Undermining

The game came as described. I enjoy playing it a lot, but my friends are a bit more polorized on it. Some of the rules about the special abilities are a bit on the fiddley side.

This is a game about controlling a drill in order to mine out resources and deliver them to fulfill contracts for points.You can also mine out alien technology and spend your resources on upgrades to improve your drill's ability to move, store more resources, take more actions, or drill more spaces at a time. This is a fine game and there is a fair bit of strategy with the multitude of options available but I think it has a lot of rough edges.For one, I don't mind tight games, I often enjoy them actually as they add a lot of tension and weight to your decisions but every now and then the stringent barriers of a game really takes away from it. That's how I feel about this game. You start only being able to hold two resources and the whole game is on a very fast timer and contracts decrease in point value with each one fulfilled. This all had me feeling like I could never really upgrade my drill (in fact only one player in 5 bought a single upgrade in my first game) and it's not the most fun to go out to drill up two resources and come back right away.Second, the game has one way to interact with other players, you can block their path by placing your drill in their way forcing them to spend battery cubes (which could otherwise be used for extra actions) to move past you. The problem is the default movement is 2 spaces so spending this energy to move past someone often doesn't accomplish a whole lot. I got stuck in a cycle where I and an opponent wasted several turns blocking each other because we got stuck in a corridor and were spending our 3 actions each turn simply to get batteries and move in front of the other. This invariably ruined our chances of winning the game since that was several actions wasted that weren't for the other 3 players at the table. I simply think the way that mechanic is designed could use a little tweak to prevent this from happening. For example, using the energy to move past a player should also count as the extra move action you could get with that energy anyway.Finally, the alien tech cards are way too powerful. This is especially bad for new players. By the time I saw how powerful they were and realized I should have been getting as many as possible all the easily accessible ones were gone and I ended up not being able to get a single one. They give insane abilities that really make the actual upgrades seem even more obsolete.It really isn't a terrible game, there are a lot of options on each of your turns and it looks nice and can be entertaining. I just think a few tweaks would have made it a much better game.

Love this game. Board has two sides to it so the game never gets boring. Can play with 2 or more people. Easy to learn and easy to play. Excellent family game.

it sucks