all right well great welcome back to the second part of this i'm going to talk a little bit about a bit more about some of the specifics and some of the interesting things that you can try to do with worker placement games and as we play some games on board game arena and throughout this course i'd encourage you to kind of be on the lookout for this but first of all a basic breakdown of the different things that actually putting a putting a meeple on a space can actually accomplish for you so the first thing is that if you're only allowed one player per space kind of like i had in my pirate example once you place that worker there you have effectively blocked everybody else from using that space so that can be a really useful thing to be able to do to allow people to do secondly you can you can there's a second thing here right where any player can use any space but any individual can only use a particular space once so that is once i put a so if i went back to my piratey example right so i can put my my little pirate figure in the cannon room but the gold character can also put their pirate character in the cannon room however once i put my pirate character in the candy room i can't put another pirate character in there it's been used and it can't get reused or any or something like that sometimes you you can put a person into a spot and it's not technically blocked so another person can also put something in that spot but there's some sort of additional cost to them to do that so maybe they need to place two workers or maybe they get fewer resources or fewer benefits from that spot if they're the second person uh and then finally as a kind of a variation of this is that um the first person to a spot gets the first choice of a certain uh of several elements there so again there's no cost in terms of a tangible cost uh for the second person coming to that spot but they just lose out on the first choice of the the options there which may be fine maybe maybe they know like oh the first person is definitely going to want this thing but i don't want that thing and so it doesn't matter to me if i'm second and i get the second choice so there's that that kind of thing uh one of the difficulties and one of the things you really need to avoid and the i i think possibly one of the biggest challenges of worker placement games is the analysis paralysis thing uh which is a phrase that we talked about when we talked about terminology so you can look look up this phrase but the definition is here right a situation which players can't make timely decisions because decisions are too complex choice is too numerous or consequences are too difficult to predict and so players lack the tools they need for effective decision making in some cases and so what ends up happening is the games just kind of slog on and on and on because everybody takes forever to make a decision to make a turn and basically in that case people lose interest in the game and in some cases no matter how well you do in terms of balancing the game they're just people who struggle with analysis paralysis and i must confess that this is something that i'm working on i have to remember that uh the game is not all about me and i have to keep the game moving in a timely manner so that the rest of the people who are playing don't don't get bored or upset or something like that it's but the difficulty here is essentially finding a balance between too much choice and not enough choice if there's not enough choice it also gets boring because people basically feel forced into certain choices and then if there's if there's no again going back to what is a game if there's no real player agency like there's only one obviously good choice and there's really no player agency then it it's not necessarily as interesting for people but if you give people a million choices they're just going to feel too overwhelmed we talk about we talk about the paralysis of choice like when you try to you try to pick a a cereal box at the grocery store right go to the grocery store you go to the cereal aisle and it's an aisle it's a just giant aisle of like 50 different cereals and you gotta go i don't know they all look like they have sugar in them you know uh something like that right um and so how do you make a decision in that case and so there's various ways of doing it so what i've got here what i'm showing here is um the board from a particular worker placement game called viticulture and you can kind of see here there are spots there are these little circles where people are going to place their workers and you'll notice that a given that they're not just kind of tile spaces they're cleverly drawn here but you'll also notice that many of these spaces have three spots so this is what i told you about where sometimes there are limits to a particular space but sometimes there's more than one worker allowed on a space and so this this is more or less mandatory if you're going to have like four people playing a game right what you don't want to have happen is for the fourth player to come around and be like well all the spots on the board are taken and so um having a couple of spots per space allows allows for a bit more of that but you'll notice there aren't that many spaces here right there's one two ah i can't count yeah let's say roughly ten spaces or something like that all right and that there's a there's a quite a bit of variety there uh if you have only three or four workers you're uh you're gonna have to think carefully but you're also not having to decide between 50 spaces right and so you have some choice but not too much choice so another example of this a very very highly regarded uh worker placement game and one of the first would be agricola which i think probably comes a little bit closer to having a bit more analysis paralysis but again here's here's your board and there are various places that you can put your uh your meeple it looks like what is this is roughly 14 spaces or something like that and then there's some extra stuff as well so this is going to be one of the things if you decide to go this route obviously i'm not expecting and i know many of you have probably felt a little bit of anxiety or overwhelmed with this not expecting a fully fledged game like this but i want i want you to at least talk about the way that you think or talk about the fact that you have thought about these kinds of things as you approach your game right why if you're doing a worker placement game why did you pick 10 spaces as opposed to 7 or you know 13 right so what and you know maybe maybe 7 is the right number i don't know it depends but i just i just want you i don't want these choices to be random your choices should be intentional with respect to these things all right so there's some really unique variations that you can make on worker placement games so for those of you who are considering this or maybe working with this mechanic so there are some clever ways that you can adapt this and this is one of the reasons why we have such a large variety of work replacement games out there because there are a lot of different ways to tweak this and adapt this to to make things more interesting so one of the things you can do is have multiple workers on a space necessary for that space to activate um or if you put more than one person on a particular space it changes the outcome of that space and so now it's not just about placing you know one person there but well do i place one or do i place two it adds a bit more option and complexity to it another thing you can do is have different types of workers so instead of having like one just very generic meeple that can go anywhere on the board right you can have you know different colored meeples or meeples that have slightly different skills or you know this meeple can only go on spaces on the right side of the board and this meeple can only go in spaces on the left side of the board or so so having some sort of variation amongst your workers which is again sort of more realistic right not all humans can perform all tasks or have the skill sets for all tasks and so that kind of mimics reality a bit more but also gives both limitations and complexity so all of a sudden you don't have to look at a worker and go well i've got to decide between all 50 spaces okay well this worker can only go in one of these 10 spaces um and you know this worker can only go in one of these 10 spaces so anyway availability of spaces can change with time so there are some games that play through like seasons and so certain spaces are only open during like the winter season which again kind of mimics reality right if you are doing like an agricultural game for example you can't harvest in the winter and so you're harvesting squares for example may only be available in the fall or autumn another thing you can do instead of having different types of workers would be having that your workers can gain experience level up or improve which again it nicely matches kind of the reality of the situation if a worker is performing a task the more they perform the task perhaps the better they're going to get at a task and so you you kind of create different types of workers on your own instead of having someone hand you a worker and say well this guy can only do you know x y and z right you say well i'm going to train this worker so that he can only do you know this particular task but he does that task very very well a lot of a lot of work replacement games have mechanics such that you can get more workers but the danger with that is that in that case usually the best strategy is always just to get more workers and so uh to counter that some games have um yeah ways of dealing with that like so if you get more workers then it costs more for you to kind of keep them fed or keep them alive or something like that some some games have ways of killing off workers so that you can't just create a small army of workers and take over the map or something like that there are some games that use dice as workers and so that's actually a fairly interesting dynamic because with a dice it's going to have a different number like when you roll at the beginning of your turn it's going to have a different number every turn and so that number can affect basically what you decide to do with that dice so you may want to put a high high number dice on a particular square and a low number dice on another square that you don't care as much about or something like that you also have to consider things like blocking versus bumping so if you place uh place a worker on a particular space have you effectively blocked that space from everyone else or do you allow other people to place workers that then bump uh you can bump the the the another player's worker a lot of times when that happens the player who gets bumped gets like a small bonus basically for getting bumped and so the player who's doing the bumping has to consider well i do i need i need this space but do i need it enough that i risk giving my opponent like this little extra advantage this little extra bonus and then finally i've got written here future limp placements are limited spatially so most most of the games so for example the pirate game that i showed you i basically just kind of plopped uh peep workers down on random spots on the boat but in real life it would take you time to move from one spot on the boat to another spot on the boat so it's possible that you can have limitations so you say like well if i place my worker here then on the next round that worker can only move up to two spaces away or something like that just to kind of represent that there's a limit in terms of how far you can move um spatially or something like that so there's all these extra little things you can throw and there's probably some things that i haven't thought of i mean i encourage you to use think creatively and think about how you want to do this but yeah those are just a few examples of how how you might kind of add some extra elements to a worker placement game