Drillers - Start Playing in 15 Minutes. Concise Board Game Tutorial
Transcript
an underground operation where your mech digs deeper, your fuel runs thinner for minerals and points in drillers.
And today we're diving into a quick start tutorial for drillers. We'll explain everything you need to know if you want to get started quickly and pick up the details and icons as you go along in 15 minutes or less.
And hi everyone, it's Stella
and Tarant. Welcome to Maple University.
And hey, if you enjoy this video after watching, like, subscribe, and comments. You know what to do. Now, let's get to the classroom. In Drillers, players are mining magnates, piloting their own ramshackle equipment down into a common mine in search of riches. In this deck building battle, players will fight to transport, collect, and sell the best minerals in search of upgrades and points. All points will be tallied at the end of the game, and the player with the most points will win. To begin the game, players begin on the surface of the mine. Floor one is the entry and floor two is the only open floor. Below them are four more floors for players to excavate.
A typical floor of the mine contains a space for mechs, a special benefit or penalty which players will reveal as they dig, some starting minerals, and a further stack of minerals players can release through corridor drilling. This is your player dashboard. You have a fuel gauge which begins full and which you can make bigger throughout the game. You have movement and drill gauges which begin empty. In the bottom right is your mineral storage. To the left is the part that's open and to the right can be upgraded. This is where you keep minerals between collecting them and getting them out of the mine. These sections here, your market and overflow are where you put the minerals after they're sold.
You have a set of drones who can do minor tasks for you. One begins active and two are asleep as well as this marker. The shop refresh drillers is a deck builder and the powers of your mech are represented by the cards in its deck. Your mech begins as somewhat of a jalopy. Eight mediocre cards in player color and worth negative points as well as a damage card. To set up, you'll shuffle these cards with the torso on top and set it into your stand. Throughout play, you're always allowed to see the top card of your deck. Split all of the other deck cards up into five sub decks based on the icons in their top left corners: damage, drilling, movement, utility, and advanced.
All damage cards are the same, and for the rest, you'll shuffle the decks and draw a face up market of two. Most will be in portrait orientation. Some will be landscape, but you put them in the market the same either way. Choose a first player and based on your position and turn order, gain starting credits, and draw a starting hand of cards. In the center, keep supplies of all of the remaining components. the credits, and do note these are the deluxe upgraded metal credits, the five types of minerals, which in increasing order of value will be silver, gold, sapphire, emerald, and ruby, and the four milestones. These are worth points and will time the length of the game. You're ready to play.
Hi ho. Hi ho. It's off to work we go.
In Drillers, we go off to work in turns, clockwise, round, and round the table until the end of the game is triggered. On your turn, resolve each of these three steps strictly in this order. First, operations, then surfacing, then upkeep. In operations, you can take any number of the actions shown here in any order. But for the most part, this is going to involve playing the cards from your hand and spending fuel from your tank to take drilling and movement actions in the mine. The second phase will be surfacing, and you'll only take this phase if you finish your operations phase at the surface. This is where you'll sell your hall for money, and then spend it to take a variety of upgrading actions, such as improving your dashboard, adding new cards to your deck, or thinning out old ones.
You'll also use your time at the surface to refill your fuel tank, giving you the vital energy you need for your next trip down to the depths. Whether you surfaced or not, your third phase is upkeep, in which you'll manage your cards, your deck, hand, and discard. And this will always include drawing three new cards. The first phase is operations.
Make your way around the mine and do some digging. Take any number of the actions that you see here in any order and any combination with the exception that this one here damaging for fuel may be done at most once per turn. You may play a card for fuel. Take a card from your hand and place it into your play area. This is separate from your hand deck or discard pile and gain the fuel shown in the green band. You may play a card for its main effect. Put it in your play area, spend the fuel shown in the red bar, and resolve everything below it. Add movement arrows to your movement gauge or add drilling icons to your drilling gauge.
If there's any icons or text inside the bar, resolve those immediately now, as well. Here you can see gaining credits, gaining fuel, drawing the top card to hand, and some other icons that you'll see later as we proceed. You may spend a movement to move your mech. One movement lets you move a floor up or a floor down. You may not move into a floor which still has its barrier tile. You may spend one or more drills to take a drilling action. There are three different types of drilling actions. They all score you points and they're going to be the largest contributor to your score. First, you can spend one drill to collect any one mineral cube currently on your floor. Put it in an open slot of your storage. You must have one available.
Secondly, you could drill the corridor to release more minerals to this floor. The drill cost is shown here. So, in this case, I'd pay two drills, would place the visible minerals from that top tile into this floor, and take the top tile to place left to right on my progress track. Your third option is dig down. If your mech is on the floor above a barrier tile, then pay drills based on the barrier tile. Take that tile to your progress track. Flip the floor card face up. resolve the when revealed effect if there is one and move down to the new floor for free. Floor cards have many other effects including ones which trigger when you drill the corridor on that floor or when you collect a mineral on that floor and ones which resolve if you're present in that floor at the end of your operation phase.
tiles on your progress track are worth the points at their tops. And as an action, you can exhaust one of those tiles to gain the effect on the bottom. This will include some benefit here. It's gaining two fuel and a loss of points, which is tracked when you flip the tile over and see the lower score now on its top. If your cards don't have the drills and moves that you need, there are two default functions you can use, which are spending three fuel to gain one movement or spending four fuel to gain one drill. Do this as often as you wish. If you really need more fuel, you can also take this once per turn action to gain three fuel at the cost of adding a damage card to your discard pile.
The last operations action is to flip down a drone in order to use a drone action. But we need to learn a little bit more before we fully understand what the drones can do. Once you finish taking operations actions and check and resolve hourglass effects on your floor,
this darkness is starting to get to me. I want to get out of the mine. Let's now take a look at the actions available when your mech finishes its operations on the surface. If you've surfaced, take any or all of these actions in any combination with the sole exception that make a repair may be done at most once per turn. First are the two actions which gain you money. First is selling minerals. Move each mineral from your storage to the bottommost open space in its column and gain the money covered. Money declines the more of that mineral you've sold. Once a track is filled, subsequent cubes go right to left in the overflow and gain the money at the top of the column.
The other option is gain money for cards. Discard any number of cards and gain two credits per card. Your next actions are to spend credits on upgrades. You may pay three credits to increase the size of your storage one step. You may pay the number of credits on the next step of your fuel gauge to increase the size of your fuel gauge by one. Once per surfacing, you may spend five credits to take the repair action. That's shown by this icon and can be seen on some other cards and effects. Pick any card from your hand, play area, discard, or the top of your deck and remove it from the game. Or if it's a damage, return it to the damage deck.
Or you can buy new cards. Each type of card has a market of two face up, except that once floor of the mine has been excavated, the advanced card market permanently increases in size to four. Buy any card by paying its cost in the top right corner and adding it to the top of your deck. Every advanced card includes a battery as part of the cost. So to buy this card would cost eight credits and a battery which can come only from expending a mine tile which shows the battery icon. If you purchase a card in landscape orientation, it goes permanently into your play area instead of into your hand. This effect will resolve every turn.
Then leave empty spaces open in the market. Once per game, you may flip your shop refresh tile, losing the point it would have offered to shuffle all cards from that market to the bottom of the deck and refill to either two or four cards. Otherwise, you don't refill any empty holes in the market until the upkeep phase at the end of your turn. Finally, in your surfacing phase, refill your fuel tank to its max capacity. While your big hulking mech is lumbering its way through the mine,
your drones are like their little helpers taking actions on the surface.
This icon lets you flip a drone to active. During operations, you can flip a drone face down to take one of the two drone surface actions. And you may do this as many times as you have drones. We saw these two actions just before on the surface. The first is to sell a single mineral. Move one from your storage to your market or your overflow and gain the full amount of credits. The second is to purchase one upgrade. Flip the drone down and pay credits. To buy one card from the face up market and put it on top of your deck. The last step of any turn is upkeep. Follow these four steps. Discard all cards from your play area.
If you have cards in your hand, then you may keep one of them for free, but any beyond the first require a payment of one fuel. Then draw three cards from your deck to your hand. You always draw three regardless of how many you were holding. As soon as your deck is empty, shuffle your discards to form a new deck. You don't wait until you need to draw another card. Unspent movement and drills are lost. You cannot carry these over round to round. Refill any empty slots in the market. You'll get the most of your points from mining,
but there's also a race to achieve the best mining milestones. There are three milestone lines on your progress track, and when you cover one, if you were the first to do so, you gain the matching milestone. This will be worth points, but not credits. Anyone else who passes the milestone gains the credits instead. As soon as the tiles in any one player's progress track meet or overlap with the cubes in their overflow track, the end of the game is triggered. That player gains the 18 point milestone and finishes their turn, and each other player takes one more turn. Count up your final score. Every mineral cube you've collected, whether in storage, market, or overflow, scores its points. two per silver, three per gold, four per sapphire, five per emerald, or six per ruby.
Every tile in progress scores the points printed along the top. Score each of your milestones collected. One point for your shop refresh if you didn't use it, and a point for every five leftover credits. Go through all the cards in your hand, deck, and discard pile and lose any points in the top right corners of the cards. And finally, the mine collapses. If your mech didn't at least reach the entrance, then lose the points for the floor you finished in. Player with the highest score wins. And if tied, ties are broken by most credits, then most fuel.
Thanks for watching, and if you like this video, maybe you like to watch this next one. Have a great day. Bye.