In this instalment of The Mechanics I’d like to take a closer look at one of my favorite mechanic of the last few years, namely that of Worker Placement. I have to admit that I thought that the idea of worker placement was older than it is. I was sure I had played something that used it when I first got back into board games but looking into it on Boardgamegeek, it seems that the idea came up about 10 years ago. As with anything geek related, there are debates as to what is the first worker placement game was and even to a certain degree what is a worker placement game.
I do believe that in a certain way worker placement games find their roots in RTS (real time strategy games such as Starcraft, Dune 2000 and Command and Conquer) with the idea of creating workers for specific tasks and assigning them to specific buildings in order to use the building’s power. This core idea then found itself in Puerto Rico, with the idea that once a player acquired a building, they still had to assign workers to it in order to gain its special power. Of course, at its core, Puerto Rico is really a role selection game, which is not today’s topic. Maybe another time…
What are Worker Placement games? Well, let’s look into it.