well uh greetings and welcome to start of week four where we're going to start really kind of diving into looking at some of the individual mechanics for different board games uh how they work some of the challenges what are some of the benefits maybe and then hopefully you're going to be able to settle it on one that you want to try and adapt and make work for your particular board game so we'll be starting with talking about worker placement the worker placement mechanic as our first mechanic so uh what is worker placement well basically uh you're doing essentially what it says you're going to be doing you're going to be physically placing a game piece or token which is some sort of worker there a lot of times they look like some sort of human form the meeple is the classic example here kind of a humanoid shaped form that you will be placing on a space and then you're going to receive some benefit from placing your work or your meeple on that space either immediately or when you retrieve the character later on so for example i don't know why i started with the pirate theme but i guess i'm stuck with that now so here we have uh you i just found this online and so we're gonna work with this i've created a blueprint i didn't create i stole off of from online a blueprint of a basic outline of what could be a pirate ship you can see here this isn't super great but this is what i had to work with i as you kind of create your own board you can create it much more freely to have all the spaces and pieces that you want but what i want to point out here are uh we've got a ship and there are there are there are spaces here uh designated by or divvied up by these columns so they're kind of rooms or whatever and so in a worker placement game i'm going to take one of my workers or my pieces here i have designated it with a purple skull and crossbones and i'm going to place it in the room here with the lighter cannon and so the placing of my piece in that room as opposed to any other room on this ship will give me some sort of certain benefit now depending on the game and what i'm trying to accomplish it could be well in this case it could be that allows me to fire a weapon and you know do damage or attack something or i i don't know it doesn't really matter the placing of that piece on that spot gives me that particular benefit in this case so one of the reasons why i think well not just me but other people think worker placement games tend to be fairly successful and attractive and why people like them is because there's a feeling of progression there's a feeling of moving that mimics actually maps onto reality in real life when you progress through something this is happening because people most of the time it's people but at the very least intelligent agents are making it happen so you're not just kind of randomly moving a weird token around because of a dice roll like the idea that a person is doing something to accomplish uh an action to give you a benefit makes sense because that's how things happen so for example on a pirate ship the cannons don't just fire themselves it's a person who has to go down and load the cannon and fire it and so the idea of putting a person onto a board to represent that that person is taking that action makes sense the other thing is nice about worker placement is because your workers as people a lot of times at least people can do more than one thing as it turns out we can sleep we can eat we can work we can do all these different things and so the ability to take the same worker person and put them in different spaces to represent different kinds of works or different kinds of activities they can do matches what we know about people the other thing that's true is that people have time constraints so you can't do everything all at once and there are limits and so the idea of you know using rounds where you only get to place people once per round shows that people can only do one thing at a time so i can't be both firing the cannon in this case uh in that particular spot as well as in the captain's room and on the mast right like i have a limited amount of time and so my turn represents a particular amount of time and then the next thing is that placing a worker represents a choice so there is like real people people have choices in terms of what we do with our time so in this you know whatever 10 or 20 minute block of time you are choosing to sit and listen to this lecture assuming you're not listening to it on one and a half speed then it will be slightly faster but you're choosing to do that which means that you can't do a host of other things right when you go to work you're choosing to do that as opposed to playing a game when you play a game you're choosing to that as opposed to like eating or watching television or something like that and so there's choice uh and when you choose you are at the same time you choose to do something you are therefore choosing not to do other things and so by placing a piece on the board right you're basically signifying a real life situation a person is choosing to do this particular thing and not any of the other things on the board and so it really represents here these last two points right that we are versatile there's a lot that we can do but there are limitations even within that uh whereas like a a board piece and so there's a lot of interesting things about the board game monopoly for example but the little pawn and monopoly can only do one thing right it moves around the board as dictated by the dice roll uh and so that's not the way real people work when we travel through land when we travel down the boardwalk in new jersey or whatever right we have choice and so this this somewhat represents or is a bit more akin to um the reality of our living situation than some other games for example all right so what would we consider to be the essential elements the things without if you're going to make a work replacement game these are the things that you absolutely must have and so there's some debate over these but for the purposes of this course i have defined it or narrowed it down to this list of things here so the first being that you have a limited number of workers so you'll notice here on um on my pirate ship i have three workers for the purple side and three workers for the gold side because you know it's hot and we're purple gold so um and that's it there are limited number of people and i can't do everything and there's there's limitations so uh then the second element would be a turn order so not everybody's just kind of scrambling all at once to do everything at once so for example in this case we're going to have purple go first and they're going to place their first worker on this that light cannon spot which will allow them maybe to fire the cannon or whatever and so then gold will go and so that this brings me to the third thing here communal spaces the spaces are shared so i'm placing my worker in the same ship as the gold player is placing there so we we have the same pool of spaces from which to choose but then right after that although we have communal spaces the spaces are limited there is a you can count them here right there's a limited number of places to put workers there's not an infinite number of spaces there's there's some limit to the number of spaces here and then within that limit we're going to fight over spaces to a to a certain extent at least indirectly so by placing my worker here in this light cannon space i have prevented or have filled that space in this case such that uh the gold character the gold player can not play their worker in the same space they they have to choose now a different space on the game and so uh depending on the game you'll notice sometimes they will allow for multiple workers in one space but usually there's a limit so it'll be like well you can have two two workers on on this particular space if it's a really necessary or valuable space but no matter the point the point being that there's uh you can't just kind of go wherever you want then finally spaces a lot of times are limited by prior resources so what does that mean so for example here i've placed the purple character has placed the worker on the light cannon so they want to fire the cannon for whatever reason in this game but in order to fire the cannon you can't just kind of walk up to a cannon and fire it right what do you need well you need gunpowder you need a cannonball you need a match and those kinds of things right so in this case in order to fire the cannon i also need to have a worker to go and get the necessary things for in order to fire the cannon and so i can't fire the can i cannot use that space unless i have acquired the resources necessary for that so in that case it means that i have to place a worker down there in the the stores section in this little made-up diagram in order to get like a cannon ball and gunpowder and so on and so forth um and so the space is only useful to me it is limited um unless i have the requisite resources the prior resources so so from here you can do all kind i mean again i didn't draw this diagram but and so i'm limited to what we have here but let's say after this um the gold player decides well hey that first turn was really valuable so i'm going to take the captain's spot and maybe i decide that the captain's square gives gold uh the first turn in the next round so they get to choose first and then purple goes again and they take the officers square which gives them oh you know plus one to some action in the next round or whatever and then gold decides well i'm going to place my worker on the mast to represent the sale so that he gets an additional movement or something or maybe additional worker next i don't know what anyway you you kind of get the point that placing workers on different places gives you some sort of benefit or bonus this is a not super well thought out version of this but should be enough to give you at least an idea of what how work replacement games work and i'll have you for your your training today do do a worker placement game so there's a bunch of optional elements that can also be included in work replacement games so for example some games limit and some games don't limit the kinds of workers you can place so for example sometimes you can influence or manipulate other players workers in some games so that's an option that's up to you [Music] it's optional whether or not you have turns between placing workers so in the example that i just gave on the the previous slide here right the gold and purple took turns placing their workers it doesn't necessarily have to be that way though we've talked about workers and that lends itself to the idea of people as workers but they don't necessarily have to be people um they could be other things again depending on the theme of uh of your particular game it's not absolutely necessary that they're people no unlimited actions uh so there are a few games worker placement games where spaces are in high demand or if they feel like there's is there's too much competition they will have a limited pool of spaces that are reusable by any number of workers over and over and over again um so there are some actions that can be taken an unlimited number of times that is that's a possibility for these kinds of things and sometimes necessary depending on balancing issues so that is making the game work well essentially actions must be thematically interpreted as work so this this kind of connects along with the the thing about um uh the workers have to be people right well the bonus that you get from placing a a a person or a meeple or whatever doesn't necessarily have to be work related it i think it i think it will help your game if you are consistent as much as possible but doesn't necessarily have to be true if you need something and you can't force it to work do what's going to make the game work even if it doesn't necessarily fit thematically a lot of times again frequently but not necessarily you will see your uh the number of actions that you can take expand over time so as you acquire more there's there's a sense of progression right like the first turn of the game is different than the tenth turn of the game life even have ten terms different than the tenth turn of the game otherwise people are going to kind of get bored right like i'm just doing the same stuff over and over again but if by by doing these first couple actions these very simple actions my first or second rounds it allows me to unlock new more powerful places or actions that i can take down the line there's an incentive to kind of to do that to kind of snowball the process and you saw that a little bit with um my talking about you needing gunpowder operate cannons right so for example here i've got i placed my purple here on the the lighter cannon space but you'll notice there's a heavy gun space so you can imagine a situation where after you have accumulated several bits of cargo or stores it allows you to operate the heavy guns which has some sort of bonus above and beyond the lighter guns or something like that but that's not something you can get your first turn you have to you have to somehow work your way up to that there are a few finally here there are a few games where players can own spaces and so what i mean by that is that the the space is open to other people to to use but when other people use that space the player who owns it gains some sort of benefit whether that be kind of some sort of rental cost or an extra bonus or something like that so there are some games where that also happens or there's a mechanic or a way to make that happen where you can kind of own own a space or yeah get bonuses or extras from that kind of thing okay so um those are kind of the basic elements of worker placement games and i'm to pause here to uh in this particular lecture it's been long enough and then i'm going to do a second one talks about some of the variations and some of the extra things that you can get there