When MCDM released Flee, Mortals!, an alternate 5E monster book, one of the most intriguing ideas in it aside from just having interesting monsters to fight was Minions. Introduced in earlier editions of D&D, Minions are there to solve the problem of letting you build encounters with giant numbers of monsters to fight, but without bogging down combat too badly.
The rules were something of an evolution of what had appeared in 4th Edition D&D. Draw Steel, however, changes the formula a bit more - naturally in part because of how Draw Steel's rules work differently.
Draw Steel's Monsters book has tons of minions - several in each "monster family" at various levels. Minions have group roles like tougher enemies, but they're designed to go down easily and in large numbers.
In Draw Steel, Directors (GMs) are advised to group up the monsters that the party is fighting into various squads, which take their turns together. There are various words to signify how many of a given monster should go into a squad, and roughly how many of each you can throw at a party. A balanced encounter at a standard difficulty will have a single Elite monster for every two players, or a single Platoon monster for each player, or two Horde monsters for each player. Minions are designed to come at a party at a ratio of 8 to 1.
However, that's not the whole story. Minions also act in different ways.
First, a Minion takes its turn as part of a group. When multiple minions in the same squad do something, you roll once and count it for each of them. So, say your Goblin Snipers attack with bows. You just roll a single time for each minion in that squad that is attacking. However, they're also not going to be as effective if they try to focus down a single hero. When more than one minion targets the same creature with a Signature action, the rolled damage is applied only by one of the creatures, and the others joining in that attack only add their free strike damage.
For example:
Andy, Bob, Carla, and Deb are our heroes, delving into the Delian Tomb to rescue the blacksmith's daughter from a group of goblins. A group of 8 Goblin Snipers, along with other goblins who aren't acting on this turn, fires their bows at the party. Carla, the party's Shadow, teleported out of line of effect from all but one of the goblins, and Andy, the party's Fury, just crushed two of the goblins' friends by knocking them into one another. So, of the 8, 4 are going after Andy and 2 are going for Deb's Null while one is shooting at Bob's Troubadour and the only goblin who can actually get a clean shot on Carla is going to take it.
The Director rolls the power roll, and gets a total of 13 - a tier 2 result. At tier 2, these snipers deal 4 damage, and the snipers' Free Strike value is just 1. Thus, Andy gets 7 damage (4 from the primary one that hit him and 1 each from the other three targeting him,) Deb takes 5 (4 from the first that shot her and 1 from the one that's joining in on the attack) and then both Bob and Carla take 4, each only getting hit by one of them. (In other words, minions will be more effective if their damage is spread out).
For maneuvers, like Knockback or Grab, you act similarly, except that there's no additional effect in having multiple minions target the same creature - only one can knock them back or grab them.
Now, what about killing them?
Minions effectively have a shared Stamina pool. Our Snipers each have an individual 3 Stamina. But we track 8 of them as having 24 stamina. Damage to any of the minions is damage to the overall pool. However, when that total is reduced an single minion's worth of stamina, the minion who just got hit dies. If this goes past another threshold, another nearby minion dies as well.
For example, Carla's Shadow uses an ability that deals 5 damage to one of these minions. That's enough to kill it, and perhaps as that minion dies, the knocked arrow they had in hand flies into one of its comrades. It might not be enough to kill the second minion, but it's bad.
The exception here is area effects - if you deal damage within, say, a 3-cube (a 3x3 square on the map) that does 12 damage, it can for sure wipe out the three minions standing within that area, but even though that's in theory 36 damage and thus enough to wipe out the entire squad, the minions outside that area are unaffected - in other words, the maximum damage the shared pool can take is the minions' max HP time the minions in the area. In this case, that means just 9.
Now, admittedly, this requires a bit of narrative inventiveness in certain scenarios. If two minions are next to each other when the Tactician strikes one with a sword, it's not hard to imagine the sword passing through one minion and into the other. When they're thirty feet apart from one another? You'll need to think of a way to justify it. Does the Tactician skewer one goblin with their sword and then fling the body off and into the other one? Or does the the second minion panic and despair in seeing their companion slain and lose their will to live?
The point, of course, of minions is to allow you to send truly enormous waves of enemies at your players. Indeed, I think the balance of Draw Steel's combat leans toward this "we few against a sea of foes" vibe, given that in my rough estimation, most monsters in the book are either minions or of the "horde" category. It'll be rarer cases that one fights platoon or elite monsters, though I'd recommend (inasmuch as I can recommend things in a game I haven't yet played) changing things up by having a variety of encounter set-ups.
Minions could theoretically be encountered on their own - just a giant swarm of bad guys to fight. However, if placed with a captain - literally any non-mount, non-minion creature who speaks the same language - they can get bonuses. The aforementioned Goblin Snipers can get a +5 bonus to the range of their attacks, but these bonuses can be extra damage or an edge of their power rolls. If the captain is slain, another eligible monster can become the squad's new captain at the start of the next round, but this of course puts a target on their back.
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