Drillers: My Favorite Mechanism
Transcript
Hey, I'm Jamie from Stonemaier Games, and today I'm going to talk about my favorite mechanism in the game Driller's, designed by Adam Spahniehl and Rimmer. Driller's is a game actually they do a good job on the back of the box of showing what Driller's is, the cycle of the game. You have you control a mech that you are sending down underground digging out new action spaces that can be used by you and other players, mining for crystals, and then jetting back to the surface to sell those crystals to refuel and to improve your deck because this is a deck building game. Now thematically and mechanically, I think my favorite mechanism in the game is the control panel. So this kind of represents like you are inside this drilling mech and you are drilling down and you're looking at this control panel as you as you drill down. And it's kind of fun to look at. There's a lot going on, but it isn't actually all that all that complex.
There's it basically all your turn as you are playing cards, you you show how much resources you gained from those cards on these tracks. So you show how much how much how much movement you have, how much drilling power you have here, and those are going to at the end of your turn they're going to reduce to zero so you're going to try to spend those by the end of your turn. And also this track is your fuel. Your fuel you can use on some cards they have fuel cost. So there's some default cost that you can use fuel to do the default the things that moving and drilling. And one of the things I really like about this track and this track down here that shows how many gems you can hold or how many crystals you can hold, you can upgrade them. So whenever you go to the top of of the of the board, you can spend resources to you can spend these resources to permanently upgrade how much fuel you have, and then when you refuel you automatically go up to the max.
Similar down here, you could just increases your capacity for how many crystals you can hold. There's also this area over here where you put the crystals that you sell for different amounts of victory points. And the end of the game is triggered when you start to fill up this bar. So, when you have overflow one of these crystals and you start to fill up this bar, and the status of this bar overlaps with these tiles that you're putting at the top of your track. Uh so, there's a little bit of a I guess a very mild Arc Nova element there to uh combining two different things. You're combining tiles, which are one of the things that you're drilling to get, uh as well as the gems, the other thing that you're drilling to get. In a way, two different types of victory points. A little less abstract though, because they're things that you're actually getting and putting on your map. You also have these little drones down here.
So, this is really a combination of a number of mechanisms, uh including these drones that you can send back to the surface to help you. But, I do like how it's designed. It's all in one place. It It shows you most of what you do in the game just in this in this one uh interface. And uh just the way it's designed a little more organically makes it feel like you actually are sitting in front of a control panel drilling and digging down underground. One other small thing I want to highlight about Driller's is I really do like that um when you gain a card, it goes to the top of your deck. And the top of the card of your deck is face up. So, you can only see what you can only see what card is coming, which means that in the chances where you have to actually draw a card, you aren't drawing randomly. You know exactly what you are going to get from the top of your deck.
And sometimes you can even manipulate that so that you gain a card, put it on top of your deck, and then draw it right away, and gain the benefits from that card. I also like that you can even keep a card from hand from hand to hand. So, if I have two cards in my hand that I really want to use, and I don't really want to use the third card in my hand on this current turn, I can save that for a future turn, and I still get to draw three cards at the end of my turn. So, I end up with four cards for a bigger turn the next turn. I like that some some small modifications to deck building that used in Thrillers. So yeah, these are my favorite mechanisms. I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have a favorite mechanism in Thrillers, or if you have a favorite game where it's just the control panel interface, whatever that might be in front of you, uh brings you some joy based on either the theme or the mechanisms of it. Let me know about that in the comments.
Thanks.