Worker Placement Explained
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- čas přidán 4. 07. 2024
- We explain the popular game mechanic of Worker Placement! This is a Euro-leaning tabletop mechanic, typically featured in games with lower randomness and more resource management gameplay. It is a very splashable idea, being in many thematic games (although not in too many Ameritrash usually), and heavily featured throughout boardgamegeek top #200 games. We try to break down the interaction between meeples, fun factor while moving chits, and how easy it is to grasp. Workers can also be dice in some games, or family members in ones that have more hand management ideas. Not every popular euro has this worker placement, like Scythe is technically not a worker placement.
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Games featured: Lords of Waterdeep, Everdell, The Godfather: Corleone's Empire, Argent: The Consortium, Caverna, Agricola, Parks, Star Wars: Rebellion, Castles of Burgundy, Lost Ruins of Arnak, Dune: Imperium
Table of Contents:
Intro - (0:00)
What is Worker Placement? - (1:05)
Why Worker Placement - (2:58)
Worker Placement’s Popularity - (4:38)
Worker Placement Common Complaints - (6:52)
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#boardgames #tabletop #tabletopgames - Hry
Worker enslavement is my favorite board gaming genre.
You should try Puerto Rico
@@maartenvzor keyflower where you treat them like _money_
Do Roll-to-Move next, the king among game mechanics! Sorry, coudn't resist that cheap shot ^^
I think worker placement is a worthy start for such a series for sure. Would love to see engine / tableau building, and also deck / bag building.
I really agree when you say the implementation matters. Theme is big for me in a game so if a mechanic like worker placement is used well with the theme I’ll likely enjoy it much more. I just picked up Rebellion the other day and I love how thematic it feels, even with placing the leaders. You get to feel like you sent General Veers to command your troops to take a planet or have Chewbacca swoop in and rescue somebody.
i wonder if you'll cover more niche mechanics like cube towers, app integration, and bag builders
Possibly! We'll have to see how it goes :D -Ashton
please make more of this series
Would love to see something like this on the topic of dice. Might be a bit longer.
This could be a very beginner friendly video series. An introduction to boardgame mechanics.
I would like to learn about tower defense.
As a member of the investor class, I personally prefer the "Worker Replacement" mechanism for achieving profit maximization. ; )
I'd like to see you cover area control, as war games are my favorites hehe
That was a big one to cover! -Ashton
@@Shelfside Not as big as worker placement hehe
Appreciate this series
Cheers! More to come -Ashton
Please keep this section Up, please. LOVE it
Very nice and quick summary, and still fairly in-depth on the various implementations and downsides! I hadn't even considered Star Wars Rebellion as worker placement. Looking forward to future installments in this series. Keep up the good work!
Thanks for explaining this kind of mechanics to me. I've been playing board games for several years with friends and family and have heard a lot of words thrown around and don't really know what they all mean. I know LCG and now worker placement. Still not sure what a Euro game is and etc.
This is a really great idea for a series! I love the idea of going over specific board game mechanics, what they bring to a game, and what some of their strengths and weaknesses are, why you might like or dislike games that use them. I'm relatively new to board games so I have a lot to explore, but something about worker placement just feels so iconically "board game" to me. I really enjoy the idea of it, and I want to play more games that use it to judge how I feel about it, but it's one of those things that I'm just thinking I'm going to like.
I think it might be helpful if these videos were tied together in the title or something, just to make it easier to know when a video is part of this specific series. As of right now I believe there's only two out, this and Social Deduction? But if I didn't know both worker placement and social deduction were board game mechanics, I would not know these two videos were connected in any way.
Thanks for the feedback! I might end up adding them all to a playlist one day for easy organizing. There are only 2 out right now, and I'm slowly working on brainstorming some more! It's pretty fun talking about things at a high level and stoked that you guys are enjoying it! -Ashton
Nice video. A recent hybrid worker placement game I've enjoyed a lot is Hybris: Disordered Cosmos. It's quite a bit more interactive than the usual worker placement and even has a really neat solo/co-op mode that feels like a proper game rather than a tedious afterthought automa.
Thanks for the deep dive into worker placement. It's one of my favorite board game mechanics, but I hadn't really thought about it to this degree before. I found the video to be both fun and informative.
Man I wish you talked more about how Argent plays around with worker placement. I guess that's more up Daniel's lane 😆There's so many smart ways it plays with standard worker placement design:
1) The voter objectives encourage more player interaction to fight over spaces to win the voter
2) The voters are hidden and change between games, making the values of spaces dynamic and adds uncertainty to who's winning until the end
3) Rounds end when all bell cards are taken, not when all workers are gone. This introduces the need for tempo and alleviates how getting another worker is usually the best move
4) Most spaces only give rewards at the end of a round in a certain order. Because of this, more player interaction can be put into the game; if you knock out another player's already placed worker, you can deny them their space's benefit entirely! Moving workers between spaces matters more as well, since you can disrupt someone's intended end of round reward sequence.
The game is lovely, just hard to learn and big. The game's powerful spells and mage worker powers are a bit hard to lift from the design into other worker placer games sadly. I'd say it's mainly due to how the systems are tied together. Also somewhat due to the magic theme and the style of direct player interaction. I hope to see similar trappings in other games!
Thanks for sharing! Yeah I only played it once so I don't feel comfortable talking about it in a video like this. Almost brought up the secret objectives, but it got cut out fairly early. Cheers! -Ashton
Live the idea. So many cool game mechanics
Great video! I look forward to this series.
Awesome new series! Thank you!
Cheers! Hope this can help people :) -Ashton
cool video and nice series :) I hope you have fun making it aswell
Cheers, hopefully it doesn't take too much time away from our other content! -Ashton
My favorite WP games to date are:
Viticulture with Tuscany, and Dinogenics with Controlled Chaos.
I love this series idea!
Cheers! Looks like I need to make way more of them -Ashton
Awesome work!
Cheers! More to come from this series! -Ashton
Got a real issue here. Carcassonne is not worker placement because it's not action drafting. However your section where you say, "Never mind the term 'action drafting' and let's just talk in ordinary language," involves a definition of worker placement which fits with Carcassonne pretty much exactly.
Try to make an interesting 10m explainer video on "roll-and-move"!
hahahaha. Looks like I might just have to -Ashton
Perhaps deckbuilding, auction(including trick taking, majority control, and other auctions in disguise), variable turn order, or century/small world-style market could be next?
Nice, thanks for sharing. Working on the next episode a bit now :)
@@ashtonwu7760 you're welcome! Looking forward to that
When I first started gaming with my friends I did not actually like worker placement games. From a beginner perspective the boards look overwhelming with all the option/action spots and often just symbols on them instead of instructions on what to do there.
There are several that are really fun though. One of the guys in our group loves worker placement games so we tend to play them a lot.
Do my favorite. BOSS BATTLERS!
You cut, I choose. That's a good one.
mmm, not sure if that's a mechanic I can talk about haha -Ashton
I unfortunately will never appreciate a vast amount of worker placement games simply because themes like "run a farm", "run a tea shop", or "build an industry in London" just hold little interest. I was told once that it's because the focus in worker placement is the mechanics while the theme is secondary, and theming is everything for me. These tasks feel too close to reality, and it feels like work. There are some worker placement games that work for me, but they've got to be comparatively light and oozing theme, such as Star Wars Rebellion (this one feels easy to grasp for me despite being told it's heavy), Disney Villainous, or Fallout Shelter.
Honestly, I'm sad that way more often than not when I try worker placement games and my eyes glaze over. I'm glad there's a mechanic out there for folks who are all about stacking up the resources, planning ten turns ahead, and performing mental Olympics. Wish I could appreciate it too.
I find i look at worker games a bit different.
2 player worker games can be the most cut throat competitive games i ever played. Person A needs food to not horribly lose the game, person B has ton of foods, there is one food stop left and its person B turn. Its the correct choice for person B to take food he has no need for just to absolutely ruin persons A entire game.
Person A getting completely destroyed will never let this situation happen again, he will absolutely secure that he doesn't play the game in a way that person B can ruin. Then people start to get to even more complex denials and machinations.
I find myself not really calculating that much as in strategy or euro game where calculating shit for one hour and ten turns ahead is the correct choice to do, because one technically can't even do so. Every time someone places a worker, that changes everything, if he placed the worker elsewhere, that would change everything in a different way. So you have games of everyone collectively needing 20% more wood than the game will ever offer in its entirety and that makes one consider is he stuck making inefficient turns grabbing little wood because someone else will grab it or pivot strategy to something else.
So worker placements is more about how one performed early, mid, late game rather than hardcore calculations. You can put math and mechanics behind it for sure, but the people that do well are the ones that feel it out the most well. Weirdly one of the genres i am doing math and counting the least, what a lot of other games dumb down to is that you can indeed count the cards, pieces, turns and entire math in your head, while worker placement is for every action one takes, he competes against all actions he didn't take, for every action one takes, he leaves another great action open for grabs. So if everyone tunnel vissions on mentioned wood, i am going to dominate the game in every other resource. It is a lot more feely type of games.
Other overlooked genre about worker games is that a lot of them feel like survival games. You have 10 objectives for perfect points, but realistically you are going to achieve 6 - 10. So you can feel the clock ticking down on game ending and your board is still nowhere close to getting filled out with what you need. Finishing a game is a question of did i survive and barely scrambled everything i need or i fumbled and never got stuff i need?
So from outside perspective one looks at worker placements as placing workers, gathering resources, making math for said stuff, while for me and my friends who are into them they can feel like war games, controlling territory, destroying opposition, surviving the god damn war for resources. Some are more natural at that than others, not much doing math after few games because everyone knows the exact number of resources they need and are in the game. Its more of a question what one will focus on and achieve.
Strange question. But is Blood Rage a worker placement? You can place a worker to a place that is common to everyone.
Oooh, that one crossed my mind while making this. While the area you're placing in is available to everyone, placing it is not triggering an action, so I don't think it fits? -Ashton
@@Shelfside you are right! The placement does not trigger any action. You only benefit later after a battle. So it is indeed a pure area control. And in case of a quest completion it is an area majority. The myth is busted 😁
Honestly I don't see why this isn't just Action Drafting... In Puerto Rico you take a role card from a common area each round. Once you've taken it, no one else can that round. Roles not picked get a coin on them to make it more enticing. In San Juan a card lets you repick something someone else has already picked. Functionally it's the same, just without workers, so I don't see why this needs to be a separate category...
4x next pls
What game is that at 0:48 ?
that is civilization, NOT a worker placement haha -Ashton
@@Shelfside thank you
Wheres my ATO review?! 😇🤪
It's getting there! -Ashton
Deck building
Mindthief video please 🙏
Whoa dude. Castles of burgundy is not worker placement. A better example would be Marco Poll.
It is in a very abstracted sense, although when you're placing to do your own board actions it is not WP. I should've put that in text! -Ashton
I guess it's only as much of a worker placement game as Village is?
im fed up with worker placment games :/
Which ones do you like the most & least?
I find Euro worker placement so boring. I wish they were more exciting. The theme just kills me. Dune looks cool. But the components don't draw me in.
So just the theme rather than the mechanic itself? What kinds of components do you prefer? Detailed minis?
Hey guys, are you able to make a video on Axis and Allies 1942 Second Edition?
Would like your input before deciding to invest in it.
Oh my goodness, I didn't know they made a 90 minute axis and allies!!! I'll see if I can take a look, that game is HUGE nostalgia -Ashton
Wait, is it 90 minutes? hahaha I'm looking up stuff and now I'm confused
@@Shelfside Ah it depends upon which one you get.
1. 1941: Axis and Allies (This is a quick 2+ hours one)
2. 1942: Axis and Allies Second Edition (This is the standard 6+ hours one, apparently very good, the one I was thinking of getting. Looks like Twilight Imperium IV play time)
3. 1940: Axis and Allies Europe
4. 1940: Axis and Allies Pacific
5. 1940: Axis and Allies Global (Aka you combine 3. and 4. to make one massive game, goes for about 16+ hours)
6. 1914: Axis and Allies (This is the only WWI one. Apparently good, but a little underdeveloped and unbalanced, which needs some houseruling)
Then there are others that are out-of-print now.
7. 1941/1942 50th Anniversary Edition (Apparently the most balanced)
8. Super old ones, like the classic Axis and Allies, the 90s edition, the revised 2004 edition, etc.