Nucleum · Board game rules
How does the Uranium bonus work?
Quick answer
Uranium is gained mainly by building Mines (amount equals your total Mines) or via bonus icons, and must always be placed in a Mine or converted 1:1 into a Worker if it can't be stored.
Details
When you place a Mine via Industrialize, you immediately gain Uranium equal to the number of Mines you currently have on the board, including the one just placed [p.13 — Industrialize]. If the mining site you build on shows the 🚲 bonus icon, you gain 1 additional Uranium on top of that [p.13 — Industrialize].
Some Action tiles also show a 🚲 icon that lets you gain 1 Uranium as part of resolving that action (even if you used the same action to build a Turbine instead of a Mine). If you have no Mines at that time, or no empty Uranium spaces on any Mine, you gain 1 Worker instead [p.13 — Industrialize].
Whenever you gain Uranium from any source, you must either place it on one of your Mines (any Mine, not just the newly built one) or immediately spend it to gain 1 Worker — you may always trade 1 Uranium for 1 Worker, but never the reverse [p.8 — Gaining Resources]. Each Mine can only hold 2 or 3 Uranium depending on its type, so overflow must be converted to Workers [p.8 — Gaining Resources].
Uranium is later used during the Energize action: transporting it to a power plant with a Nucleum produces 2 electricity per Uranium, and the amount you can transport depends on the number of Turbines present at that plant (1 by default, plus 1 per Turbine) [p.15-16 — Energize]. Transported Uranium is spent and returned to the supply [p.16 — Energize].
Watch out: You cannot "bank" Uranium outside a Mine — if you gain it and have no room to store it, it automatically converts to a Worker instead, so plan your Mine capacity before triggering Uranium gains [p.8 — Gaining Resources].