Designer Notes ItM #11 - Worker Placement
Have you heard of the difference between ameritrash games and euro games? Ameritrash games have a very high luck element (think of Twilight Imperium or Risk), whereas eurogames have a very low luck element (think of chess, Agricola, or Brass Birmingham). I personally enjoy games leaning more towards euro, but I'm happy to have some luck element to keep things a little surprising. Many of the heavier players enjoy euro games because their success is much more in their hands. Among the euro games, one mechanism pops up again and again: worker placement.
Worker placement (also known as action drafting) is when a player moves a component (often representing a being doing work) to a location to execute an action immedietly. You often know which action will happen, fitting nicely into a euro game. I knew very early I wanted to have worker placement in Into the Mountain. I'll get more into details about this mechanism and how it fits into my first game in the next blog, for now I want to really flesh out the mechanic in general. I'm going to write about the basic concept and reprecussions of worker placement, what variations of this we see in other games, finally how it can be developed and expanded.
An entry level worker placement game I used to bring to events when I lived in Cologne, Germany is "Stone Age". In the round players first take turns choosing locations. Some locations allow multiple workers, whereas other locations are limited to one worker. The locations allow players to gain resources, develop their abilities (food and dice manipulation), and also get more workers. There's a critical note here, in Stone Age you must feed your workers; this provides a soft limit to the number of workers a player can have. In game design it's often important for balance and power to limit the benefits of mechanisms (I wrote about this in blog 8: power arcs) . Furthermore, player use their workers to gain/use cards which allow them to spend resources to gain points. I love the tension in victory point games between gaining resources and gaining points.
Not only is the balance of power important in designing worker placement, but also the design decisions about workers per location. Some places in Stone Age only allow 1 worker per location, whereas other locations allow more. The reason limiting the number is so important is because it encourages player interaction. This is part of the fun factor for players. What I love about this restriction and interaction is what I call indirect interaction. I don't like games where you can directly ruin someone else's game.
A more advanced example of worker placement is a game I really enjoy called Dune Imperium. All players start with 2 workers, they can get 1 more during the game, and there is a neutral worker they can acquire too. The thing is, the workers are only sent to a location with a card player from the hand. This combination also allows restriction as to where the workers can be sent, by the card the player uses. In expansions of the game, players gain ways to bypass the limit of 1 worker per location. I really love how this game increases the interconnectedness of two popular game mechanics.
Some more creative expansions of worker placement are using dice as workers (example: Castles of Burgundy). This folds in some more element of randomness with a classic euro mechanic. There are other games with asymmetric workers such as the "Grande worker" (example: Viticulture) or workers who level up (example: Teotihuacan). Another important variation of the mechanism is how the workers leave their locations. Many games return all the workers at the same time. A varation on this is to place a new worker and then return a different worker (example: Raiders of the North Sea); this creates a puzzle element and alters the flow of the game. These variations lead me to a piece of advice for game design: create the baseline rules of the game and then think of ideas of how to allow the players to bend and break the rules they know! This not only provides a great element of fun to the players, it really grants a designer a source of ideas for aspects of development and options during the game.
I already touched on some ways to develop worker placement during the game. The most important one being gaining more workers. Players love to feel progression during a game. Furthermore, allowing players to unlock new locations during the game is another simple way to grant progression. It's something to work towards and can reward players for good decisions. If the game has asymmetric workers, unlocking those would also be developing it during the game. Another opportunity for development is seen again in Stone Age. You can increase the power the workers use to execute the action; the players can add numbers to the dice the workers roll. However you choose to design worker placement in a game, remember to provide the players with progression and development.
Hey, thanks for reading my blog. It means a lot to me. I'm looking forward to writing about how I designed worker placement in Into the Mountain. If you're curious about my game, you can play it on Table Top Simulator!
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