Drillers Review

I really like Deep Sea Adventure, Oink’s game of divers going deeper to gain better rewards while depleting a common oxygen reserve, hoping to surface before the supply runs out and everyone drowns. Like most Oink games, it's kinda thin, and there's a group that wants more from it. When I first looked at Drillers, the similarities had me approach it as CGE meeting that demand, putting out Deep Sea Adventure with deckbuilding. Now that I've played it enough, I've realized that it's the other way around; Drillers is a deckbuilder with a loop that reminds me of Deep Sea. I know it sounds like semantics, but believe me, it makes a world of difference.

Every turn of Drillers starts you with three cards, which you'll overwhelmingly play for one of two effects: pay its gas cost to gain its movement and/or drill icons, or dump it to replenish your gas tank. Drills let you pick gems off the floor (whoever worked in this mine before you had no idea what they were doing), open corridors for points and access to more gems, or open lower floors for more efficient corridors and gems. Movement, as you might've guessed, gets you between floors–really important if you want to end your turn on the surface and get a surface phase. The surface unlocks a secret third card use, discarding for money, which you then spend on new cards, upgrading your player board, and repairing your mech; i.e. removing a less efficient negative point card from your deck.  Top off your gas and continue the cycle until someone's mined enough to have their overflow minerals and points tiles meet.

That core loop of descend, drill, ascend, is good enough that when you find the little efficiencies based on what cards and floors show up, Drillers feels amazing, or pleasantly frustrating when you only draw drills or moves at the wrong time, but there's enough tools to mitigate bad draws that you can’t attribute a loss to them. If everything had been tuned to where the variance was a little lower between different cards and strategies, it would've been an easy GOTY candidate that I'd have no qualms about recommending to everyone. But Drillers’ cards are incredibly spiky; with some cheap and efficient cards dropping damage into your deck, bloating it and giving you negative points, while repair cards do everything from breaking the one-repair-per-surface restriction, to enabling those self-damaging cards, to just generating gas since you can just take a damage to get 3 gas. For my taste, it's all within tolerances, just a mechanic that's pushed a bit far, but some people are going to bounce hard off the amount of luck and straightforward decisions presented in what's generally a very low player interaction euro. It does feel like an unnecessary extra level of variability when the floor card setup changes things up a lot from game to game, and those cards only being revealed when someone drills down to their floor is gonna turn off the same people that hated SETI’s mid game alien reveals. Neither of those really bothered me, just be forewarned.