In Darkrock Ventures, each player is in control of their very own, small, independent, deep-space asteroid mining ship and a skeleton crew. Each mining venture will receive corporate sponsorship through the Darkrock Ventures Deep-Space Mining Consortium and will be given its own unique advantages as they set out on their task of extracting as much of the valuable metal ore from the asteroid as they can in the shortest amount of time possible. (There are other companies working against you, after all!)

The core of Darkrock Ventures, runs on a very clever "Shared Dice" mechanism; players will be rolling their own special Mining Rig Dice and pairing one of them with one of the three standard shared dice in the middle of the board. When one of your dice plus one of the shared dice make one of the totals shown on the various mining sites on the board, you are able to collect that resource... but only if you assigned a worker there beforehand or you manage to move one of your crew-members there mid-round.