Drillers

Here is a general overview of how to play the game, structured step-by-step.

Setup

1. Unfold the main board in the middle of the table, which includes 7 floors: the surface, the mine entrance, and 5 underground mine floors (p. 15). Place printed minerals on each floor, shuffle and place floor cards, sort and place corridor and barrier tiles on their respective floors, and set up the 2-piece shop board above the mine (p. 15).
2. Give each player a dashboard, fuel cap tile, shop refresh tile, storage cap tile, 3 gauge indicators, 3 drone tokens, and an assembled card stand (p. 21). Place each player's mech miniature on the top floor (the surface) (p. 19).
3. Assemble each player's starting deck using their 8 colored cards plus a damage card, placing the torso card on top of the deck (p. 21). Distribute starting credits and cards based on player count and turn order (p. 19, 21).

How a Turn Works

The game is played in a series of turns in clockwise order (p. 3). On your turn, you follow these three phases in order:

1. Operations: You can freely alternate between moving, drilling, playing cards, using your mech's default functions, and using active drones in any order as many times as you want (p. 10).
   • Playing cards allows you to generate movement and drills, gain fuel, or trigger special effects (p. 6, 8).
   • Movement and drilling let you travel between floors, collect minerals, excavate corridors, and remove barriers (p. 16).
2. Surfacing: If you end your Operations phase on the surface floor, you can visit the surface shops to sell your collected minerals, repair cards, upgrade your rig's storage or fuel cap, discard cards for credits, refuel to the maximum, and buy new cards (p. 9, 13). If you do not end your Operations on the surface, you skip this phase (p. 13).
3. Upkeep: Perform three steps in order: pay 1 fuel for each unplayed card beyond the first that you wish to save for your next turn, clear your play area by moving played cards to your discard pile and resetting your movement and drill gauges to zero, and draw 3 new cards from your deck (p. 5, 29).

How the Game Ends

A player triggers the end of the game when they complete their progress track by having their mine tiles meet the cubes in their overflow zone (or reach the end of their dashboard if they have no cubes) (p. 4). The player who triggers the end takes the final milestone token, and every other player takes one final turn before the mine collapses (p. 1).

After the final turns, players calculate their total victory points and subtract any points lost from their mech's depth and negative-point cards in their deck (p. 1, 4).

(Note: While victory point and tie-breaker details are provided, a complete breakdown of every scoring source is partially missing from the provided rulebook excerpt.)