Earlier this year I pitched some ideas to the editor of the official programme for the UK Games Expo, which I attended last month. You can read all about my time at the show right here. Fortunately, they liked one of my pitches, and I ended up with the article printed for all the attendees to read.

If you didn’t attend and want to see how it looked in the finished programme, you can download a copy here. It’s a hefty download at ~90MB, so I’m also republishing it in this post too. Read on for the full article.

You don’t have to take too many steps down the board game rabbit hole before you hear the term “worker-placement” thrown around. If you’ve never heard it before, it could sound very industrial and authoritarian, and in some ways, that’s exactly what it is. Worker-placement games normally task you with collecting resources and spending those resources to perform different actions or trade them in for fancier resources. Most of the time you do this by placing your little meeple onto a space on the game board, and then getting whatever stuff that spot promises you in return.

In essence, you’ve taken one of your meeples/dice/anthropomorphic hedgehogs and assigned them to a place to do some work. Hence the term worker-placement. Clever, eh? It’s widely used in a huge variety of board games and has been for at least the last couple of decades. Worker-placement must be doing something right, but where did it come from, and why is it still so popular today?

If you ask any self-respecting board game nerd where worker-placement first started, you’ll get a few common answers. For a lot of people - myself included - their first experience with putting workers on a board was with Stone Age (Bernd Brunnhofer). It’s a beautiful game, and while it’s undeniably lightweight, is still one of the best examples of the mechanism in its purest form. Agricola (Uwe Rosenberg) and Caylus (William Attia) both came before it, and both are often given as examples of being the first worker-placement game. Neither of these is the true daddy, however, and there’s no need for a daytime TV paternity test. The real genesis of worker-placement as we know it happened right at the end of the last millennium, however, with both Bus (Jeroen Doumen & Joris Wiersinga) and Keydom (Richard Breese) hitting shelves in 1999. They can fight amongst themselves to decide who was the first.

You might find yourself thinking “I’m a real fan of worker-placement, so I’ll enjoy anything with it in”. The reality, however, is that worker-placement is just a mechanism, and how much you enjoy it can depend on not only the type of game you’re playing, but also the game’s setting. Many modern games limit player interaction to just blocking a worker spot and preventing someone else from using it. Playing an older game like Caylus or Troyes (Sébastien Dujardin, Xavier Georges, Alain Orban) might come as a bit of a shock if you’re new to the hobby, because of how downright mean they can be. Stealing others’ workers or knocking them out of their places might not be your cup of tea, and the same essence of “maybe it’s not for everybody” is true for each game’s complexity and theme too.

You might like games that aren’t too taxing. Lords of Waterdeep (Peter Lee, Rodney Thompson) is a reasonably light game that’s easy to teach and play with your family, while A Feast For Odin (Uwe Rosenberg) with its 60+ action spaces and multiple routes to victory is enough to leave some people curled in the foetal position, sobbing. Your significant other might hate Sci-Fi with a passion, but love Period dramas, which puts Vital Lacerda’s masterpiece On Mars out on its backside, while holding the door open for the Austen-inspired delectation of Obsession (Dan Hallagan). Maybe you’re of the opinion that cutesy creatures are lame, but time travel is awesome. In which case it’s a dismissive buh-bye to Everdell (James Wilson), and a big “Hello, gorgeous” to Anachrony (Dávid Turczi, Richard Amann, Viktor Peter).

So we know that worker-placement games cover the full spectrums of complexity and theme. From light to heavy. From dry and industrial to rich and fantastical. But have you ever taken the time to think about why we enjoy them so much? What is it about a worker-placement game that scratches that ludological itch we have? What is it that tickles our dopamine receptors? This near-universal love for plonking meeples on a board isn’t the same for other mechanisms. I know people who can’t stand drafting, hidden roles, auctions, and negotiation. Yet ’ve never heard somebody say they have a strong dislike of worker-placement. Why is that?

I believe the particular enjoyment comes from the idea of ownership. In an area control game, my focus is on the shared board. I might add pieces to it, but it’s one-way. I don’t necessarily get anything back in return. Bag-builders, in contrast, are very personal, but there’s a lot of chance involved which can ruin your plans. In a worker-placement game, however, when the game starts, we all have the same potential. We all have workers. We all have options. But I choose to go to that worker spot. My worker mines those crystals, harvests that wheat, and recruits that butler. My worker takes those things from the central pool and brings them home with them, back to me.

How many times have you played one of these games and heard fellow players - or maybe even yourself - say “My guy is going here, so I get that thing”? Worker-placement is a game mechanism which amplifies player agency. It adds another layer of investment to the actions you take. When things go badly you can (and often will) blame something else - somebody took the spot I wanted, there were fewer florins available than I realised - but when it goes well… hoo boy. The look of sheer delight in your neighbour’s eyes when you don’t occupy the spot they wanted, is telling. Marvel at the speed they place their meeple in that empty spot, lest you invoke the sacred rite of takesies-backsies.

Worker-placement never rested on its laurels, and the simple ‘place a person, gain a thing’ formula has been tweaked and tampered with over the years to keep it interesting. Village (Markus & Inka Brand) has a fantastic mechanism where workers grow old and die, and even then there’s competition for plots in the graveyard. The Manhattan Project (Brandon Tibbetts) lets you place your workers in other players’ bases as spies, blocking spaces and using their worker places as your own. Anachrony sees you borrowing resources from the future, on the proviso that you later have to send them back to your past self.

Barrage (Tommaso Battista, Simone Luciani) mimics the time it takes for your engineers to do their work by putting them on a wheel, which turns over time, rendering them unemployable until they return. Euphoria (Jamey Stegmaier, Alan Stone) has dice as workers. The dice values represent their intelligence, in a tongue-in-cheek game where you want to keep your workers stupid and happy. Targi (Andreas Steiger) uses a grid of cards instead of a board and rewards you with the goods at the intersections of the rows and columns you claim, in addition to the cards you place your meeples on.

As I write this, 28 of the top 100 games on BGG use worker-placement in them. We’re not just talking about old, stalwart games that have their roots so deeply embedded in the hobby that they’ll never shift, nor are we just lauding the latest hotness. The full range is represented, from the old-timers like Caylus and Le Havre (Uwe Rosenberg), right through to recent hits like The Lost Ruins of Arnak (Min & Elwen) and Dune Imperium (Paul Dennen). There’s no denying its appeal.

Every game I’ve mentioned here is brilliant in its own way, and I have no hesitation in suggesting you check them out. If you’re new to the hobby, I especially recommend checking out some of the older titles I’ve talked about. Some may be more simple in their execution, but they might just surprise you with how ruthless and unusual they can be. More recent games have started to blend other mechanisms in, so if you fancy a bit of deck-building along with placing workers, try those too. Keep an open mind and you’re bound to find something you love.

Worker-placement is here to stay. Being your own boss is a lot of fun, it seems.