 I'm Ryn. I'm Scott. We are the host of a podcast called Geek Nights, and we are here at PAX Unplugged to talk to you about worker placement games. Long ago, many, many years ago at a PAX East, we did a panel called Mastering Game Mechanics. Scott wrote this one, and we talked about a whole bunch of game mechanics, and it was really popular, and it was really fun, and we liked doing it. We had an idea. What if we did a whole panel about each game mechanic one by one? We gotta keep coming to PAX for free, and we're running out of ideas, so we're just gonna take one panel and chop it up into lots of small panels one year after the other. Done. So to try it out, we did an episode a while ago where we were like, let's talk about worker placement and see how it goes, and yeah, there we could, you could spend weeks talking about worker placement and not run out of things to say or argue about, so it felt like we have a good strategy. So we're gonna cover worker placement as a mechanic generically from the perspective of designers and from the perspective of players and a little bit from the perspective of philosophy and semantics. And a tiny bit of math, but we're not gonna get into the math because we don't know the math. We just know the math exists. Also, there's a good chance you've played more worker placement games than we have. We're just the ones smart enough to get the free badge, so don't come at us asking, what about this game? What about that game, right? We haven't played it probably. Yep, so there's a better question to ask, and most nerds, when they run a panel or they're at a convention like this and they wanna be insufferable, are gonna start with what is a game mechanic? Now, we could spend a long time talking about this, but it should be an easy question to answer because I suspect most of you use the phrase game mechanic a lot in your daily lives. You've probably said those words at least dozens of times just today. So it should be very easy to answer just like what is a sandwich? I mean, if I asked for a sandwich and you hand me a hot dog, you may not be wrong, but you're weird. So worse, game designers, people who are seriously study this and try to make games, they have a lot of really, really long definitions. And what I have found is that most of these definitions are either so precise that they're worthless or so broad that they're worthless or they're just an excuse to argue with other game designers. Right, these are usually useful for people who are academically discussing games, but they're not useful for here as anyone who's actually playing or making games, which is all we really care about because those are the two things we're gonna be doing in our lives, right? I don't think, you know, we're gonna be studying games in an academic setting. Well, partly because games are new. No one's gonna pay me to do it anyway. Arguably, the first worker placement game that was named as such was Calis, which came out in like 2005. So we are still in the very earliest days of modern games, full stop. Video games were invented in the lifespan of people in this room. If you agree that Calis was the first worker placement game, then worker placement is newer than Pac-Man, right? It's newer than video games, period. It's really new, so. So, these definitions aren't gonna help us, but it seems weird that it's hard to have a good definition, yet we all use this term all the time. So, let's ask Wikipedia. That's always how you solve this, right? I guess the panel's over. Worker, there's no such thing as game mechanics, but wait, what's this? I think there's more to this panel. Yeah, because otherwise we'd been three minutes. So, let's look at a list of what we would all agree. Everyone would agree, these are all game mechanics. Whatever that thing means, these are game mechanics. Taking turns as a game mechanic. Voting as a game mechanic. Raise your hand if you know what a rondle is. Rondle team, yes. No other PACs would have more than like two people who raised their hands to them. We love a good rondle. So, if we all agree that all those things are game mechanics, then the question to ask is, one, is worker placement the same kind of thing as those things? Obviously, the answer is yes. If anyone disagrees, I don't know what to say, because we're not gonna address your complaint. But Richard Garfield, in his book, Characteristics of Games, actually made a very good point about definitions and how nerds, especially in gaming, like to be really fiddly about them. But he said, when in doubt, don't be prescriptive unless you're doing academia. Be descriptive. So, instead of trying to write a definition of what is formally a worker placement game, describe what the hell a worker placement game is and then work with that description. You'll be a happier person if you do this generally in your life. So, we're gonna play a game together now. And let's decide what a worker placement game is together. Let's start with a game called Calis. Now, let's look at Calis. Calis has a bunch of pieces and looks like some dudes and you're putting these dudes on some spaces and I think you get some resources back. Raise your hand if you think Calis, just looking at this, is a worker placement game. I mean, we already told you it was the first one. You're just raising your hand for it. It's the first one, the first one. But what's going on here? We can say at least that games, it's a game where we're putting pieces on spaces and we're getting something back or causing some action from those spaces. Something's going on there. All right, Lord's of Waterdeep, another popular game. You might not know the rules to Lord's of Waterdeep, but I think if you look at this picture, it's pretty obvious that this is a worker placement game. Put some things down. I think you get some cubes back. Maybe you take this card. We can intuit that this is a worker placement game. Our brains know. We know in our hearts this is worker placement even without knowing the rules. So, of course. Agricola. Everyone's already nodding. I feel like we have agreement. Agricola. I feel like you wouldn't come to this panel if you hadn't played a bunch of worker placement games. That would be weird. Like somebody's never placed a worker in their lives. It's like coming to this panel. There's one person in the back furiously taking notes. Right. All right, let's up the ante a little bit. Let's go crazy. What about a fellow? Now, before anyone says that's a reversey, you're actually wrong, but I don't have time to explain why. This is a fellow. Now, you're placing pieces in spaces. Those pieces have game mechanics. They're owned by you. They achieve some mechanical thing in the game. I think we're smart enough to say that even though it's not meeple-shaped, that's not the point. That's not the important factor here, right? Are they workers, I think, is the question. Does anyone, raise your hand if you think this is a worker placement game? Nobody, no? Oh, someone does. Somebody does. I don't think so. Now, why not? What's different? And this is where we're gonna debate because we don't have the answers. We're not academics. We're two guys. I got some free packs badges. So, on one hand, with those other games, the worker itself seems meaningful in that it may interact with other workers by blocking them. It may do some things in the game. These pieces block other pieces. They do block other pieces. They also bring a resource or a thing back. In both those games, you put a worker down and you're getting something back out of it that you then use to re-engage with the game. Whereas here, the only mechanical effect those pieces have is the space they are in and whether or not they cause flippages. And also, if a hot dog is a sandwich or not, if I said, hey, you wanna play a worker placement game and I put this on the table, you would think I was weird. All right, now it's gonna be a hard one. It's a meatball shape. It's a meatball shape. You play a tile and then you might put this meatball there and it brings back victory points. Raise your hand if you think Carcassonne is a worker placement game. Ooh, some people. We've got some more people. Hello, I guess the meatballs have them confused. Yeah. Well, we're gonna say arbitrarily, this is not a worker placement game. This is a tile laying game. I'm not arbitrary. I can explain why I don't think it is. All right, explain why this is not a worker placement game. All right, so here's, I don't know, we discussed this this morning. Rem doesn't seem to agree. We don't agree 100%. No, you don't agree. This is gonna be great. So imagine you just have a regular old game, right? And what does a game do? It has your turn structure and it's on your turn, you have steps, right? Step one, step two, step three, do all these things. That's a basic game. Obviously every game follows that structure. Therefore every game cannot be a worker placement game. So have some games that don't have turns. Sure, but having a set of steps that you perform on your turn is not enough to make a worker placement game, right? Okay, so what if you have a game where there are actions and you say choose some actions, right? Okay, so the rules of the game say on your turn, there are four things, pick one, right? Is that enough to be a worker placement game? Like I could make a board with four areas and on your turn you have one worker and you place that worker in one of the four areas and that's your turn. And that looks like worker placement, right? You're choosing an action each turn, but it's like if I got rid of that worker part and I just said, here's four things, choose one, is that enough to be worker placement? I don't think so, right? What I think is worker placement is when the actions on your turn that you take, you put an abstraction layer over them, right? So now that the taking of actions itself is a mechanic of the game, you might have a different number of actions, you might have a resource that you have to spend to take actions. People are competing over which actions you're going to take, you might draft the actions, right? Actions themselves are no longer just rules in the game, they are instead a resource of the game that you are battling over, fighting over, trading, accruing and such and such, right? So in Carcassonne, on your turn, what do you do? You play a tile, you draw a tile, you play a tile and then you may put a meeple on it. The actions are the same every single turn, right? There's no abstraction of I can get an extra meeple out or if I play a meeple, Rhym can't play a meeple because there's blocking. There is a little bit of blocking because he can't put a meeple on a feature that already has someone. A little bit, right. If we talk about large shaped places to put workers, we're getting into the advanced territory of this panel already. Right, but in general, the action structure of Carcassonne is set in stone. It is not, the rules of the game don't manipulate the action structure in any way, shape or form, it's the same every single turn, these are the steps. There's no way to buy more steps, lose steps, rearrange steps, take steps from anyone else or anything like that. So I also think it's not worker placement. I don't disagree with anything Scott said, but I have a very different reason why it's not a worker placement game. I think of worker placement as the workers are a finite resource, they must interact with each other, but when I put them down, I'm going to get a resource back and I do not consider victory points and of course there are exceptions to everything. Don't start with me here, but victory points are generally not a resource, they're the end game condition, they're almost like adjacent to the game. You're getting victory points, most games don't mechanically change the game based on how many victory points you have. There are games that do, but most games do not. So I say it's not worker placement, even if it looks like worker placement, if the only thing the workers do is collect victory points. If they can collect victory points, but they can also bring back resources, that's fine, but they can't only collect victory points. But you could have games or the actions aren't just getting resources. You could put out workers that do something that is neither victory points nor it, right? It doesn't matter what the, it could be like, oh, you play worker here, you get a free turn. I guess you could say a free turn is a resource, you could define, almost anything could be a resource, but it's not always gonna be like get five wood, right? Or get 10 weeks. If I woke you up in the middle of the night and asked you, what's a resource in a game? You're probably gonna be in for a much longer panel than this one. You're gonna imagine a cube of a color that is like a fish or something. Yeah, a bag of water. All right, here we go. Puerto Rico, you choose, each player chooses one of these and they can each only be chosen once and then every people get the effects. Is Puerto Rico a worker placement game? Raise your hand if you think yes, be brave. If you think it's worker. People don't seem to think so. See, I, yeah, according to what I just said to be consistent, right? I think this is a worker placement game, right? These are places you can put workers and when I take one, you can't take it anymore, right? This is, if everyone had one worker and there were eight spaces to put a worker, on your turn, you put your worker on one space and now nobody else can go in that space that turn, right? The only disc is we're taking cards instead of putting workers onto eight spaces, right? You're still drafting actions. The actions that you take on your turn, right? Are still part of the mechanics of the game. It's not just, ah, on your turn, you craftsman and then you do this, right? It's like, choose what you will do on your turn, right? You do it, everyone else does it more weekly, right? And then the other person chooses what they're going to do on their turn. There is some sort of action draft here, right? And then the action draft is an abstract structure over what you do on your turn and therefore it's worker placement. You said the words action draft, which are very important. So I'm going to say this is not a worker placement game because again, if I go out there and say, hey, do you want to play a worker placement game? And I plop down Puerto Rico, not everyone is going to be- The vast majority of people did not raise their hands. Exactly. But there is an asterisk there. Want to take a screenshot from Board Game Geek. Worker placement is a stylized form of action drafting. So it's a skin on top. I could, we could literally like Scott described, just put those, put a little nipple spot on each one and you put your nipple there and then we execute them in turn order. So if you went along with Board Game Geek's definition, the only thing that's keeping this from being worker placement is eight nipples. So if we re-implemented Puerto Rico just to use nipples, now it's a worker placement game. And if this game came out today and we remove that awful colonial theme, which there is a re-release that does replace it, that is good, then it would be a worker placement game and we wouldn't have this debate, but it doesn't. It looks like that, so it's not. All right, so you don't need to know the rules to Mexico. Mexico is a really fun game. It's pretty old. It's in the same series as Tecal. If anyone's played that- And what was the other one? I forget the name of the third one, Mexico, Tecal and something. I forget. Nobody remembers that. Java. Java. So in Mexico, you have action points. Six of them. Six of them. You spend one action point to do whatever the hell this is. You can spend five of them to do whatever the hell this is. Doesn't matter what those things are. Is Mexico a worker placement game? Raise your hand if you think it is. More hands are coming up. Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, it is an abstraction, right? Over, you know, you're spending action points, right? You know, and you're sort of choosing the structure of your turn by spending these points, right? But on the other hand, there's no interaction, right? You spend your six points freely, and everyone else can spend their six points freely on the prescribed actions, however they like. And there's no interaction with the other players, right? If I choose the water auction at the top six times, right? That rim can do the same exact thing, right? There's no drafting. There's no, I took the action, you can't take it, or nothing like that whatsoever, right? And does that have to be there for it to be worker placement? It's like, maybe, I think so. But there has to be some sort of interaction where there is competition for the actions and not just choose whatever you like, right? Because you could rewrite this as like, oh, here are four things that you can do on your turn, pick any one, or here are six things you could do on your turn, pick any six, and you just pick whichever ones you want. And earlier I said that's not worker placement, so I have to be consistent. If we go on the style argument of how the game is put together and presented, if these were physical pips, and we just had our own boards to do solo worker placement, and we just torturously redesigned this game to look like worker placement, it would at least have the style of worker placement, and this is where instead of putting an X on it, we're gonna talk about the seven bridges of Constburg problem. So we're not gonna get deep into the math because we don't know it, we just know it exists. But this is a famous old math problem that Euler worked on, and there's a lot of problems like it this led to the modern theories of topology, to not theory, to big parts of quantum physics. Broadly speaking in layman's terms, the idea is you can take things and map them to the minimum essence that has a shared set of characteristics, and then all things that share those characteristics are for certain purposes identical to each other. That was a lot of words, so let's break this down. It does not matter what shape this stupid city is in. If there are seven bridges and rivers shaped like this, any physical geography that has those seven bridges connected to this island in this way, they are all the same in terms of how you can walk from one place to the other. This gets into a more complicated theory of topology theory. This is actually how the periodic table works as well. If any of you know physics, then you'll be nodding, no one's nodding, and I'm paraphrasing Wikipedia and YouTube video. There's a number file on YouTube, right? You're out there. Yeah, but a coffee cup and a donut for many purposes are functionally identical. They are describable the same way. They are effectively the same object, and that is very important because all tabletop games that are not dexterity games and do not have an app, which I argue are not tabletop games anymore. Not role-playing games either. Yep. But some of them maybe. Though you can implement any role-playing game except a lark with cards. Sure. All tabletop games are card games. Full stop, no exceptions, except the ones we just listed. Every component, any component, take any board game, imagine a monopoly, a yacht sea, any game that you can think of. Every component can be replaced with cards only. A D6, six cards with rumored one through six, shuffle it up, draw one, that's a D6. Yep, monopoly board, a whole bunch of cards arranged in a circle with a big card under all of them. Meeples, and putting them on spaces, it could just be, well, we showed you Puerto Rico already. Right? Cards. Yep. Everything can be replaced with cards no matter what. So we've just proven that every game is every other kind of game, and there's no mathematical or real intrinsic distinction. And we can all agree on what is and is not work replacement for radically different reasons. Then what the hell is a game mechanic? So I think we're asking the wrong question. There is a much better question to ask, and the question we should be asking is, what does naming a game mechanic do? Ooh, someone went, ooh. Yeah, that's, we got the microphones. It's the TED Talk moment where you're like, what if? It gives us intuitive expectations, heuristics about the real world. If a game is a work replacement game, then I have this natural, I'm a human. I can see the world around me. I can intuit. I have six people who can do work. There are a bunch of buildings there. If I put them in a building, they'll do work. There's a picture of a fish. He'll bring me a fish back. The workers can't go into the same spot. There's not enough room. Like we have all these intuitions we can have. That's why we can teach each other board games relatively easily without having to explain quantum physics to get there. I think the biggest thing that naming mechanics and more broadly naming genres does, is that if you look at, say, video games, they name the first person shooter and they say, that's one, that's it. Doom, that's a first person shooter. Quake, that's it. As soon as you give that a name, now everyone in the design space starts taking the core aspects of that game and making other games, keeping as much or as little of the original thing as they can and then calling themselves the same thing. And in effect, it just sort of organically, whatever designers make based on what inspired them and what they borrowed the most from just becomes more items in the same category. So it's like, K.L.I.S. appeared. If we agree it's the first one, might not be, whatever. And people made other games that borrowed heavily on K.L.I.S. called themselves the same thing. And now you just create this sort of, actually close-minded space for designers of thinking, I am going to make something with this label and therefore I will carry on some number of these tropes from all the other games that have done the same thing. Case in point, many of you, if you were not around playing German-style board games in the U.S. when K.L.I.S. made it over here, it was the biggest damn deal. You couldn't get a copy of this game, like everyone was playing it. I got a copy of it. Oh, we got a copy of it, yeah, but it was expensive. But these intuitive expectations also mean if I sit down at another first person shooter, I can assume a lot about how it works. I don't have to read the rules to Overwatch, too, to understand how to play it because I've played Doom. There's more things I need to learn, but I got all the basics down. We get a common lexicon. Think about any genre or mechanic of tabletop games that you like, trick-taking games. Yeah, the word trick, you know what a trick is. You'll talk about Trump suits. You'll talk about following suit. You have this language that's shared. You've played Race for the Galaxy, Roll for the Galaxy. That language that you learned, you learned a language, congratulations. Once you know that language, you know how to play all those games that use that same language. Common characteristics. This is back to that topology thing. Worker placement games share a set of common characteristics. We're gonna talk about those in a little bit of detail in a moment. But think about back to trick-taking games. A trick-taking game may or may not have Trump suits. Just like a worker placement game, may or may not have the workers block each other in certain ways. A trick-taking game may or may not have bidding. A first person shooter may or may not let you use a mouse. May or may not let you jump. There's a set of characteristics almost like the parameters you can tune to change how the game works in detail. But they're all fundamentally the same kind of game. All the worker placement games fit into the superset of worker placement game. Of course you can dispel the nothing by naming the child and save the world of Fantastica. Notice in a lot of fantasy worlds, there's a trope. Giving something a name gives it power. Knowing someone's true name gives you power over them. Naming things is something humans do because it turns the thing into a symbol that we can then compact and put into our brain. That was a joke. That's why we had Falkor up on the screen up to this point. But also, giving something a name makes it real as far as our prefrontal cortex is concerned. And this is the one I think is the most important. This is telling us, the designer is telling you, by how they skin the game, what part of the game they thought was interesting, how they want you to interact with the game, how they expect you to interact with the game. That's the most important one. Worker placement games are the kinds of games where the designer broadly wants you to have a limited set of things and put them down to collect fish or whatever. Yep, we talked about how you're abstracting the structure of your turn and there being some sort of rules around that, right? It's like if the designer makes a bunch of meeples and a bunch of spaces, they're telling you that that abstract system that they have developed is the focus, the focal point of this game. That is what this game is about. There's other stuff going on, but it's really about that system. Whoever does best at that system is gonna win. And there might be other games where that system, they do have an abstraction. It is technically a worker placement game, but they really haven't designed it in that way. They didn't choose meeples and spaces or whatever kind of thing to focus on it, right? They really put a lot of stuff going into maybe some tiles that get laid as a result or something else and you would call that a tile laying game even if worker placement happens to be there or lately everyone's combining deck building and worker placement together, like the Dune game and the Arnett game, right? And it's like, are they one or the other? Are they both, right? Look at what the designer did, how they shaped the thing and that will tell you what's up. Yep, just like the theme of the game. Kailas has a theme of you're building the castle and the castle on the board is like at the top and it takes up a bunch of space for no good reason. But it doesn't take up as much space as all those squares are going down the road. That's the biggest part. All right, so we're gonna talk about Kailas in a little bit of detail. Now don't worry if you don't know the rules. We're only gonna talk about the worker placement parts of this and I have two slides we can jump back and forth between depending on what we're focusing on. Has anyone here played Kailas? All right, not as many as I thought. Okay. So I've read the rules again recently. We played this game a lot a couple of decades ago. 2000 something. Yeah, 2006, 2007. We played this game a lot. I remember, yeah. But this game, in terms of worker placement, one thing that we do that we can interrogate a little bit is on your turn, you take a worker and you put it on a space and you get at the end of the turn, whatever is on that space. I put a worker here, I get two wood and I think that's food, two ordnance food. I think pink is food, yeah. I put a worker here, I can do a thing. I put a worker here, I can do a thing. It's not always get, right? It's like there's an exchange one, there's build, right? There's various different actions you can take. But most of them are just get some cubes. Yep. So we've got the base mechanic. The most important and core characteristics of worker placement I think is easy to say is placing workers to get resources or to mechanically interact with the game in some way. Yeah. So it also has the very basic rule. If I put my worker on a place, nobody else can on that turn. I'm the one in that place and everyone else is out, right? So it is an action draft. Yep. So in a worker placement game then, a characteristic we won't, about this game, worker placement games have the characteristic of whether or not the workers block each other and whether or not the workers interact directly. This game has a thing where players can own the spaces. That's what the houses are. So I might have built this space. If I put a worker there, that might mean something. If Scott puts a worker in my space, that might mean something. Now, when Kayla's the way it works, if I put a worker in someone else's space, they just get a victory point. So it's good to be the landlord. But also, if I put a worker in my own space, I always pay $1 to put my worker there. There's a whole other set of mechanics we'll talk about in a minute. So I can go there more easily because it's mine. I can go, someone else can go there, I get rent. So already there's a lot going on. That's not even a super common mechanic in worker placement games, but it's here in Kayla's the first one. It even has something cool and clever. I don't know if you can see it down here. If I own this space and someone else goes here, they get two wooden and a food. I get a wood or a food. I get a little bit of kickback of resources as well. Partly because these buildings in this game are ridiculously overpowered, super unbalanced, dangerously broken. I mean, you could put a worker somewhere else to get one cube or go there for three cubes, right? It's three time. That's like getting three workers. It's obviously strong, even if you know nothing else about the game. It has a passing mechanic. Worker placement games, you go around, you put workers out and eventually someone passes. The way this game works, when the first person passes, they might not have put all the workers out. They get a dollar. That's fine. A lot of games have the characteristic of the first person to stop doing things, gets a special thing. They then put a token here, covering up that one. It now costs everyone else $2 to put a worker out. When someone else passes, it costs $3 to put a worker out, $4, $5. That is huge. Very few worker placement games do that. But it's here in Calis, the first one. Is it really worth it for you to do more actions than everyone else? You could do more actions than everyone else and do a whole bunch more stuff, but you're gonna spend $5. That's a lot of doubloons. But now think about that other mechanic we talked about. If you own a space, it always costs $1 to go into that space. Now we've opened up a whole strategy around worker placement. Do I go in my own space early because I don't want someone else to get the good payout? Do I wait, hoping someone else will go in my space so I get a kickback? Do I wait, hoping no one else goes in my space so I can go there cheap after everyone else has passed? Do I pass early to drive the price up for everyone else and then sneak into my own building or someone else sneaks into the building later and I still get my kickback? A lot of interesting decisions came out of the interaction of these, what three mechanics we've talked about within worker placement so far. The workers execute in order. Intuitively, down the road. This goes, then this goes, then this goes, then this goes, you just follow the road. Yeah, you put all the workers out and then you process all the buildings down the road. It's not a lot of worker placement games these days. It's like you put the worker and immediately do the thing and K-List doesn't work like that. You put out all the workers once everyone's passed, then you go down the road. So let's say one of the buildings requires me to give it an input. My worker has to bring some food with him to make this happen. Well, if I don't have any food and the building that needs the food is up here but the building that'll get me food is down here, where my workers are placed on the road matters in addition to which tile they're on. This was also, again, the first worker placement game. It's like this game did everything and then every other game just sort of scaled back to a subset of these characteristics. You also have to keep in mind that adding the tiles to the road is itself an action. When the game starts, you only have up to there, right? And all these other tiles beyond there are added. So the order is changing every game. See how those are tiles? And the other ones are not tiles or at least those are the first five or preset. It starts all the way up here. Yeah, but the point is is that the order might be different every game. There might be a tile that makes food higher up on the road than a tile that uses food or it might be backwards. You don't know. You're probably gonna do it on purpose one way or the other to help yourself. You might go in a place, the only early food so that your friend won't have the food they need to do whatever they were gonna try to do and ruin their strategy. Right, so you went on that one space and that obviously blocks the space you went on but it might actually effectively block other spaces down the road which are now useless because no one has the resources to be able to use those later spaces except you. Now think about how much more complex that is than say a Gricola where a common strategy in a Gricola is put your worker in the space someone needs and you block them. A lot of worker placement games are only interactive in the sense that if you block a space someone else can't use it. This game's got big brain ways to block people. It's not so simple. Not every worker is necessarily even gonna fire. Yeah, this is the craziest thing. This game has a provost and a bailiff and I don't think I've ever seen a game that has this mechanic. It's complicated. I can teach you the whole thing but basically there's a guy who every round is moving down the board and he tells you how far out we can start building buildings. There's another guy who moves around the board. The player one, there's a building you can put a worker in that lets you move this second guy up to three spaces in either direction. After all the workers get placed every player then goes around in order and can spend money to move that token back and forth up to three spaces. He takes bribes, he's very corrupt. Yep. And then, see intuitive mechanics. In the real world I can totally bribe a cop. So guess what, I can bribe the cop here. Let's say the provost ends up here. Well then, none of these buildings fire. The building's only fire up to where he is. So now the players are spending resources and fighting over how far down this road are we even gonna go. If your worker's here, you're just effed and it's really funny. Can you imagine if you were the last player to pass and you paid five dollars to put a worker at the very end of the road and then the bailiff moves lower so that's not even gonna happen now. And now how many more dollars do you have to pay to bribe the guy to go down to let that building happen? So now we have a whole other level of fun mechanics and all the strategies where if Scott put a worker way out at the end I might put a worker like right behind him because he needs to protect his worker so he's gonna also protect my worker and I don't need to spend as much money to protect my worker. The point is you can see that there are a ton and ton of rules and all these rules are determining is what will you do on your turn, right? There's no pre-written thing. I will do step one, step two, step three. It's not here's four things, choose three. We're going to play a game, an entire sub game and that game will determine what will actually be the actions you take on your turn and that is what makes this very worker placement. So let's zoom out a little bit now. Now, characteristic, another word and I don't have a whole bit about a definition around this but a characteristic of a game is like we were talking about before. So in worker placement, what are the characteristics of worker placement in the same way that in trick-taking games is there Trump, do you bid, whatever? So first and foremost, to talk about one we didn't talk about with Kailas, can you get more workers or not? That's huge. Some games like a Greekola, there's that one spot where you can make a baby and you really want to be the first person on that spot. You want to hammer that baby as hard as possible. But Kailas, there's no, you have a set of workers and that's it, you're not limited by the number of workers, you're limited by money and the provost and all that other nonsense. There's the characteristic of do workers need to pay to go out, is there a resource cost to placing a worker beyond just the worker? Does the worker go out and then come back with a resource? Or does the worker go out and stay for a while to having some effect and come back later? Not many games use that ladder, but that is a characteristic of a worker placement game. You could have a space where the worker has to sit there for three rounds and then he comes back with something or another space that gives you two fish, but he comes back immediately. A game that has delayed worker placement because there aren't many is actually a Super Nintendo game called Aerobiz, and Aerobiz Super Sonic, which is literally a game where you are the CEO of an airline and it's a spreadsheet game on the Super Nintendo where you run an airline and you have workers in the game for negotiators and you can send them to different airports to negotiate for airport slots, basically fish. You're going somewhere to get fish and bring them back. Tokyo, it might take 12 months for that worker to come back with the fish in Tokyo. They're very tough negotiators over there. But if you want to drop one in LA yet, that worker comes back the next month with the fish. So imagine a worker placement game where the cost is not necessarily fish or money or whatever. It could be time or turns or blood or whatever it is. Do workers block or not? Can they share spaces or not? There's a whole unexplored world of complex interactions. What if we had a game where if two workers are in the same spot, they fight with each other? I've seen games where it's like, yeah, you could put workers in the same spot, but there's three spots and there's like five players. So it's like, yeah, it's more people can go together. You're not completely blocking, but you're kind of team blocking, right? Not everyone can go there. Yeah, it's a little easier. We've got the characteristic of, well, I guess there's so many, we can't list them exhaustively, of course. But think back about Kailas with these buildings. Can the spaces be owned and can the spaces even be changed? A lot of worker placement games just have those spaces. Maybe there's some randomization of which spaces. There aren't as many where the spaces are themselves also being built by players by putting their workers on other spaces like Kailas. But whether or not they are modifiable, whether or not the players have agency over what spaces are there, whether or not spaces can be added or removed or upgraded or augmented, which is something Kailas also does that we didn't talk about. That's a whole space that's largely unexplored. I think any characteristic of worker placement games we could talk about, we could come up with a way to use it that no one has ever made a worker placement game before on earth that does that. Well, I think really the simplest way to put it is that if you're going to abstract how you will determine what you do on your turn, you're basically making a sub game, right? It's a sub game of what will we do on our turn? Let's play a different game to figure out what our turn's gonna be in the big game. And that sub game can be any game. Can be any game? Yeah. You could play poker and be like, all right, that determines what you're gonna do on your turn, right? And now you have worker placement via poker, anything. So a little bit, I think this is worth talking about. If worker placement games have common characteristics, they have a common topology, they're all that same thing, then what are the common strategies of worker placement games and how effective are they? And this gets a lot into how honestly well designed the worker placement games are. The core strategy, in my opinion, this is not, this is just some guy on a stage where you gotta patch the packs. It's all about return on investment. If workers are the finite resource, meaning you have a set number of workers you're gonna be allowed to place over the course of this game, no matter if you distill it down to that, you gotta get the most return for the workers you place. Figuring that out is the most important component to any strategy. But if that's the core, then for any worker placement game where you can get more workers, you probably wanna try to get more workers. Especially earlier, right? Cause the earlier you get them, the more use you get out of them, right? So really it's not more workers, but like more worker turns, right? How many total placements you're going to get is what you would maximize. Yup. Cause think about it. If you start a game with three workers and every round you can put them out and the game lasts 10 rounds or 10 turns, three workers times 10, you're gonna get 30 actions. If you get a new worker after round one, then you multiply that, you now have nine more actions compared to all the other players. That is huge. I found many worker placement games mess this up and if they let you get more workers, that is the only strategy. Look at you, Agricola. But the opposite is true, right? If you get a new worker very late in the game, even in Agricola, getting a new worker costs a worker turn, right? So it's like, when you make that baby, you had to spend a worker on the make baby space. So you actually lost one worker turn, right? In order to get the new worker. So if you get a new worker one turn before the end of the game, you actually have a net zero, right? Because you lost a worker turn to make the baby and the next turn, you basically get that action returned to you and you take one extra action in your back where you started. You would have been better off just not doing that and doing two other things. So not to drag Agricola, but at least in base Agricola, there's one space that will give you an extra worker early. So each turn, only one person can get a baby to get another worker. And you know it's gonna come out either on, I think it's the fourth turn or the fifth turn or at worst, the sixth turn. Like it comes out at a certain point in the game. The entire game strategy effectively boils down to, you want to be positioned to be the person who gets that first worker and almost nothing else matters up to that point. Unless you're very foolish in the other areas of the game that's gonna win you the game. Why? Because workers block, there's only one space, there's only one way to do it. It becomes like a soccer game. The score is gonna be zero, zero. One goal matters a lot. As opposed to Calis where it has all these other systems to mitigate that. A game that mitigates this very well, but it's not a worker placement game, is a game called Hansa Toytonica because it's a game where you can do the equivalent of getting more workers. You start with like two workers and you can get a third worker, even a fourth worker, a fifth worker. There's only one space on the board to do it, but it takes multiple turns effectively to engage with that space to get another worker. And other players can fight with you in that space. So instead of the game being whoever gets their first wins, the game becomes, are you going to fight with other people over that space or are you gonna let your three idiot friends fight over that space for a while while you just collect all the other kinds of things you can collect in the rest of the board? So this gets into Game Theory of Hawk Dunn Problems where they're all hawks now, they're fighting with each other and they're actually destroying themselves, but the game gave us this strategic space to where a dove is now a viable strategy. In a Gricola, it can't be a dove. If you don't go for that baby, you're gonna lose unless your friends are really bad at a Gricola. All right, so with this in mind, practically speaking, you have a brand new worker placement game you'd never played before, right? How do you get the biggest return on investment? If you first look, see if there's a way to get a new worker, right? Because obviously if you do that early, you're gonna be doing great. But if not, what you wanna do is look at each possible action, right? And do the math and say, okay, that action, it gets what? Three wood, seven grains, five sheeps, whatever it gets you. And be like, all right, how does that translate into victory points? The thing that's actually gonna win the game, right? And you're basically just trying to do the math to say, all right, the most victory points per worker action. I'm gonna have this many worker actions, that space or that worker action spent there will result in this many victory points. That one will result in one less victory point and so forth. And if you just focus on that, are you gonna win every time? No, but if other people aren't trying as hard as just thinking of that simple strategy, you will beat them, right? You will beat them pretty much every time. Yep. So how about some more generic juristics to be better at worker placement games? Look at the board and remember intuition, worker placement, think about the real world. If you see a lot of spaces to get grain and a lot of spaces to get sheep and a lot of spaces to, I don't know, have a baby, but there's only two spaces out of all those spaces that give you a crystal skull. There's something special about those crystal skulls. So assume in a vacuum, if you know nothing else about the game, go for the crystal skulls. Do whatever you need to do to get those crystal skulls. That'll probably be better than playing randomly and it'll probably be better than whatever your friends are doing because they didn't come to this panel. And another thing you can focus on to worker placement, spend some time, this is a little more advanced, look at what the other players are doing or needing in the game and try to be in their way. This is a common strategy in almost all worker placement games because of the blocking. You all know the moment when you take the spot and your three friends all say, I needed that spot. Well, then you made a good decision, you're correct. The turn order plays big in this, right? So it's like usually worker placement games will have different paths of victory points. For example, in K-List, there's the castle, which is the main way, but there's also, you need the expansion, maybe there's a jewelry way to get a lot of victory points for being a jeweler and just hitting the, getting gold, making jewelry and getting a lot of points that way and ignore the castle. You don't need to help the king build. You can help the king and the queen, whatever they need, right? Jewelry rise. And so it's like, if you see the person to your left starting to collect gold, like you think they're gonna do jewelry, well, they're to your left. So you wanna do that too and now they can't do it anymore, right? Whereas if the person to your right is doing jewelry, do castle, right? Never do the thing in any game, not just worker placement games, never do the thing the person who usually goes before you is doing, you'll always just do it worse and be worse than them and lose. Do whatever the person on the other side of you is doing and you'll always do it before them. You will beat them to their own game. You may not win, but you'll at least get second place. And this is why in a most well-designed worker placement games won't just do a clockwise turn order, which on the one hand is kind of annoying because it makes the game harder to play, like who goes next? Oh, it goes in a star shape and it changes every turn and sometimes you're bidding for turn order or trying to change who goes first, right? But that ends up basically making the game meaningful because now you're not just constantly, well, I'm sitting to the left of so-and-so and they chose that strategy so I'm hosed and I can't change the turn order at the end. Instead, you can be like, oh, well, the person to my right is hosing me. Let me put my resources towards changing the turn order so I go before them and now ha ha, the shoes in the other foot. It's not worker placement, but so back in college when we got, we found out about these weird German games, we played El Grande all the time and we realized there was a strategy where on the last round you wanna play a two, then a one, then a 13 and play the king. It's like all a thing. So you wanna do this. We all knew we wanted to do it and the game went clockwise. So one day Scott sat down at the table. I sat down at the table, but I sat down on a certain side of Scott. Scott got up and sat next to me on the other side of the table and then I got up, went to the other side and then we had to draw lots on who sat where because this became a problem. When that happens, I think you should just play a different game, right? It's like, it's time. You figured this one out, you're good. Or you have to play the game in times and being the number of possible configurations of the table and there are some people at this pass who would definitely do that but I don't have time for that. But a good touristic for you. If you're ever playing any game, Kailas has this by the way and there is a way in the game to spend resources to manipulate turn order. That is probably a very important thing to engage with. The designer did not put it there for no reason. They probably put it there to stop what just happened with the musical chairs. Right, so the turn order is very important for the reason we just said. It's very important, you know, agricula again as the example, right? We talked about how getting the baby first is the most important thing. Well, how do you get the baby first? You have to be the first player on the turn the baby action appears. So all the turns leading up to that, you're hammering go first. I, and it's like I went, I choose the workers that I go first and then I go first so no one can stop me from picking go first. And then I keep going first every single turn until the baby appears. And then, aha, I go first, baby. All right, tada. When you're choosing go first, you're basically cashing, you're basically sacrificing all these earlier worker actions to get a whole bunch of return on them because that baby is gonna replace all the ones you spent on the go first action. And I think in agricula, going first, you also get something else when you go on that space, like a gold or something. Yeah, I don't know. I don't get it exactly. All right, the other reason going first is great is remember, this is an action draft, right? Even if you get a ton of workers, let's say I gave you 100 workers, right? I think about a draft also as like a sports draft, right? If you think about the major sports leagues, you know, NHL, MLB, NFL, right? The people who aren't picked in the first round basically don't make it to the league like almost ever. It happens, but it's extremely rare, right? Though there's sixth worker, your seventh worker, the action, you're getting more actions, that's awesome. But a lot of times like you're looking to place your seventh worker and you're like, all these actions don't really do anything but ROI is like one victory point, zero victory points, right? This action is meaningless, right? You kind of wasted time getting the extra worker. If you go earlier, right? You're gonna have a better pick of the actions. You're basically upgrading all your workers. If you're in a sports league, you would easily, no question trade your third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh round draft picks to get one first round draft pick, right? That's an easy trade every single time because a first round draft pick is a pro player who's gonna be in the major league, right? This third, fourth, fifth, sixth, those are all minor league people. You'll trade your whole minor league team, right? For a star player in the pro league, right? No question. So if I can go first and get my worker out before, I can take the best actions, right? And sometimes like we saw in K-Lis, there were actions that give you three cubes and there were actions that give you one cube. So playing your worker on the three cube action is like having three workers, right? Whereas the seventh worker is gonna get you one cube. Now, forget turn order within your own actions to do the same things God said. The earlier workers you place in a given round or whatever the unit is that this game works in, those should be the strategic ones that are core to how you think you're gonna win the game and as you progress through placing more of them, now you're just trying to extract as much value as possible. First worker's strategic, last worker, what gives you the most things? Even if you don't need those things for your core strategy, they don't hurt to have more of, right? Oh, I got more food that I need. Oh, no big deal, that's great. I can trade it maybe. So the real big brain thing to do when you play games, if you play a lot of games, you play games to the point that you talk about games in panels at PAXs, when I play worker placement games, I actually try to not think about it as worker placement at all. I literally try to think about all the games, not as being card games, but as being these like mechanical systems that I'm engaging with. If you're really good at games, you can see through that matrix and see through the worker placement skin because play engaging with the game the way the designer intended will get you very good at games. That'll get you 90% of the way there. But think about professional gamers, professional sports. That is when they're looking at the diminishing returns of the extreme, radical, edge case and unexpected strategies. Like in the super minor leagues of hockey, like little kids, the face-off doesn't matter. It's actually random. Can they skate matters? Can they even shoot the puck at all matters? Can that kid even see out of his mask matters? In the minor leagues even too, but in the NHL, winning more face-offs actually matters a lot because everyone else is playing at near the optimum level in every other aspect of the game it's possible to be good at. Like in first person shooters, can you click on heads in Counter-Strike? You're already better than most players. Can you memorize where to pre-shoot in every corner you could walk around in every map in the game? Only insane people do that and professional people. That won't matter in most games, but that's the level of extra effort you have to put in and that's no longer a heuristic of I'm a police officer with a gun trying to do a thing in a game. That's now a heuristic of I move my mouse in this direction and click without even looking. That's not how they intended you to play. So if you want to get really good at games, learn from what the game designer told you to do but then try to see through it and engage with the real game that's underneath. It's ugly, it's a bunch of resources moving around but that's where you're gonna find the strategy that the game designer did not find in play testing, beat all your friends, ruin the game and have to sell it because you'll never want to play it again. If you want to have fun, don't do anything we told you. We didn't give our usual warning. Oh yeah, so there's a panel. If you enjoyed this, we still got time. We got more to talk about. We have a video of a panel. We gave it a bunch of packs called how to win at games or how to win every game. We've done different iterations of it. How many of you have played a tabletop game you like more than five times? Okay, all right. More than 50 times. Wow. All right, again, unplug the aberration packs. How many people do that? Yeah, most people get games and play them very few times each. It's statistically. But if you play a game a lot, that is the only way you're gonna get better at that game. But in this panel, we did an hour of like extremely specific strategies that will make you good at all tabletop games across the board. But we have this whole warning because if you do what we just said here, if you follow the advice on that video, if you're brave enough to watch it, you will be your friends a lot more often and you're gonna have a bad time because you're gonna now be the person in your friend group who is good at Street Fighter. So now you're not good enough to play with the pros, but you're too good to play with anyone you've ever met in your life. And it's a problem. Air Hockey is that for us. We're better than anyone we know at Air Hockey, but the Air Hockey Championship people, they break our fingers. So we can only play Air Hockey with each other and we're just screwed. That's just how it goes. So we actually did end shocking about six minutes early. That never happens. So I think it would be fun to take a few questions. Oh my God. Does anyone remember the rules of question asking? You get to ask a question? Like I'm not joking about the rules of question asking. As soon as you break them, I'm gonna shut you down, like you canceled, right? We're not joking about this. So no self-promotion, no telling a story. You must ask a question. You say one sentence with a question mark at the end. It can't be a personal question. Like I did this. Tell me about the... No, it has to be something relevant to everyone in the room and it has to be relevant to this panel. Are we cool with the rules of question asking? Okay, good. All right, let's see who succeeds at the game. Scott is the chooser. I will restate the question. We'll see who successfully asks a question. We'll just go front to back. Ooh, is reusing your workers an essential characteristic? I don't think they're... I think the only essential characteristic is a vague space around are the workers mechanically significant? Do they interact with each other in some way and do they return resources within the game and not just victory points? Every other mechanic is optional. Every other characteristic, I think, is optional. Just like in trick-taking games, the most basic trick-taking game is just war. Well, not even war. Follow suit. Actually, war is a trick-taking game. I think it doesn't even have suits, that matters. I think that reusing the workers is just sort of like a mental illusion, right? Because you have these meeples that go out and come back where really it's like you could just destroy the meeples and get brand new ones each turn. So it's just like, there's just a number. That's how many meeples you get. I want a game where you literally like the meeple on fire. You're not really reusing the meeples. It's just I have six per turn. I have seven per turn. I have three per turn, right? So that doesn't really matter. So I think the fundamental characteristic there that you touched on is how do the meeples interact with the game in terms of how are they generated? How are they placed? How do you get more of those actions regardless of the fact that it happens to be a worker? That's the core characteristic. We have to remember to repeat the questions out loud. We don't take questions very often. This is extremely rare. Okay, what's that? Wingspan, action point game or a worker placement game? Is Wingspan an action point game or a worker placement game? I think my first, my answer to that is that it doesn't matter. I only played Wingspan like once. I don't remember. I like Wingspan. Thinking back, if I've only played Wingspan three or four times, I don't think that's materially a worker placement game in any meaningful way. But I'm saying that based on, I have a few friends who hate this term. I love this term. So, you know, you go to a restaurant with people who are really into food and they talk about the mouthfeel of like the salmon they're eating. So, I like to use the term brainfeel when it comes to games. Wingspan does not have the brainfeel of a worker placement game to me. I do not engage with it on that way even when I'm in the matrix. We again forgot to repeat the question out loud. I repeated the question. We'll try again. I repeated the question explicitly word for word. Okay, oh, okay. I didn't. All right, so the question is, can we give tips on how to determine what order to take, you know, what's more how to prioritize, right? What actions you're going to take, right? What's most important? I think it's just you want to look at each action and say, you know, look at the end goal of the game, right? What is the victory condition of the game? Usually victory points, right? Well, just look at them and say, well, how many victory points is it, right? It's like that one, right? Even if it's not directly victory points, it might be like get three cubes. You're gonna have to do the math and say that three cubes is gonna result in so many victory points at the end of the game, right? I think I have a more. I'm gonna use those three, you know, wait, like if you look at settlers of Gitan, not a worker placement game, right? It's like four resources is one settlement is one victory point. So four cards, one point. So if something gets you three cards, it's getting you three quarters of a point. If something else gets you two cards, right? It's half a point and you have to do this math. Yeah, winning a game is hard. I think I have a more. I have more specific advice, I think, because I just did this in that game with the dogs that we played a little while ago. The good dog game where you place the dogs down. Where I misread the card and lost cause, yeah. Yeah, and I won because I had the obvious win the game card and I played it and no one did anything about it. Anyway, couldn't do anything about it. So I would say, start with what Scott said. What are you doing in the game? Like, is victory points it? Get the most victory points? The next question to ask yourself is, how am I going to get those victory points? And you did the look at the game, whatever's on the game, whatever tools the game gives you, and pick two. If there's a lot of them, pick two. Pick a primary one and a secondary one. And your general strategy should then be, all right, if I'm gonna use, I don't know, the wood mechanic, the thing the game does with wood to get victory points, that's the end game score I'm going after. And then stone, the stone brick sheep strategy is like my second strategy, like my backup strategy. Then your next question to ask is, what is the shortest path in the game with the minimum number of actions to be able to turn on the machine that'll make my first strategy work? And then every action, every action you take, no matter what, make sure it is feeding whatever that machine is. I mean machine in the Eurogame sense, you know, you build a machine, you crank it, a bunch of cubes pop out. Any time you can't move that forward, then try to crank your secondary machine. And if you can't crank the primary or the secondary, it doesn't matter, just take your turn quickly, do something randomly. But yeah, I guess you're asking about interim steps, right? It's like you just have to add up the points, right? If a wood, if three wood gets you a house and two houses gets you a victory point, right? Then it's like, well then, right? Three wood is one house, one house is a victory point, then one and a half wood is half a point, right? It's like you just have to go all the way down. We are no fun at the table to play games with, by the way. So we are absolutely now, we have 10 seconds left, so we are out of time. Okay. I hope this was enjoyable. Enjoy the rest of your packs. I'm rimmed, that's Scott. If you go to that QR code, or type that word into any browser, in any machine that connects to the internet, you'll find videos of tons of other talks in all of our business, enjoy the rest of packs. Okay, we'll get out of here. Let's go make sure I push the record button on the camera.