ORE: THE MINING GAME
Lead? Copper? Gold? Take your pick…
It gives us no end of punny pleasure to announce that Ore: The Mining Game is a worker-placement title that comes with a little added depth. Set at the turn of the 20th century in the mineral-rich Appalachians, it casts its players as mining company bosses competing to meet the demand for coal and metals as cities like New York and Chicago embark on ambitious building projects that reach for the skies.
You’ll need to direct your meepleshaped workforce to fulfil contracts, obtain building permits, and recruit new help as you start delving beneath the ground in search of lead, coal, iron, copper and gold.
For the most part, Ore is exactly what you expect and need from a decent worker-placement game: taking turns to plonk meeples on action spots, triggering immediate returns, while ideally progressing a particular short-term strategy and blocking the other players from doing the same thing – perhaps even forcing them to rethink their own plans.
But where it gets interesting – and challenging – is in the way it
Quick Simple Fun Games
applies the mechanism to mining itself. Each ore has its own deck of mine cards, which are put out one at a time until a mine is exhausted. When you place a worker in a slot on a mine card (usually the top one, unless you’ve got a drill bit token to spend) your worker is now committed to delving for several turns. This grants increased rewards, in terms of reaping a particular kind of resource – and resources are needed to fulfil contracts (which must have an order row fulfilled at the end of a round or you’ll lose them) in return for VPs, money and the chance to construct any buildings you might have permits for (in return for further VPs and other benefits.) However, it also thins out your meeple ranks. If you focus too much on mining, you won’t be able to achieve much else – though it is possible to extract a miner before they’re done at a cost.
How deep you can go also depends on whether or not you’ve invested in a mine cage, which can only send you to the deepest, richest depths after an upgrade. So you have to think very carefully about where you focus
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ 1 Game board
◗ 32 Mine cards
◗ 5 Reference cards
◗ 120 Money cards
◗ 40 Contract cards
◗ 64 Building cards
◗ 25 Workers
◗ 5 Temp workers
◗ 150 Resource
cubes
◗ 1 Round tracker
token
◗ 5 Mine cage tokens
◗ 5 Drill bit tokens
◗ 5 Private mine
tokens
◗ 5 '5x' tokens
◗ 1 First player
marker
◗ 2 Overtime tiles
50-140m 1-4
exchange some of them for useful tools? Which of your farm buildings should you improve? How can you ensure the survival of your sheep for one more season?
Making this multitude of moving parts work together is key, and it’s a lot to hold in your head at once. With a 24-page rulebook and a 10-phase turn structure, it’s an intimidating prospect. Luckily the game’s iconography is easy to follow, and most of the steps on your turn are actually very simple. It’s only in combining them that the complexity emerges. Watch a rules video and you’ll only need to dip into the manual to clear up an occasional point or two.
PLAY IT?
14+ £73
❚ YES
If you’d rather go to the dentist than play a fairly complex farmingthemed strategy game, Hallertau isn’t going to change your mind. But if crop rotation and incrementally upgrading your homestead sounds like your idea of a fun Friday night, it definitely deserves your attention.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED AGRICOLA
Lacking the longtime classic’s depth of strategy, Nevada
nonetheless conjures a similar feeling with a dash of exciting randomness and a strong theme.