Defining Worker Placement

Would worker placement by any other name smell as sweet? Perhaps. But there’s power in names: they allow us to develop a common vocabulary, so that we know what other people mean, permitting us to set our own expectations.

That means that a big kerfluffle about naming conventions is significant, such as when a notable board game show says that a non-worker-placement game is one of the top games in that category of play. Because it muddles our meanings, it impairs our communication, and it sets incorrect expectations:  if you loved worker-placement games and picked up the game in question based on a recommendation, you might well be disappointed (or not: it’s a great game otherwise).

So this week I wanted to give my own definitions of worker placement, starting with a look at its history.

A History of Worker Placement

The worker-placement mechanic grew out of an older mechanic, role selection, which I previously wrote about while discussing “role civilization” games. It started with Verrater (1998) and continued on through Meuterer (2000) before it gained mainstream success with Citadels (2000) and Puerto Rico (2002).

Basically, role selection turned the even older mechanic of action selection on its head by transforming those actions into a limited resource. Players no longer got to freely determine what they would do. Instead, they had to contend for actions with their opponents. It innovated gaming by creating tension and uncertainty in what previous players would have considered a pretty essential element of gaming: whether a player got to do the action he wanted! It also dramatically ramped up interactivity: a player might now select an action not just because he wanted it, but also to deny it to his opponents; and players now kept careful watch over their opponents’ turns, as they fearfully waited to see if they’d lose the action they wanted to take.

The selectable actions tended to take the physical form of cards (or their equivalent, tiles). These were nice components because they offered a visual reminder of whether an action was available or not, and they could also be used to list out what could be done with the action. Various games offered variants on this core play: most supported open selection, but some such as Citadels instead allowed hidden selection; and most permitted singular actions, but some such as Puerto Rico instead caused a player to open up a new “phase” of play in which everyone took part.

Enter Caylus (2005), the game that created the genre of worker placement. (Was it the first worker-selection game? Probably not, but many of the claims for earlier “firsts” are spurious.) Worker placement started with the core of role selection: creating contention for player actions. But it moved the actions from a set of “role” cards to spaces on the board, and it moved the selection from free selection to a choice that was linked to a player resources: meeples. These two changes allowed the classic role-selection mechanic to expand within a game: not only could the number of actions easily grow, but the acquisition of resources for use in the worker placement became yet another subgame. Worker placement also managed to create a much more coherent and evocative play system than role selection by the simple fact that all the action spaces were integrated into a playing surface, rather than scattered about on cards, which is in my opinion why it succeeded.

Though Caylus (2005) wasn’t the first game to use worker-placement-like mechanics, it defined and popularized the category. (And what does it say that my only photograph of Caylus shows an empty board?)

Caylus was a phenomenon in the year or two after its release. I personally thought that it had fundamental flaws largely related to a play length that could telescope by a factor of two dependent solely on player choice. I only played it four times and quickly fired it when the better polished Caylus Magna Carta (2007) card game came out. But, I also spent those two years dodging Caylus games. The game was very popular, in spite of its flaws, and that was largely due to the popularity of the worker-placement mechanic, which took the simple idea of a player choosing an action, and turned that into a multi-leveled, competitive set of game systems … before you even got to the resource-management systems that defined the core of Caylus’ play.

In the next few years, the one-two punch of Agricola (2007) and Stone Age (2008) locked in worker-placement as a major eurogame mechanic. Since then, worker placement has probably become the most-common mechanic in eurogames, displacing the auction and majority-control mechanics that were commonplace in the genre’s youngest days and standing up to the deckbuilding that soon followed. It’s so popular that it may even appear in a majority of new eurogames.

Popular latter-day worker-placement games include Caverna (2013), A Feast for Odin (2016), Le Havre (2008), Lords of Waterdeep (2012)Tzolk’in (2012), and Viticulture (2015).

What Worker Placement Is

So what is a worker-placement game? I generally believe that it’s an action-selection game, which focuses on players choosing what they’ll do on a turn from a menu of possibilities, where that choice also has four additional characteristics:

  1. Actions Are Shared. The actions that are the heart of the game need to be publicly available, to be used by any of the players — like the building spaces in Caylus or the action spaces in Agricola or Viticulture.
  2. Actions Are Limited. Each action can only be taken a limited number of times. Most often, that means that an action can only be taken once in a round, but there might be multiple spaces for the same action, or it might be possible to take an action multiple times. As long as the limitations are meaningful and cause tension (and anguish!) during the game, you’ve still got worker placement. Some designs such as Stone Age have specific rules for how many workers can be placed on each space. Other designs are more far-flung, such as Keyflower (2012), which allows multiple players to take the same action, but at ever increasing costs, with a hard limit of three.
  3. Actions Are in Contention. This is the critical point where those other two characteristics come together: those shared and limited actions are in contention, so that when one player grabs one, it’s not available to his opponents. This is almost the defining characteristic of worker-placement games. Without it, you have some sort of standard action selection: with it, you have the tense and constrained gameplay that grew out of role-selection games.
  4. Selection is Limited by Resources. However, as the term “worker placement” suggests, there’s one more critical element: the workers. Players don’t just choose their limited, shared actions willy nilly, they have to use limited resources to grab them. Usually, these resources take the form of workers placed on worker-placement spaces. Sometimes, players must also pay additional costs. Generally, one could imagine many sorts of resources being expended and still having a game that’s a lot like worker placement.

A few other characteristics are optional, but are ubiquitous enough that they’re found in many worker-placement games.

  1. (Optional, but common) Actions Expand Over Time. One of Caylus’ big innovations was that it slowly expanded its available actions, increasing complexity as the game went on. Agricola and others followed this same formula, but there are some worker-placement games such as Viticulture that don’t do this. Not using this option largely removes the ability for players to ramp-up their workers, and so removes an orthogonal way to advance in the game — but if you’ve got a game such as Viticulture that’s quite multi-faceted already, that’s not a problem.
  2. (Optional, but rare) Actions Can Be Player OwnedThis was Caylus’ other big innovation that hasn’t become mandatory for worker-placement games. In fact, it’s pretty rare. But some games such as Keyflower do allow players to own some or most of the worker-placement spaces. This creates another orthogonal strategic question: do you aid your opponents by using their spaces or not?

Does a worker-placement game need to all all four of the “mandatory” points in my description? I would say yes, but there’s a lot of possibility for variation, such as in The Manhattan Project (2012), which uses worker placement as part of a larger whole. But, if you get far enough away, you might have moved entirely out of the category of play.

The Manhattan Project (2012) is a little outside of the norm because it combines pure worker placement with personal action selection, and uses the same worker-meeples for both.

As with so many things in life, you’ll know worker-placement when you see it (as long as you have a strong definition, like the one herein), but generally you should see something that focuses heavily on these four or more points.

What Worker Placement Is Not

Worker placement is sometimes confused with a few other categories of play:

Action Selection. As with worker placement, action selection depends on players deciding what they’re going to do based on some menu of possibilities. Unlike worker placement, actions in action selection aren’t shared and they aren’t in contention. I’d generally define worker placement as a subset (or an advancement) of the action-selection mechanic.

Area Control. This sort of play uses tokens to gain control of regions in a game through warfare: new markers come in, and old markers are either destroyed or move out. Perhaps those regions later produce resources or allow some special action, but players don’t actually use their area-control meeples to select the action (nor is that action available to others in any meaningful way).

Auction. Here, players bid resources to win prizes. They could theoretically be bidding on actions, which puts auctions into the realm of worker-placement games. However, bidding on an auction is a totally different mechanic from simply placing a meeple: it has uncertainty, the possibility of loss, and generally requires a different type of strategy. You could perhaps make the argument that worker placement is a subset of auctions where everyone bids “1” and the first “1” wins, but you could perhaps make the argument that for most mechanics, so I think it’s specious.

Majority Control. This category of play is very similar to area control, except that control of a region is determined by who has the most meeples in a territory, not by who last player to drive their opponents out. The rest of the discussion applies.

Village (2012) is hard to categorize. It definitely has shared action spaces, and you’re definitely placing limited resources on them, and they’re definitely in contention … but that contention is defined by the resource cubes that you remove from the regions, not by the number of meeples placed there. I’d call it worker-placement, but an usual variant.

Role Selection. The history section of this article already covered the difference between role selection and worker placement, but in short, worker placement built on the action contention of role selection, but integrated it more tightly into a central board and introduced the need to expend resources to use those actions.

Some Controversial Games

So, finally, we come to those games that people claim are worker placement, but where I’d argue otherwise. I’ve listed five of the most popular here, with my argument for why they’re not worker placement.

Carcassonne (2000). You place meeples on territories, and if you have the majority of meeples in the territory when it scores, then you earn the points. In other words, the meeples, even though they have worker-like names such as “farmer”, “knight”, “monk”, and “thief” are majority-control markers. They do not select actions of any sort; instead, they contend for points. Majority Control.

Keydom (1998) / Aladdin’s Dragons (2000). This is a game that some claim was the first worker-placement game, and it’s not, in large part due to its absence of discrete workers and the uncertainty of its action selection. In fact, it’s really a bidding game (call it auction or majority control, as you prefer). Players place tokens in action spaces, and then when they’re tallied up, they determine who gets to take the actions. It’s still a pretty unique action-selection auction that I’d love to see available in a new “key” edition from Richard Breese. Auction.

Orléans (2015). Players draw characters from bags and combine them into formulas to take actions. The fact that actions are activated through the combination of multiple “worker” pieces would probably disqualify this game from being worker selection on its own. But, the actions also aren’t shared, so there’s no contention. Action Selection.

Robinson Crusoe (2012). There’s a set of shared actions in this co-op, all plainly visible on the main board. Players take them by putting one or more of their action discs on the space. It’s not worker placement because there’s no particular contention: players can stack their “workers” wherever they want. In fact, it’s been pretty hard to marry co-op games and worker placement because the contention at the heart of worker placement runs exactly at odds with cooperative design. Action Selection.

Scythe (2016). And finally, this is the game that got the argument started, when a popular video show claimed it was a top worker-placement game. Many of us thought that the reviewer was talking about Scythe’s action-selection mechanic, where players choose their actions from their personal player boards, which of course has no contention (though it creates some clever limitations based upon its pairing of actions, where those pairs always have to be done together). However, in retrospect, it looks like the argument was weaker than that: Scythe calls some of its meeples “workers”, and that seems to be the reason for the claim that Scythe is a worker-placement game. But, a name does not make it so. The “workers” are area-control units, and though they do generate resources, they have no part in the action-selection cycle of the game. Action SelectionArea Control.

Scythe (2016). Play this fun and innovative game, but please don’t call it worker placement. That’s a simple action-selection board shown above.

Summary

Worker placement depends on an action selection system where (i) the actions are shared, (ii) the actions are limited, (iii) the actions are in contention, and (iv) the actions require limited resources to activate. It is not area control, auction, or majority control. A game isn’t worker placement just because it calls one of its tokens a “worker” and you at some point place it somewhere.

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20 thoughts on “Defining Worker Placement

  1. I mostly agree with your definition of WP but I’m honestly baffled by your suggestion that role selection ‘dramatically ramped up interactivity’ and the implication that before RS players didn’t carefully watch each other’s turns.

    There are all sorts of ways to interact apart from action blocking and I tend to keep a more careful watch if someone can wipe me off the board rather than just take an option away from me, sometimes not even intentionally.

    • It certainly varies from game to game. I think that interactivity was generally medium to low in eurogames pre-2005, with some exceptions where it was high. The difference is that you had that interactivity in every single game with a worker-placement mechanism.

      • Examples of lower interactivity?

        I’m struggling. but can’t find any. Carcassone has a more engaging kind, so does Citadels, Bohnanza, Chinatown, Catan, Tikal, Mexica, Torres, Modern Art, Tigris and Euphrates. Heck, Lost Cities has more engagement versus one’s opponent.

        Princes of Florence? Goa? Both are very similar in structure to workerplacement games, but instead of action selection, there’s auction/bidding. The engine building part is kinda similar.

        • Yeah, I’d say the exact opposite! For me, worker placement took away interesting forms of interaction and replaced them all with the same blocking dynamic.

          • I think you’d have to go back and look at the games you were playing in 1998 before Verrater, in 2002 before Puerto Rico, and especially in 2005 before Caylus (but I can’t go back and look at my games played at the moment, because BGG has been down for the last day).

            My larger point may not be clear: worker placement (and role selection) increased interactivity because it placed interactivity in a phase of play were there previously wasn’t any: the action selection. That doesn’t in any way constrain whether there is *also* interactivity based on the results of the actions themselves. You might have an argument that worker-placement games tended to also walk back other types of interactivity. But if I look at Village, as an example, there’s piles of interactivity in going into the monastery, in contending for places in the Book, and in jostling for position in advance of orders coming out. (Maybe in traveling too? I don’t remember. It’s been a few years since I played the base game.)

            If I said there was a category that tends to minimize player interactions, it’s the resource management category of play, whereas you listed highly interactive trading, majority-control, and area-control games. (Lost Cities, one of my most played games, I find exactly comparable to worker placement, because the interactivity amounts to watching what your opponent does and blocking him via your discards.) Do worker-placement games tend more toward the resource-management category. Yeah, because that’s what Caylus introduced. But it’s not a necessity.

          • I would insist on getting an example of any relevant pre-Caylus games with lower interactivity than worker placement. Thing is there is a fairly common consensus (amongst certain boardgaming crowds) that boardgames and eurogames became less interactive after worker placements became popular

            Article on this: https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/18955/

            “My larger point may not be clear: worker placement (and role selection) increased interactivity because it placed interactivity in a phase of play were there previously wasn’t any: the action selection.”

            It’s clear, but I don’t see it as relevant. As my counter-argument is that it comes at a price for lower interaction in other parts of the game. A sum of interaction over the whole of the game is actually “less” then before – or rather as I see the main feature of WPs a restricted menu of possible options and their consequences the interaction space is narrower. Player’s personalities, group dynamics, all this is cut off from the game, I suspect intentionally (in the name of “balance” and “fairness” as the only skill worth seen as exercising in these games is optimising through an engine building maze of efficiency.)

            “If I said there was a category that tends to minimize player interactions, it’s the resource management category of play”

            Examples?

            “Lost Cities, one of my most played games, I find exactly comparable to worker placement, because the interactivity amounts to watching what your opponent does and blocking him via your discards”

            Hidden information element + push you luck element = psychology enters gameplay. Doesn’t in WP games – in those I just optimise around actions and win more than my share of them. And yes, more psychology in gameplay = “more” interactive.

  2. I can remind at least Way Out West (Wallace, 2000) before Caylus as worker placement. Also games like Im shatten des Kaisers (Burkert, 2004) use action selection (among limited available actions) juste like a classic worker placement (Russian Railroads for example)

  3. “But there’s power in names: they allow us to develop a common vocabulary, so that we know what other people mean, permitting us to set our own expectations.”

    Well, the idea of language is communication so this goes for any term you can think of – namely that it tries to communicate between different people. What’s particular about boardgaming terminology is that boardgamers aren’t the most cleverest in the naming department – they mostly try to describe things at face value, hoping, that somehow naming a tangible visible attribute of a boardgame will somehow translate into describing the feel of the game. Which is why “dice game” doesn’t tell you much. “Worker placement” in opposite takes a very narrow genre (in sense of variety of boardgame experience) and this is one reason it works. The second reason is that “worker placement” is a visual metaphor. So the term manages to connect the most in-your-face visual attribute of these games with the feel of these games (i.e. they all have the same feel, which is why).

    As far as I care, I happily lump workerplacements together with drafting games together int the same bucket of “action selection”. Same idea – you pick an action and by this deny anybody else taking it. Difference (I don’t care about) is that in WP games same assortment of actions tend to be available every turn thus shaping the strategy of these games; whereas in drafting games (of 7 Wonders type) the array of actions might change with every round. The feel of both types of games is the same – pick an action from a confine of options designer made for players (the main trait of these games is for me exactly the absence of open ended options, all game states are the ones designer predicted and controls) and other people can’t get this action. It’s a template that’s basically another word for MPS games (another visual metaphor) that besides drafting and WP includes games which are neither yet feel in play exactly the same way – in which players are constructing/solving a puzzle (can be engine building, can be just a tile placement like Kingdomino) and the only “interaction” is plans of different players interfering with one another on the level of action selection.

    “Instead, they had to contend for actions with their opponents. It innovated gaming by creating tension and uncertainty in what previous players would have considered a pretty essential element of gaming: whether a player got to do the action he wanted! It”

    This is ridiculous. Just because I can place a tile in Carcassonne doesn’t mean I get to place it just anywhere and action of players before me restricted or open up the options for placing.

    Worker placement did neither of these two things you claim – it neither created tension or uncertainty, nor eliminated “freedom of actions”. It just changed the place where they happen and how they happen. Instead the availability and feasibility of options being determined by gameplay and thus by collective creation of all the players, there’s now a menu of options carefully arranged and absolutely controlled by the designer. The tension of picking an option was there before and it is there after, just the way options emerge is different. Or rather: before options did emerge and vanish within the flow of a gaming situation (imagine a game like area majority or something like Small World), now options arrive on a platter, each neatly outlined with “yo, this is an option!” and a big red light over it in case anybody would miss it. Action selection means: 1 – options are controlled by the designer, they are controlled in their variety, but also in their effect. This is possible because options and group dynamics are severed from one another – the main idea is actually removing the influence of the gaming group and players’ personalities from influencing the gameplay. You can only do one of prescribed options, doesn’t matter if it’s 3 of them or 101 of them, and the effect of the action is already calculated into the system (balanced, controlled).

    “It also dramatically ramped up interactivity: a player might now select an action not just because he wanted it, but also to deny it to his opponents;”

    Nonsense. As I said WP on one level merely shifted focus. Before I took (an) action(s) to interfere with player’s positions or values – I would try to invade their area, or I would try to devalue their stock market share or I would try to trade with other players so to deny the player in the lead trading options. What WP supposedly does, other types of games already did. Just differently.
    (Also, seriously hindrance of opponents is what many many many game genres do way better that worker placements).

    Instead what happened was that there’s this menu of action in between myself and other players. Before I used actions to influence the shared game state – imagine an area majority map – and on this map there were investments of other players. So I would intrude into shared space trying to re-map the relationship between our investments (areas, buildings, units, money, …). All of these flowed in the case of area majority/control through this space which was open ended for all sorts of investment and intrusions of players. Same thing with trading space in trading games. Same thing with shared economy in a game like Modern Art or stock market games. But now – in WP – there is this filter in between us. There’s a keyboard and it has only so many keys, and all of them narrowly defined. And somebody clicking on a key makes it go away on other people’s keyboards, and …. this is “ramped up interactivity”? Err, manipulating other people’s keyboard is “more interactive” than talking to them, bargaining with them, wrestling with them? What it is, it’s a much more narrow way of interacting with both the game state and other players.

    Maybe what makes it so lovely is that just everything that could be happening in a boardgame is made so much more obvious and at face value. Options don’t emerge, they get designed and controlled and arranged. And suddenly everybody can see them on their first play – whereas with other genres it could happen that people would need 5-8 plays to understand which options the game actually enables; or it could happen that half the table would be clueless during the game and blamed the game for being boring. The benefit of worker placements is something completely different to what you talk about – it’s in providing an idiot proof environment which is bound to work with any type of player (relatively speaking) and can show in its first play more or less what the game can offer in the long run. Which is my main beef with these games (worker placements, drafting games, action selection games and games that aren’t any of listed, but play the same way) – as they give away the control of the game state to the designer they lower the ceiling of what is possible withing a boardgame.

    “Worker placement also managed to create a much more coherent and evocative play system than role selection by the simple fact that all the action spaces were integrated into a playing surface, rather than scattered about on cards, which is in my opinion why it succeeded.”

    Which explains why drafting games made on the same template like 7 Wonders or Amongst the stars were such a commercial failure. (not!) Drafting is the closest sibling to WP games and it’s as popular. Well, it’s basically the same thing, but on cards – pick an action, deny to others, pick another, quickly as the hands of cards rotate.

    • There’s a wide difference between 7 Wonders card drafting and worker placement: one has near infinite possibilities and the other has very limited possibilities. So, I feel like a worker-placement game is much more about strategically making plans and hoping they’re not spoiled and that a card-drafting game is much more about tactically reacting to the options you’re surprisingly given.

      (And, I think 7 Wonders was successful for totally different reasons: it compacted a two hour game into 45 minutes thanks to its simultaneous play, creating an otherwise unknown density of play in the long-filler space. There had been great card-drafting games before it, my favorite being Midgard, but they didn’t succeed at any particularly high level because they didn’t have the same density of play.)

      • 1. It’s only a minor, tangential bit of my post, which I really wouldn’t like to elaborate further than I do below. I’m more interested in other notions I wrote about. As I often said – if one plays a lot of WP games, then drafting is “widely different”, but from where I stand, exposed to a wider variety of gameplay types including narrative engagement, memory, dexterity, shouting, lying, etc., the difference is best illustrated by a Serbian saying “same crap different wrap”. It depends on the perspective of where one’s looking from, really.

        2. “one has near infinite possibilities and the other has very limited possibilities”

        No, both are limited, both have a ceiling.
        Tigris and Euphrates doesn’t have such ceiling, Bohnanza doesn’t have such ceiling, Condotierre doesn’t have such ceiling.

        But I already acknowledge this difference in flavour – WP with same options over the course of the game leans towards more scripted type of opimisation (a.k.a. “strategies”), drafting throws a bit of randomness into the mix, there’s a bit more adapting required. Though drafting offers even more control – there are games with special decks of cards for every round of the game, which means it’s possible to control the flow of the game up to quite a minor detail.

        “So, I feel like a worker-placement game is much more about strategically making plans and hoping they’re not spoiled and that a card-drafting game is much more about tactically reacting to the options you’re surprisingly given.”

        I agree. But this is only if you look at them in relation to one another. Looking from further away it’s more narrow type of efficiency focused engine building VS a tiny bit more adaptive type of engine building. Both with designer controlled menu of prefabricated options and narrow space for player engagement styles. My argument is that these two types have much more in common than where they stand apart. What I prefer to talk about is what these two types have in common (and why I don’t like it. Heh.)

        • Bohnanza has a single meaningful action: trade cards. You can’t even count playing or harvesting as actions, because they’re required. Tigris & Euphrates also has a limited set of actions: place a tile, place a disc, place a monument, refresh tiles (if I remember them correctly). Those are both considerably fewer choices than any worker-placement game I’ve ever played.

          Yes, there are many trades you could make in Bohnanza, and yes there are many places that you could place a piece in Tigris & Euphrates, but those are elements of the action system, not the action-selection system. Worker placement is just the front end of a gaming system, one that doesn’t define that back-end (though that’s often been resource management). And, though some worker placements have constrained back ends, others don’t. In Agricola, you have a totally freehand for building fencing and stables and you also have considerable freedom in choosing what cards to build, and later how to use them.

          • ‘Action system’ vs ‘Action selection’ system just seems weirdly artificial to me. When I’m thinking about what I’m going to do on my turn in Tigris, I have far more possibilities to consider than I do in most worker placement games. And what the other players do in between my current turn and my next one has *far* more impact on what I’ll choose too. WP often comes down to ‘I’ll take this space if it’s still available, otherwise that one’.

          • “Bohnanza has a single meaningful action: trade cards.”

            Yes, but this action includes a multitude of options emerging from the gameplay: Trade which card? To whom? To Sue, to Joe or to Reagan? Should I offer two cards for one? Could I donate the stink bean to anybody before my turns comes? What if start a greenbean field to take over Sue’s monopoly?
            This is the thing – in WP and drafting (and games which are neither yet play the same) it stands that more or less: action = option. That’s exactly how designer controlled environment is created – by gluing options on actions. In older games – as you said – everybody got the same amount of actions and didn’t contest for them. Yes, but, these actions could be used to multitude of options, all of which weren’t always available or were context specific.

            “Those are both considerably fewer choices than any worker-placement game I’ve ever played.”

            You mistake an action type a game allows you with a choice or an option. Possibly this is because of personal gaming history – namely workerplacement games have this “action = option = choice” equation thing going on. But in other games it’s not so.

            For instance, I once played Condotierre with gamers used to linking options to actions (eurogamers). They looked at their hands of cards, concluded they’re worse than mine and just threw the game to me. Because they didn’t realise than in Condotierre (a 1993 game) options aren’t in your hand of cards, they’re in the opponents. You’re not playing the system, you’re playing the opponents – in case of Condotierre this means passing the buck, letting people with stronger hands deal with problems and wear each other out. The main options in the game are all linked to group dynamics and not to hand of cards at all. (They’re linked to relative difference in player’s hands and their relative on board position).

            Take the extreme case of minimalistic social deduction game “Win Lose or Banana”. If you’re not the one with the “Win” card you basically have no choice in actions – your only course of action is to convince, scream or yell to the “win” player: “I’m a banana! Banananana! BaNAna!” But options emerge from: how do I say this? What arguments and strategies does the other player use? What is the character of the “Win” player? Do I need to act trustworthy and calm? Do I need to act persuasive and charming? Do I use intimidation and fear? (“Don’t mess this up bro!”) Do I use arguments? Do i try to charm with details, sounding as convincing as possible by talking more? How do I react to emotional atmosphere from the other player – are they convincing? Are they sure of themselves? Are they boring? How can I counter them? What can I exploit.
            And it’s just one action (“I’m a banana”) but zillion of options emerging from the game’s social situation.

            This is what I meant when I said that in other games / some games actions are emergent. There’s just 3 types of action, or 1 type of action or 1 action per game, yet options that can be reached with these actions are numerous and are sprouting up as the game progresses and evolves. These games I call “player driven”, because player have the power or the freedom to shape their gaming space. The actions given to them by the game are like a basic hunting knife – it’s just one blade, but can be used to accomplish many many tasks (if one knows how). Whereas workerplacements, drafting games and other related games of designer control paradigm have the equation of “action = option” – these actions are like highly complicated gizmos which are all one-purpose-only and only thing you need to do to make them work is push the red button on them.

            “Worker placement is just the front end of a gaming system, one that doesn’t define that back-end (though that’s often been resource management).”

            If does define it. Namely the back is always some kind of solitary juggling. It could be engine building or it could be “merely” a set collection or maybe even a spatial solo puzzle. The whole purpose of WP is to restrict options with which to interact with the shared space other players have access to. Which is why the “back end” has no access of other players. Thus it is defined.

            Or to frame it your way

            games that are “player driven”
            – Front end = simple action (maybe just one)
            – Back end = situation with multiple emerging options

            games that are “designer controlled” (WP, Drafting et al).
            – front end = an array of actions that equal options
            – back end = solitary gizmo

            The main difference, as I said is – in first situation options are emerging from a shared gameplay situation. The beauty of option not being linked to action is that designer doesn’t need to predict all possible situations possible in the game, they just frame the arena in which the situation battles and designes basic tools to be used in this arena. Players then create and/or find options in the situations they’re in.
            In the second situation the options are pre-fabricated, their variety and their effects completely in control of the designer. The ceiling for the possible situations in the game is set.

            In “player driven” games options emerge from a shared dynamic. In “designer controlled” games the action selection phase is where options are.

            “. And, though some worker placements have constrained back ends, others don’t. In Agricola, you have a totally freehand for building fencing and stables and you also have considerable freedom in choosing what cards to build, and later how to use them.”

            This part is just a solitary puzzle.

          • Every single game is designer-controlled. Every one is constrained by the choices the designer allows you, whether they’re neatly arrayed into a menu, listed out on a board, or sloppily scattered about a rulebook. You’re creating a distinction that does not exist.

          • Addendum to “the back part” of WP games

            Actually the back part contains just one option: optimise the hell out of what you have and get most points. It’s an efficiency puzzle of this or that type and the only prescription is more cow… victory points. All options are in the “front end” and the front end is narrowly controlled.

          • “Every single game is designer-controlled. Every one is constrained by the choices the designer allows you, whether they’re neatly arrayed into a menu, listed out on a board, or sloppily scattered about a rulebook. You’re creating a distinction that does not exist.”

            I’m voicing a distinction you refuse to recognize.

            If I play cockroach poker – a player driven game, there are situations emerging from the group playing the game repeatedly that designer could never have predicted and didn’t have to. Such a game environment is not “controlled”, because there was no need to foresee every possible situation that could happen. It was enough to form a basic frame, draw a circle and say – inside this circle there’s a game. Players can then run around this arena and INVENT options! Options designer never had to or needed to think about.

            You just said that T&E has – what 4 actions? But Knizia didn’t need to foresee consequences of all the possible things that could happen and cover all the corner cases and invent restrictions and whatnot. Because the game allows PLAYERS to do so. There are games where designers don’t need to balance all the options and all the actions and yadayada, because players actively balance such games. And when players balance games, the environment is richer, their personalities enter gameplay, their interplayer dynamics enters gameplay. And because of this options emerge from playing around and with player’s personalities and their relations.

            Designer controlled environments should be read as a visual metaphor of “hands on management” – designer defines everything that could be done and then outlines it with a big thick red pen, so players never need to figure it out, find it, or need to be creative or invent things on their own.

            if “control” as a term doesn’t work for you, how about distinction between hands-on-designer and hands-off-designer? (i.e. hands on management and hands off management).

            What I’m saying is:
            – in some games things happened that designer didn’t have to foresee and it’s okay, it doesn’t unbalance the game or anything of the kind. Players are left to have their agency and do stuff with it.
            – in some games designers carefully sculpted every little possible thing you can do, restricted it so that the effect of every such thing can only be brown or beige (usual euro colour scheme) and that all these effects are balanced between themselves. Players basically just execute rules, their creativity is minimal.

            Problem I have with WP games is that the as options are glued to actions there’s only as many possible actions in there as designer managed to fabricate, creating a ceiling in the process. With games that are player driven, the sky’s the limit – as players can inhabit the game space it can grow with them.

  4. Interesting article and alot of points I personally agree with, however, it seems like your discussion of Keydom really has to work hard to avoid listing most of the characteristics of WP. Simply because they are tabulated results, I don’t think makes it any less WP. In fact, that gives some interesting background to why WP grew out of Role Selection and possibly Auction games.

    And just to advocate for the devil a bit, I would ask that Risk be looked at with a critical eye. You place a limited number of workers on limited spots, to take one type of action (attack). However, the number of workers does control how many times you can take the action. I realize that placing the workers does not block the other players, rather triggering the action does.

    • Devil’s advocating is generally a good thing. I think that auctions and majority control are basically the same thing, and they’re perilously close to area control like Risk. So, if you argue that the auctioning of Keydom is worker placement (which I disagree with :)), then by necessity you let in something like Risk too.

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