We Just Played Oil Rock - Essen Most Anticipated
Transcript
Welcome back to the table. With Essen just around the corner, I wanted to talk a little bit more about one of my top picks of Essen, and that is Oil Rock from Cranio Creations and Marco Pio la Casselli, who I believe is a first-time designer with art from Giovanni Colore and the incredible Clemens France. Great artwork for this game, but I wanted to talk about why this was one of my Essen picks and why I actually think this might be an underdog for game of the year. This Oil Rock has a lot of the things that I love in a Eurogame. The theme, obviously drilling for oil, take it or leave it, but what's actually happening in this game is very interesting because it goes through these different procedures in a lot of different ways. There's definitely worker placement here at the core, but even that worker placement is handled in a very unique way. So, I'm going to start by kind of explaining what you're doing in the game, and then I'll talk about all of the twists that are kind of layered on top of that that really uh stood out to me. So, in this game you are producing oil, and you're doing that through kind of a multi-step process. A lot of that's going to use what you see here in front of me on the main board. This right here is kind of a map of the world, and you'll notice a few different terrain types, and we all start with some trains and engineers out on that map. As the game progresses, you're going to be able to move your train and move your engineers across this map, leaving them in some different places, gathering a bunch of different rewards along the way. But, what you're really doing out there on the map is
building these offices. These offices are giving you access to drilling more oil in more places. So, as you can see on your player board, you've got these three different wells that correspond to these three different colors, but those wells are capped. You can only get so much oil from each color each turn until you start building these offices. And you build these offices out here, they do give you points and they do give you some bonuses, which ties into something I'm going to talk about a little bit later, which is just all the different bonuses and chaining combos that you'll see in this game. But, you get to place these out, and that brings me to your actual player board. You'll see these three wells I talked about. Each well's going to produce oil of a different color barrel. This is important for the end of your turn, but you'll be able to drill these wells out. You can only drill them out one space until you start building those offices, but then you can start drilling farther. At the end of your turn, you're going to produce one barrel of oil for every barrel that you can see. So, drilling and taking these off of your board is a pretty great action that's going to allow you to produce a ton more. Because at the end of your turn, you're actually going to produce all those barrels. You're going to gather all of the different barrels of these different colors, and you're going to bring them over to your refinery. At the start of the game, you have a very basic refinery. You can basically break these barrels of oil down in a very simplistic conversion to get some of the resources in the game.
There's tools, there's coal, and there's coins. You're going to need all three of these. So, early in the game, converting just to get these resources is huge. You need the tools to build the offices, you need the coal to move the train, and you need coins to build things, and you need all three resources to buy cards, which I'll talk about in a second. Later on in the game, you actually can build more refineries. You can start taking these refineries and placing them down the line. They start at level one, and they go all the way up to level 12. You can actually flip these over. You can have up to six refineries running at any given time. These refineries give you some pretty significant bonuses, and they can be paired up with these turbines. These are little bonuses, these tokens you can build. You lay them out on your player board, and then when you trigger a refinery, you get the refinery bonus, and you get the turbine bonus. You have to build these in order, but once they're all built, you're going to see that you're going to have a variety of different options. Each one of these options is going to cost different colored barrels of oil. So, as you're drilling on your board, you have to decide, okay, I really want to trigger this particular refinery to get this particular resource. So, I need a lot of green barrels, which means I really need to build out these green level offices, and then I need to drill down green so that I'm producing like, you know, maybe four barrels a turn because you're going to be assigning these barrels. You can keep one of each over to the next turn. So, if you don't really like your arrangement, or if you know you're going to build some refineries next turn, you can do that.
You can hold on up to three, then you can have maybe a really big turn next turn. These barrels are going to give you resources, points, and a lot of things that you need to spend out in the game. So, that's kind of what you're doing. You're building, you're drilling, you're gaining oil, and then you're spending the oil in the refineries. But, there's a few different twists layered on top of that. The first one I want to talk about is these improvement cards. There are a wide variety of improvement cards you can get in this game. You're going to buy these improvement cards. It is an action that you have to take to gain these. There are some yellow immediate benefits. There are some lightish blue or teal utility benefits that trigger every time you do something. And then there's some dark blue in-game scoring cards. These cards are key to the game. Those yellow cards can give you some insane instant bonuses. They can move your trains. They can give you resources. They can give you some upgrades on your player board.
They can do a lot of things. But, then those those teal ones give you improvements that you can use throughout the game. So, whenever you do X, do Y. Those can be huge, too. I really want to hammer in the combo potential in this game because you'll have some situations where, for example, I talked about this. You build an office. You come over here. You place the office. You get the office bonus. The office bonus gives you some kind of benefit, or it allows you to place something, or it allows you to take a card. And then you take a card, and that card gives you a thing, and you can chain some serious actions on, especially later in the game because the other thing that controls all of this is the action selection system. And I wanted to talk about that in a little bit more depth. This wheel right here on the side of the main board is where you're going to take all of your actions. Each one of these little circles is a worker placement spot.
You're going to see some spots that are directly on the action tiles, and then some spots on the outside ring that point to two different actions. That's because you have two different types of workers. You have these big managers and these tinier apprentices. Apprentices are going to go onto the actual action tiles themselves, and they're going to trigger that particular action. These actions are what control everything in the game. That's what's going to let you move your train around. That's what's going to let you build those offices. That's what's going to let you drill the wells, build the refineries, get the improvement cards, and some of these just get you resources as you grab and collect resources throughout the game. You'll notice these little guys, they come out and they trigger one action. But the managers, they will come out to the outside and they will trigger two different actions. So later in the game, when you start unlocking your bigger workers, you're going to be able to take more actions. Now, you're only ever going to get three of these, but you're going to get some different combination.
You might end up with two apprentices and one manager to place. You'll be taking four total actions that round. But as you progress through the game, you might even be getting into a spot where you're placing all three of your managers and taking six actions. And then each one of those actions can cause some cascading chains. You might do two actions in one turn that place things. And then a lot of these actions, or some of them at least, allow you to spend coins to do it more. There's an action to place refineries, but you can spend money to place more refineries. There is an action that lets you go up this light bulb, this progress track around the outside. You can spend money and go up that progress track a little bit more. Well, okay, I mentioned the progress track. This is maybe the coolest thing. This is the big hook of the game. Maybe I should have led with this, but I wanted to save this to talk about at the end because this progress track denotes the level that you're going to hit with a particular character. This game comes with wild asymmetric powers, and they come in the form of these little flip books, and there are six of them in the game. Each one of these flip books represents a character, a real historical person who was very active during the oil boom. We got like Rocke- Rockefeller and Vanderbilt.
You'll choose one of these characters. You'll take their flip book, and you'll flip it open to the very first page. This is your level one character. And if you see on your level one character, it tells you your income. I start by getting one tool, one coal, and my three apprentice workers. That's what I have at the beginning of the game. As you move up that progress track, you start hitting level two, level three, level four, etc. Each time you level up on the progress track, you actually flip your flip book to the next page. You'll notice your income gets better. On level two, now I get one manager and two apprentices and some better resources. But when you hit level three, that is when you first unlock your asymmetric ability. And let me tell you, this brings me back to Marco Polo. This is one of those situations where I read my power out loud, and everybody at the table goes, "Oh, oh, that's broken." But then the next player reads their power, and you say, "Oh, that's broken." That's They're all broken. They all feel incredibly broken. They allow you to take some aspect of the game like moving your train or drilling these wells or gaining these cards or placing these refineries, and they let you do it better. They let you do it for free.
They let you do it cheaper. They give you other bonuses when you do those things. As you level up your guys, you go to the fourth, fifth, and sixth level, not only you're getting better workers and better income, you're leveling up your ability to a point where when you get to the sixth level, your ability feels so absolutely bonkers broken. And if you have been playing into your ability well, you will have some crazy in-game moments because you have been collecting a lot of those cards that I talked about. And if you're looking at your ability, my ability lets me move my train engine around and take some bonuses. I might have some cards that say, "When you move your train, also get this." And then another card that says, "When you get that, also get this." And you're just cashing in. Plus, by the time you get to the end of the game, you probably have quite a bit of refineries.
You probably have drilled out quite a few wells. And there are some other things that just give you barrels of oil. So, by the end of the game, you might have this huge literal engine where you're just cashing in all these stuff. You're taking all these bonus actions, and you're really taking advantage of your character's player power. These are so cool. I mean, it seems a little gimmicky like, "Okay, you're just flipping through this book." But everybody that I've played this game with, this has been the part of the game that has stuck with them. How cool it is that you get to these little flip books. And on the back, it does show you all the variable powers. They are wild, these variable powers. They're wild. Uh and that brings me to the last thing I want to talk about, and the thing that really pleases me as a Euro gamer, and that is the combo potential in this game.
I've talked about a lot of the resources and what they do, but there's one resource I haven't talked about, and that is these contracts. You can earn these in a variety of ways, but these are by far the hardest resource to earn. They're like a special resource layered on top of the resource system. These contracts allow you to gain bonuses. At the start of the game, you're going to have a bunch of briefcases on your player board. These briefcases just give you things. They give you money, tools. They give you movement on the progress track, coal, points, barrels, whatever. Any point in the game on your turn, you can turn these contracts in to turn in the briefcase and get that benefit. So, if I'm short by two coins early in the game, I can spend a contract, use this briefcase, then I can uh get those coins I needed or whatever. By the end of the game, you're cashing in summit level two or for three contracts. But, at any time on your turn, you can turn in three contracts to take a bonus action. And there are a whole stack here of the bonus actions. They correspond to some of the actions that you will see out here on the wheel, but once per round, so four times in the in the game, if you've saved up enough contracts, you can just claim a bonus action. And I cannot stress how important that is when you are trying to get something specific done by the end of the round, either because drilling will give you access to some new barrels, or maybe you need another refinery before the end of the round, or if you're seeing here in the center of the board, there is a unique scoring disk for each of the four rounds. At the end of the round, you're
going to score something, and these can be worth a considerable amount of points if you hit them. So, maybe you're looking and you're thinking, "Okay, I can do this special action. I can get a couple more things, and that's going to score me four or eight points at the end of the round, which is a significant amount of points." This system of bonus actions really chains into the game because, like I said already, you're doing up to maybe six actions on the board with your workers at by the end of the game, plus you can turn in one of these tokens for a seventh action. You can have a crazy final turn because, again, like you're trying to accrue the most amount of points possible. And yes, at the end of the game, you are going to score a lot of points for just everything you're doing. You're going to score points for how far you've drilled, you're going to score points for all the stations you've built out, you're going to score points for level two refineries if they're paired with a turbine, which is already getting you some significant points. And then you have those in-game scoring cards, those dark blue in-game cards. And if you've bought those correctly, as they come out, you know, you're seeing ones that kind of fit into your strategy, you can really double dip. You might have a power that gives you turbines, and then you have cards that score turbines.
It just really works together in a way, and I'll tell you, when you get to the end of this game, you feel really smart when you start scoring all these points in all of these different ways because of the decisions that you've made in the game. I have played several times now, and I'll tell you, when I first sat down, like, I was excited about this game. I like Eurogames. I wanted to see what it had for me. I was very intrigued by this flip book character progression. All you have to say is variable player powers, and I'm in. But this surprised me in so many ways. It turned out to be incredibly satisfying, and I have lost drastically, but even when I lose, it's fun to watch other people and see the combos they've created, where they go, "I do this, and then I get this, and then I get this, and then I play this, and then I draw this card, and then my variable player power triggers, and I get another card, which triggers this."
And then you're like, "Oh my gosh, I just watched you get 30 points in one turn just by comboing everything." It is incredibly satisfying, and I think that Euro lovers are really going to attach to this game. They brought in Clemens Franz. I've mentioned that name. He is one of the Euro greats. So, you already kind of feel at home looking at this player board. He did a lot of the like Uwe Rosenberg games and and classic Euros like that. So, it already feels like a great presentation, but then the gameplay really does fit into that. So, I can't recommend Oil Rock enough. I hope that a lot of people that are going to Essen find their way to this game. And if you're not at Essen, you can still order it online. It will be coming. It's coming from Cranio Creations, so it will be coming out to the states. So, definitely make sure to keep Oil Rock on your radar. Please, let me know in the comments below if you have any questions. Let me know if this made it onto your SN most anticipated list. If you're going to be at SN, Mike, uh tell me if this is one that you're going to want to pick up. So, thank you so much for watching me gush about a game I really love. And until I see you again, make sure everyone has fun at the table.