Each of us takes on the role of a supervisor who watches over four workers and gives them orders. Every day there is a joint order from the government as to which raw materials are to be extracted from the mine by the evening. This could be, for example, 3 copper, 2 mushrooms (yes, there are also mushrooms in a kind of underground farm), 2 gold and any three precious metals.

A day consists of two day shifts and a night phase, which is essentially used to prepare the playing field for the next round. In the day shifts, each player has three actions plus a possible additional action. Each action begins with the play of a card that specifies up to how many spaces you can move one of your workers and whether an action can be carried out at the current location before or after the move.

You move on two rondels, one on the surface and one underground in the mine. Each rondel consists of 6 fields on which a wide variety of actions can be carried out. On the surface, the main focus is on personal advantage. Here you can swap raw materials from your own supply and carry out research, which gradually unlocks additional functions and victory points. New, more powerful action cards can be purchased at the commissariat, which can be used to move three workers in one turn, for example. And finally, there is the elven embassy, where secret additional orders are taken that are extremely advantageous for the respective player if they are fulfilled.

In the lower rondel, which is accessed from a lift space in the upper rondel, everything revolves around mining and transporting resources. In addition to two spaces that allow direct, predetermined mining, you can also dig deeper into the mine. This seems lucrative in terms of the raw materials down there, but the route is dangerous and often leads to hospitalisation, which means that the respective worker is initially out of the game for one or two rounds.

In addition, the train is filled at the bottom and finally transported to the top, provided someone has cared for enough steam, another space that can be visited. Listing every little detail here would go too far, it definitely takes two or three rounds to internalise the processes and develop a plan for working together and fulfilling your own personal goals.

What's really great about the game is the integration of various mini-games. For example, small or larger tiles are acquired during research, which then have to be positioned on your own player board in a Tetris-like manner until entire rows or columns are filled. When patrolling the deeper corridors, you first position yourself at different corridors. The end of the corridors with the rewards are already visible, but the centre section is missing. This is only revealed after all workers have been positioned on starting fields, so a worker can end in dead ends and other surprises instead of his wanted destination.

And finally, you have to decide where to position yourself when transporting the lorries, because the government only takes the raw materials from each wagon that it has ordered, all others go into the personal possession of the "co-drivers".

As you can see, there's a lot going on here in Mine 77. Nevertheless, the game plays quite smoothly after a short familiarisation period, even with a full crew. In my opinion, the prototype is already very advanced and sophisticated, the game itself seems complete, so it's just a matter of fine-tuning and optimising the game materials.

With Factory 42, it took me a while to warm up to it. I also initially had the first version of the game, which still had a few problems with some maps and a few game components. However, the update pack solved this and since then I have been diving deeper into the dwarf world now and then.