and their production is always good. It's always like Yeah.
So solid production.
Yeah, exactly. I think they did a a fantastic job with this and
Definitely go try it before you buy it. Coming out very very soon if not out already.
already out already. It was definitely definitely a Gen Con was there was the out out. I think it's now you will you will might find it in the shops this period or anyway.
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