Worker Placement Games

Worker placement refers to a game mechanism whereby a player places a worker token, or meeple as they are also referred to, onto a specific area on a gaming board, in order to activate an action present on the Board. There have been several variations on this concept, and I happen to own a few games which embrace this game mechanism.

The first game that comes to mind is also one of my favourites. The game is Lords of Waterdeep, a game imbued with D&D theming, though I feel that the mechanism could be used with any theme. The game revolves around players taking on “quests,” drawing “intrigue” cards from a specialized deck and acquiring followers in order to complete quests. The followers, represented in the game by wooden cubes, symbolize any one of four factions including clerics (white), warriors(orange), rogues(black), and sorcerers(purple).  These followers together with a fifth resource, coin, are used to complete quests as well as purchase new buildings which provide additional actions on the board on subsequent turns.

The fixed locations on the map, together with the additional buildings purchased by the players during the game, are what offer the actions necessary to acquire more “followers” as mentioned above.

So, during a typical turn of play, each player will take one of a finite number of worker tokens and allocate them to specific free areas on the board and in the process execute the action found there. In most instances this will entail gathering followers and adding them to the player's pool. In some instances, rather than followers, players could end up gathering coin, quest, or intrigue cards. As soon as a player has enough followers to complete a quest, he can turn that quest in and add the associated points to his final tally. Intrigue cards when invoked during a turn (again as a result of claiming an associated action) usually take the form of follower gathering, either from a common pool or “stolen” from another player’s available pool.

In summary, Lords of Waterdeep offers diverse paths towards points scoring which make it a truly intriguing game. You get points for quests resolved, residual coin and followers left at the end of the game and for quests which are specific to the “Lord” assigned to you (randomly) at the beginning of the game.

Another intriguing game that makes part of my collection and which adopts a modified Worker Placement mechanism is Raiders of the North Sea. This game adopts a similar placement model but this time a player gets to take one or two out of a possible three actions. The first two possible actions are linked and involve both a “worker placement” and “removal” action. Alternatively (if all conditions are met) a player may decide to opt for a lucrative raid option. Raiding obviously scores the most points but requires the gathering of both food resources as well as crew members for your raiding party. There are not all that many turns in a full game, so each action taken becomes important making it a brilliant and challenging game.

At the end of a game, players will score points for raids conducted, any livestock, gold and iron tokens in hand as well as for active crew members on your raiding party. Players also get to score points for how far they might have progressed along the armoury track (paid in steel tokens during the game) and the Valkyrie track (paid in crew members who fall in battle during raids...a bit gruesome I know). Overall, this is a solid worker placement game.

Tokaido is another game that adopts a worker placement mechanism, but the action taken is reminiscent of leapfrog, whereby locations selected along the game track can only be selected from those just ahead of the leading player. Furthermore, the next turn is taken by the player whose worker is the furthest behind along the track at that given point in time. Tokaido offers interesting decisions, since points can be earned through diverse actions. For instance, there is a decision that needs to be taken on how far ahead you should jump on your next turn to attain a particular objective. This because, when you move too far ahead along the track, you reduce your point scoring opportunities later while also increasing those of your opponents behind you. Character abilities, which are significantly diverse, add to the variety in the game, since not all characters benefit the same from all locations along the game track. Having a good understanding of what the characters can or cannot do, can also help you to weigh your forward movements while obtaining the crucial points necessary to snatch a victory.

Another worker placement game, which many consider to be among the first to employ such a mechanism is Carcassonne. In this game which is principally “tile-laying” in nature, players take turns to lay tiles in specific configurations to create features they will then lay claim to. For example, I might get a city tile, place it adjacent to another, yet unclaimed, city tile on the table and lay claim to it by placing one of my meeples there. The catch is that before that feature is completed (and there are ways in which this is achieved), you may not recall or recycle the assigned meeple back into your hand. In this classic game, maintaining an adequate supply of meeples, in hand, goes a long way towards helping you build your point score. Having too many unused meeples on the other hand, is still not a good strategy since you are effectively blocking any further point scoring possibilities.

Good worker placement games do an excellent job of offering a finite pool of resources but many instances of decision making, each translating into opportunities to score points and possibly win a game.

In a subtle way, they teach players how to hone a fine balancing act based on retaining just enough meeples to affect the next profitable play, while at the same time ensuring that points flow in at a steady pace.

As you might have deduced by now, I tend to like this game mechanism in all its various forms. The main reason is that this is a mechanism normally linked to euro-style game systems that focus on player engagement as opposed to player elimination. I am not fond of the latter game mechanism as it inevitably entails having players fall by the wayside, doing nothing, till the game is finally over. Indeed, one of my favourite pastimes, as a board game hobbyist, is to find ways to adapt traditional board game rules, shifting them from player elimination to euro-style variants or co-op. Obviously the nature of that variation will strongly depend on the original game’s components and core game structure.

Over the coming months I will be proposing a few homebrew variants for classic, player elimination games. The first will be a homebrew version of a classic Sword and Sorcery game. I’ll reveal nothing else for now.

Back to worker placement games, the market has over recent years given rise to a wide assortment of games which embrace this mechanism to some degree. At their very core these games have a simple economic model, based on a limited supply of resources which are in their turn crucial towards winning a game. How these resources are released and collected is normally linked to two factors. The first factor is board actions, a worker is placed at a location on the board which triggers an action, once an action is triggered by one player it becomes unavailable to others until the end of a given turn. The second factor is linked to the nature of the point generation being embraced by a player. Normally, a good worker placement game offers diverse tracks along which a player can advance, gaining crucial victory points in the process. The assortment of these tracks is normally designed in such a way that no one track becomes the exclusive focus of final victory.

In fact, these games put emphasis on goal attainment as opposed to player confrontation. The message being that the “economic” success attained by a player is less about direct confrontation than it is about optimizing the various tracks that will allow further point scoring. In order to explain this a bit better I will focus on one of my current favourites, Raiders of the North Sea (RoNS).

In RoNS, players have various tracks they can pursue in order to earn crucial points towards victory. The core mechanism is the raid, everything you do in the game is geared towards conducting raids at several key locations on the board. Yet these raids necessitate resources in order to carry them out. You need to put together a crew, sufficient food and, later in the game, gold.

Yet while it is possible to obtain food directly from one location on the board itself, there are other resources available (normally through a raid) that can generate additional food to use on raids. In RoNS, this resource is Livestock. You can use Livestock at a location called the Longhouse to trade one livestock token for two food tokens. Yet in order to be effective on raids and earn more points, players need to recruit more crew members and further harden their crew’s skills through another track known as the armoury track. Players will, on occasion, loot metal ingots as part of their raids. These can be turned into armoury points by trading one metal ingot for two armoury points. Interestingly if you are not getting any iron ingots to trade for armoury points, you can still buy points on this track with coin, though at a slower rate. These points are then added to the overall attack score made up of the various attack scores of the active crew members. A higher overall attack score will in most instances lead to a higher raid score which goes towards a player’s final tally.

Another interesting track, which is highly thematic in my opinion is the Valkyrie track. As would have most probably been the case in real life, not all crew members on a raid would have made it back alive. Yet Vikings believed that there was nothing more honourable than to die in battle with a sword in your hand. They in fact believed that Valkyries would seek out the fallen on the battlefield and take up their spirit to Valhalla where they would live forever in the presence of their Gods. This is where the Valkyrie track comes in, each dead crew member generates points along the track, and these are in turn added to a player’s final score.

The longhouse itself, mentioned earlier, can also be a source of points. In fact, players can make offerings to the Gods at the Longhouse, exchanging loot obtained in raids for points. This might make sense especially towards the end of game where a player may not have enough resources to raid the final three locations on the map, the fortresses, but still have enough loot to make offerings at the longhouse.

This interplay of point scoring tracks and raids is what make RoNS so incredibly interesting in my opinion. It forces you to assess your situation repeatedly during each turn. You need to assess your strategy in the light of changes which accrue from turn to turn, as well as keep a close eye on the endgame which can be triggered by any player raiding and destroying at least 2 of the three fortresses on the map. More incredibly, the game does all this while never resorting to player elimination, no one is out of the game before the game ends and the points tallied.

Therefore, I find myself liking this game mechanism. Not only, but you can bet that I will try any game that has this mechanism at its core. As in the case of Lords of Waterdeep and RoNS, theming further accentuates the enjoyment because I like both. Still themes apart, worker placement offers me a lot of incentives towards committing my time to learning how to play and win.

One final comment on this mechanism is that designers are still finding new ways in which to incorporate it into their creations. In 2020, Dune Imperium hit the market with a new flavour of worker placement that somehow espouses confrontation between players. While so far, the nature of worker placement games has not been linked with player clashes (to some extent) this does not entail that we will not be seeing more games like Dune Imperium. In all likelihood similar worker placement games will eventually make it to the market, each offering a slightly different twist to differentiate.

As for me, I will obviously be on the lookout.