Worker Placement
The Author is Dead
Paolo Greco I dunno man…Glenn Drover strikes me as pretty iconoclastic as well. His game, his rules. It seems like some designers don’t ever pop their heads up to assess the world around them. Same with RPGs!
Sometimes I wonder if there’s some real value in isolating yourself creatively. It goes against all my instincts, but then again my name isn’t splashed all over a Buick-sized game box.
Do we want to write some kind of Berlin Interpretation for worker placements? Roguelike, as a term, is going through the same inflation. Some people consider Race for the Galaxy some kind of weird deckbuilder, despite being an economic game with hand management. Blargh.
Simply allocating tokens to areas is not a worker placement game. Otherwise stuff like El grande would be a worker placement. Hint: El grande is an area control game.
(Agreed on all points! Having only read the rulebook I can also see that there are some opportunity costs associated with grabbing for particular positions on particular tracks. So…pseudo?)
edit: I forgot the turn structure. And the part where you put your dudes on the very very different, scarce actions that they’re going to make later on. I was wrong on calling this game not worker placement. Blargh, too much shellfish for lunch.
Not even. Stop me if you don’t want to have this conversation. Also, I understand things are not crispyly defined so this is my 2c.
What makes a worker placement? How are they different from, say, area control? You allocate people to places, right?
Yes. But. In worker placement the placement has qualitative differences. As in, making kids is different from building an oven in a way that is different to the difference between sending people to the Caribbean and sending them to Newfoundland.
Also. Worker placements often have exclusive worker allocation to a place. Often have board cleanup. Often there’s a round robin allocation. Note: I’m not mentioning economics because it is incidental to the form: worker placements are often economic games but they need not be.
Also: compare and contrast Caylus and Antike. Would Antike be a worker placement if you could deploy stuff everywhere?
Also: why Puerto Rico turn structure is different from its worker allocation and how.
Also: why the hell I don’t play Caylus often enough? The answer is Concordia (not a worker placement game either). So good.
Paul Beakley I’m a git. I forgot that there is actually exclusive worker allocation with qualitative difference in Age of Empires.
Definitely a worker placement. Sorry.
Noted!
you know, i forgot the worker placement part of the game
durrrr
There’s something to be said for gaining some distance from a design community and cultivating your own weirdness. It’s hard to design by just using all the popular techniques.
cough – Friedman Friese’s Copycat – cough