29th Oct 2026 - Oil Rock & Essen Week

• Recent games

Seven tables at the club this week. And, as far as I can remember, seven games that haven't been seen at the club before. Alien: Fate Of The Nostromo possibly once before? But the other six were definitely new.

This was of course mainly because last week was Essen week. If you're new to the club, and wondering what kind of games we play here... well, the answer seems to be "all latest Euro games". We sent a substantial expeditionary force over there last week, complete with uniform - sort of - and they came back on creaking suspension with bootloads of new games.

I was not among the Essen raiders, having instead spent last Thursday at the club very enjoyably, playing a weird new Age Of Steam map set in Ancient Egypt. So I was instead among the majority of members this week, picking and choosing from the various new-from-Essen options as they appeared on Looking To Play.

The one that caught my eye was Oil Rock. Partly because I like a good economic / resource-management game; but also I was intrigued by the backstory. This game is designed by Marco Piola Caselli and - according to BGG - this is his first published game. But artwork by Klemenz Franz, attracted a lot of attention at Essen, must be a big deal...

But "Oil Rock"? Surely this is a clumsy translation? Petroleum - which this game is definitely about - is normally translated as "rock oil", or "oil of rock" - why "Oil Rock"? I guess if you go to Essen, you get to ask these irritating questions to the designer or publisher, and get encouraged not to wear the club uniform by the others - so hopefully I'll get my chance one year soon. In the meantime, I just had to make do with playing the game. And it was fine...

I didn't entirely see what the hype was about, to be honest. It felt like a fairly conventional Euro game. You are generally digging oil wells, extracting oil, refining it, and reinvesting the profits back into doing more of that. It's an engine-building big point salad with lots of different ways to win. All the typical Euro things, particularly the thing where you have a very limited number of turns, but can string together sequences of actions within a turn.

So 4 rounds, 3 turns each round, 12 in total. The first round is very quick; the last round you can play a quick game of Carnegie with the other 3 players while each person takes their turn. So downtime definitely a problem. And not that much player interaction, I thought. It mainly comes from the worker placement element; so we're competing for the best worker-placement spaces, which we then use to do stuff in our own player area, largely independent of what others are doing. So it's good fun, but I personally prefer the games where you're primarily playing the other players, not the game.

There is enormous setup variability, of which the most interesting bit is the character book that you get. You can have different individual player strengths, according to your character. We dealt them out randomly, though according to the rules we should have chosen them at the start in reverse turn order. I hope the strengths of the different characters have been thoroughly balanced.

It came down to a fight for the win between Andrew and me, basically because we both made the most of our character abilities. My character was Rockefeller, who was definitely the oil guy, so I got all my points in the oil producing areas. Not sure who Andrew's was (Carnegie?) - but his was good on "structures" - which meant end-game scoring cards. So he had crap oil refining ability but had massive end-game bonuses. I don't know how thoroughly this game was playtested (possibly, due to the high downtime, you could have playtesters doing several concurrent games?) - but it would need a lot to validate that these abilities were equally likely to win.

Which all sounds like the bitter rantings of the one who narrowly lost the game, as I did. I beat Andrew by 5 points in Age-Of-Steam-goes-to-Egypt last week, but he had the last laugh, beating me by 6 points this week. Which is probably appropriate: Age Of Steam is more my kind of game, as it's more about playing the players, whereas this one was mainly about playing the game. But a nice enjoyable game nonetheless. Would play it again.

As I may have mentioned, there as plenty of downtime, so I went wandering and looked at all the other Essen games. They all looked fairly interesting and expensively produced, though I can't claim to have understood much beyond that. For the record, they were -60°, Drillers, Gaudí and Almighty. Maybe someone else will write some more about them.

But also a word for the last game at the club this week, which was not from Essen but definitely new, and on a theme that I've never seen before at the club: Sunday Manager, which Mario managed to make it in on a Thursday to share with us. It's a board game about managing a (Sunday-league) football team! What is this kick-ball sacrilege? Well, according to Ben, there have been a couple of previous efforts in this vein, which were a bit crap - but this one is actually quite good. And it did look good! I was definitely intrigued. I may be shunned by the rest of the club for my mainstream-interest sins; but I'd be interested to try that one if it comes to the club again.

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