Drillers - Board Game Review
Transcript
Welcome to Allies Arene Enemies. I'm Jess.
And I am Sean. And today we are talking about drillers. And our copy was provided, but the thoughts are all our own.
Drillers is a one to four player game designed by Adam Spaniel and Ryman where you are deck building to drill down, get some gems, sell those gems, and buy some cards. Let's take a look at how it plays.
You start the game with a player board, a few coins, a few cards, and a mech ready to drill. On your turn, you play cards from your hand. Either discarding them to gain fuel or spending fuel to gain their benefits, which mostly means drilling or movement, but sometimes includes other things. While you do this, you will also be using the movement that you gain to move up or down levels and the drills that you gain to collect minerals, which you'll use for money and points or excavate corridors and remove barriers, which will add tiles to your progress track and provide more minerals for future drilling. And if you end your turn on the ground level, you can also buy new cards, remove cards, sell minerals, upgrade your board, and refuel. Then you draw three more cards, and the next player gets drilling. The game ends once someone's tiles overlap with their overflow minerals. And then you gain points from mine tiles, minerals, leftover money, and milestones, and lose points for the floor your mech ends on, and any negative cards in your hand. And then the greatest driller is named.
Core of the game is balancing your resources, movement, drills, and fuel. And you're going to be wanting to go as deep as you can, and if possible, even get back up again. You're going to need your drill to get gems and to drill even deeper. And you're going to need fuel to do everything. Yeah, it really is an interesting balance between those things, especially the fuel because the interesting thing with the fuel is you only refuel fuel when you get back up to the top. So, every time you're spending that, you have to spend that on almost every card that you're buying. You aren't getting anything back. But then the interesting thing is the cards all have a double purpose that they have some way that you spend fuel and you're going to get something or you can just discard them and get more fuel. So, you find that when you first drill down, you're kind of spending every card, getting rid of that fuel, and then you're like, "Uh-oh, I need fuel again, and then you're then you're really balancing discarding those cards for fuel, spending that fuel to be able to do stuff."
Yeah. And the decision of when to surface is a challenging one because if you're already a few levels down, it's going to take a lot of movement to get back up again. So, it's tempting to stay down there, especially if you know you're going to be getting drills on your next turn because you can see the top card. So, if your top card has like two or three drills, you think, well, I'll stay down here because I know I can get stuff, but then I'll have to figure out how to get back up again to then sell that stuff cuz my storage might be full and to refuel.
Yeah, you only have so much storage for those gems. In fact, you can only store two gems at the start of the game until you start to increase that storage. And I do like that as well that you can increase the storage and increase your fuel. You do both of that those things at the surface as well. But you only have so much storage, you can only get so many gems. You're also thinking about every time you drill you, especially if you are drilling on those levels to gain those tiles or drilling down a floor, you're opening up more gems for everybody else because as soon as you take one of those tiles, you got to put out all the gems on that tile. Tiles are expensive. So, you probably don't have the drills to then pick up all those gems. So, then your opponent's just like, "Great, I'm going to go hop on those gems now."
Yeah. And you're going to jump on those opportunities. So, it is a challenging balance of making sure like you're doing what's best for you, but you're also not necessarily leaving good things for your opponent. And I like that the end of the game is triggered when there's the crossover of your mining tiles and your overflow overflow storage as well because then you're really motivated to basically do both.
Yeah. Yeah. You definitely have to do some of both things. cannot just collect up minerals and zoop up to the top. You're never going to be able to finish the game because you can only get so many minerals. So, you're you're just never going to be able to end the game. So, you need to get a certain number of tiles, but also you can't only get tiles cuz you're just going to leave oodles of gems out for your opponent. And then the other big thing with this game is that deck building because you do need to have those gems so that when you go up to the surface, you can sell all those gems and you can buy all those cards. There's loads of different cards and that part of it reminds me a bit of Deep Regrets. And if you haven't played Deep Regrets, go play Deep Regrets. It's a terrific game, but that part feels a little bit like that. Otherwise, this does feel like a different game.
Yeah. And how you build your deck is going to be really important because there's some utility cards that will give you bonuses, like being able to get rid of some of your cards, which will be beneficial, or being able to flip your robot tokens. There's also other cards which will give you a lot of movement or a lot of drilling. And then there's some really powerful cards, but those cards require some like blue liquid that you only get from some of the special mining tiles. So, you can only get so many of those really good cards.
It is really important, too, to not always just get the strongest card cuz I learned that when I had a deck filled with movement and I could not drill anything at all. You really need to have a mix of the movement and the drilling and the utility. But those utility ones are really interesting cuz I've had ones that every time I play it, I get to move one of those two caps for free. That's super powerful. Also, that thinning out your deck because you're going to end up getting a bunch of those damage cards that you're going to be taking on. And those obviously, as they sound, are not nice to have. And all of your starting cards as well are worth negative points. You want to get those out of your deck as quickly as you can, too. But managing that damage feels a little bit like heat where you need to take on some of those cuz some of the best cards use them, but you got to have a way to get rid of them.
Yeah, that's the trick is if you know you're going to be adding a lot of damage, you want cards that let you get rid of it. But I like that there's the dual use of the cards where a card maybe gives you damage. So maybe you don't use its power and instead you're able to get a lot of fuel. So, that could be something you're thinking about when you're buying the cards, too, is how much fuel it might give you.
And then also, the whole thing is a race because you're going to get those milestones. And the first few are nice. They're like four, five, and six points, I think, and they all get you a bonus. But that last one for finishing the game is worth 18 points, which is huge. So, you really do want to be the person that finishes the game. This is a game for one to four players and we have only played it at two players. And I'm going to be honest, I think this is a two-player game because the turns can take a while. When you are just doing the drilling part takes a little bit thinking about your cards, doing all of that engine part of it, getting your fuel, spending your fuel to get your things, then using your things to get stuff. But when you also are able to move back up to the top at the end of your turn, that becomes a whole another turn. And if you wait for that for four players, it could take a while. But we have found that once we get up to the top and we are going to be doing the marketing stuff, we just let the next person start to play because there's really no reason for them to wait.
Yeah. And I highly recommend that you do that. And I think it will depend on your gaming groups because for us it would doesn't really add a lot to have more players playing given the increased length of time it will take to play. But if your gaming group is used to kind of waiting for people's turns and having it be a bit longer then maybe it's fine for you. But this is going to be a much longer game at four players.
Yeah, this is going to be at least a 2hour game I would say at four players. The box even says 30 minutes per player. That's probably pretty close to true. Maybe that's a little on the light side, but I think you can make that quicker if if if you just don't watch everybody buy their cards. You really don't need to. There is also a solo mode in this game. In the back of each board is a different bot. And so there's four different difficulty levels. And I believe it is a full bot. I have not played with it yet, but I have played a lot of CG solo modes. They're usually pretty solid, but I can't speak to it either way. But there is a full solo mode.
My favorite part of the game, I think, is actually the player board because it does such a great job of laying everything out. Everything has a really clear space and it's really important that it does because you're spending your cards to increase your your movements, your drills. You're spending fuel. So, it's nice that you're keeping track of it so easily. And because you can upgrade how much fuel you can have, how much storage you can have. Again, I think all of the way the ways it does that is quite straightforward.
Yeah, it really is. It's really easy to keep your gems nicely organized. It's really easy to know how much you have of every single thing to slide that up, to slide all that stuff down. We haven't had any problem with any of that jostling. It's obvious where you're going to put every single thing. I think my only slight trickies with this are one when you've got those horizontal cards that give you all the time benefits, which are great if you can get them early game. I haven't really found a perfect place to put those to remember that I have them. That may just be a me problem. And then the biggest thing is the top floor, the ground floor is actually a different level than the other levels. We did not know that for our first couple games. We looked and we saw that on BG. Apparently, we are not alone in this. And if you're playing it, do know that that there is like a zero floor and then one, two, three, four, five. And so there is that is a different separate floor. I would have liked that to just have a thing that said ground floor and make that super obvious so people don't make that mistake.
Yeah, because the level one mine doesn't go all the way across. So it is tricky to tell. But in general, I think the art works for this game. It has kind of a video game art that I think makes sense for a game about drilling.
Yeah, the art actually all looks a bit like Junker Town in over I'm a huge Overwatch fan and it just it reminds me of Junker Town, so I kind of like it. And we didn't even talk about probably the coolest bit is the minis. And so there's the four little drilling things. It says they're all inspired by real vehicles. I don't know. I'd like to see these vehicles, but they remind me of the thing that Sigourney Weaver uses to push the alien out in the first Aliens. And I just I I think they're pretty cool. So, who is this game for? And I think the big thing really to know about this game is that it is a little puzzle that you're solving every single turn. But it's not necessarily a game where you've got to be thinking like three, four turns ahead because you really are dealing with what are these cards that I've got right now? How am I going to use those to make this turn as good as I can? Sometimes you're thinking about keeping a a card maybe for next turn.
And we forgot to talk about this in the components, but there is this really great component where you're going to put your cards, and that always lets you see the next card that you're going to have access to without letting anyone else see. And I think that's actually really clever, too. And that's also part of that puzzle. But really, this is a game where you've got that constant new puzzle every turn that you're thinking about.
Yeah. And you're also balancing what you're doing with the opportunities you're making available for the other players. And so you're considering that too. You do have to have, I think, a fair amount of patience, though, if you're going to be playing at three, four players. It's going to play a lot quicker, probably a little bit smoother at two players.
And I do think this is a pretty easy game to teach. There's not like a huge rules overhead for this game, but there is enough of a puzzle that I think people who have played a lot of games are going to still be interested in this. I wouldn't necessarily say this is for like brand new gamers. I certainly I wouldn't bring this to like a game night with like my non-gaming family, but I think you could bring in like this is kind of gateway gateway plus easily. And I think it also caters to people who are interested in a puzzle that's beyond that as well.
And even though the core of the game is pretty simple where you're moving, drilling, and getting gems, there are a surprising amount of different paths that you can take. And we've found that each game we've played has felt pretty different.
And that is it. Have you played Drillers? What did you think? And what are other recent deck builders that you've enjoyed?
Thank you so much for watching. And as usual, please like, subscribe, and hopefully we'll see you next time for another game.