Wouter & Ymke 
Oil Rock takes us to Pennsylvania during the early days of the oil boom, when Edwin Drake’s famous 1859 well in Titusville helped show that there was serious business underneath all that dirt. Oil wells started appearing, railways connected growing industrial areas, and investors were more than happy to get involved. People discovering a new way to make money has rarely resulted in everyone politely standing aside.
That’s roughly where we come in. We’re building our own oil companies by drilling deeper wells, refining different grades of oil, expanding across the map and improving our industrial machinery. We only get four rounds to do it, so there isn’t much time for a company that doesn’t know what it wants to become.
👥 2-4 players, ages 13+
⌛ Playing time: 90 minutes
📝 Designer: Marco Piola Caselli
🎨 Artwork: Giovanni Calore & Klemens Franz
🏢 Publisher: Cranio Creations (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Oil Rock is a worker-placement game played over four rounds, with each round divided into actions, production and refining. During the action phase, everyone gets three worker placements. The mix of assistants and managers depends on how far your character has progressed, and these workers are placed on the large action wheel in the centre of the table. Assistants use a single action tile. Once your assistants are gone, managers become available and can either use one tile or be placed between two neighbouring tiles to perform both actions.
The wheel contains six different actions covering the various parts of your company. You can improve your oil wells, construct refineries and turbines, move across the regional map, build offices, gain improvements or increase your progress. Occupied spaces restrict what everyone else can do. You can also spend one progress on the copy space to perform any action from the wheel except one occupied by your own worker. If that action is occupied by another player, they receive one progress. At the end of each round, the wheel rotates and changes which pairs of actions managers can combine.
Oil comes from three wells on your player board, producing yellow, green and blue oil. Adding drills takes those wells deeper and increases their production. Blue oil can replace green or yellow when refining, and green can replace yellow. Refineries process combinations of oil into resources, patents, progress, victory points and other benefits. Turbines improve adjacent refineries, adding their own bonus when those refineries are activated.
Away from your player board, twelve hexagonal region tiles form the map. Your train travels between them and collects railway bonuses, with your engineer able to relocate along the route the train travelled. Offices can be constructed where either your train or engineer is located, immediately giving you the branch bonus printed in that region.
Improvements alter different parts of your company or provide additional scoring opportunities. Patents can be used to open briefcases on your player board, or you can spend three to take one extra action per round. Progress develops your historical character, improving income and workers before eventually unlocking stronger versions of their individual ability. Your position on the progress track also affects turn order.
After everyone has placed their three workers, oil extraction begins and each well produces barrels according to its depth. Refineries can then be activated using those barrels, with adjacent turbines adding their bonuses, before the current round’s goal is scored. After the fourth round, final points come from your wells, offices, qualifying refineries, improvements, progress and leftover resources and patents. Whoever has the most victory points wins.
Artwork & Components
Oil Rock certainly looks industrial once it’s spread across the table. Railways cross the modular map between oil derricks and machinery, with earthy browns, greens and yellows covering most of the artwork. The player boards continue that look with wells, pipes, storage tanks and refinery equipment. There are icons and numbers almost everywhere, and our first setup looked rather intimidating before we knew what any of it meant.
The wooden components help separate everything. Trains, offices and other markers come in bright player colours, and the oil is represented by chunky little barrels in three colours. The large action wheel attracts most of the attention in the centre of the table, with its riveted metal appearance and workers gradually filling the available spaces. It looks like a substantial piece of machinery and actually has a reason for being there beyond looking good in photographs.
We especially liked the spiral-bound character notebooks. The characters are real historical figures connected to industry at the time, including Edwin Drake, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Ignacy Łukasiewicz. Their abilities are loosely related to their backgrounds, with Drake leaning towards drilling, Vanderbilt towards railways and Rockefeller towards refining. As you progress, you physically turn pages to reveal better income, different workers and stronger abilities.
Once everyone starts building, the map gets crowded quickly. Buildings sit between railway lines and printed bonuses, the wheel fills with workers and the player boards collect barrels, refineries and improvements. We occasionally had to lean over the table to check a symbol or see what was underneath something. The iconography itself didn’t give us much trouble after the first round or so. The amount of information on the table did.
Our Experience
Our first game started in fairly typical Eurogame fashion: everyone nodded during the explanation, confidently placed their first worker and then immediately wondered whether they had chosen the wrong action. We hardly needed the rulebook after the first round. Working out what we actually wanted to do with our companies took longer. We drilled, picked up improvements and moved our trains around, without always having much of a plan for how those things would work together later.
Production exposed that rather quickly. We had plenty of oil at times, just not necessarily the oil our refineries needed. At one point it felt as though we had refineries waiting for barrels that were perfectly happy staying underground. After that we paid more attention to what we wanted to process before deciding where another drill should go. We didn’t suddenly start calculating everything five turns ahead, but there was noticeably less random company development going on.
Managers caused a different sort of problem. Once everyone had seen what a useful pair of neighbouring actions could do, those spaces became much harder to ignore. There were several occasions where someone was clearly planning for a particular action and another worker arrived first. The resulting silence around the table usually said enough. Sometimes we used the copy space. Sometimes whatever we had planned simply wasn’t worth rescuing.
Progress was less uniform. Some of us pushed much further along the track, while others spent those actions elsewhere. The characters encouraged that to some extent, especially once their stronger abilities appeared. Goals and improvements could easily send us in another direction for a round, though, and nobody seemed particularly interested in developing a character exactly the same way every game.
By round four there was considerably more happening on our player boards than we expected from such a relatively short game. Wells had gone deeper, refineries had supplies behind them and our workers had changed. There was generally something we hadn’t managed to finish as well. One more refinery, another drill or an office we had intended to build two rounds ago tended to remain on the list when scoring started.
Our Thoughts
The part of Oil Rock we enjoyed most is deciding how much preparation something deserves. A refinery can look useful several turns before you actually have the oil for it. Drilling deeper solves the supply problem, except those actions could have gone towards an improvement or another office. Progress is tempting for all the obvious benefits, but it can consume a surprising amount of attention if you keep pushing it. There’s rarely enough time to develop every part of the company equally, and trying to do so didn’t work particularly well for us.
Managers are probably the element that gives the worker placement its most distinctive twist. The wheel rotating between rounds means a pair you relied on before may no longer exist, and another combination can suddenly become useful. We found ourselves checking those pairs before deciding what we wanted from a round. The interaction is mostly found there too. Oil Rock isn’t particularly confrontational beyond people taking spaces or getting somewhere on the map before you.
We also used the game’s escape routes more often than I expected. The basic refinery dealt with barrels we had no better use for, higher-quality oil covered missing lower grades and the copy space occasionally rescued an action we really needed. I’m glad those options exist. Four rounds would be fairly brutal if one awkward barrel or occupied space could derail an entire round.
Four rounds can be brutal in another way. Build something too late and there may simply be no time left for it to repay what you spent. A refinery that only runs once isn’t always much of an investment, and some improvements become far less attractive once you realise how few opportunities remain to use them. There isn’t much room for experimentation. We liked that the game stopped where it did, but players who want to spend several rounds enjoying a completed engine probably won’t get that here.
I’m less interested in making claims about balance at this point. The character abilities can become substantial, and different goals or improvements obviously favour different developments. We haven’t seen one approach dominate our games, including games where players invested quite differently in progress. That’s about as far as I’d take it for now.
Oil Rock looked heavier on the table than it turned out to be, yet it gave us more to think about than the individual actions initially suggested. Not because there’s a hidden layer of complicated rules, but because there’s always another part of the company competing for one of those few actions. We didn’t finish our games feeling that we had seen everything or settled on how we wanted to approach the different characters. For now, I’m quite happy to leave it there.
📝 We received a review copy of Oil Rock from Cranio Creations.
