The best worker placement games 2023

Worker placement is a game mechanic for board games. We have selected the best worker placement games for you.

What are worker placement games?

Worker Placement is a game mechanic and also known as "drawing actions". The worker placement mechanism requires players to select individual actions from a set of actions available to all players. In general, players select actions one at a time and in order. There is generally a limit to the number of times a single action may be performed. Once this limit is reached for an action, it usually either becomes more expensive to perform again - or it cannot be performed for the rest of the round. Therefore, not all actions can be performed by all players in a given round, and "blocking" of the action occurs. If the game is structured in rounds, all actions are usually refreshed at the beginning or end of each round, so that they become available again.

Different variants of action-drawing Worker Placements.

Actions are usually selected by placing tiles or tokens on the selected actions. Each player usually has a limited number of tokens with which to participate in the process. Some games achieve the same effect in reverse: the round begins with action spaces filled with tokens that players claim for a fee.

The various professions gave the game its name

From a thematic point of view, the tiles that players use to design actions often represent workers in a particular occupation (but this category of mechanism is not necessarily limited to or by this thematic representation). In other words, players often "thematically place workers" to show which actions were designed by individual players. In Agricola, for example, each player starts with two pieces representing family members that can be placed on action spaces to gather resources or perform other actions such as building fences. When someone places a piece on a particular space, that action is no longer available until the next turn.

Examples of worker placement games

Keydom, released in 1998, is widely recognized as the first game of the worker placement genre. Early design experiments with this mechanism include Way Out West (2000) and Bus (1999). Well-known worker placement examples include Agricola (2007), Caylus (2005), and Stone Age (2008).

For more details on the topic, see the Wikipedia article on Worker Placement.

List of the best Worker Placement games 2023