Tag: Worker Placement

Games with a Worker Placement mechanic require players to coordinate various workers as those workers gather resources.

Brew

| T3d-1978
Brew

Brew

Bring balance back to the forest!

Time is broken and shattered. The seasons all exist at once, and day and night have no real cycle — they rotate at the whim of the forest. This enchanted land has been driven into chaos and it’s up to you, the cunning mystics of the forest, to tame extraordinary woodland creatures and use your magic to bring back balance.

In Brew, players must choose how to use element dice, either to take back control of as many seasons as possible in an area-control game or to procure goods at the local village in a worker-placement game. Recruiting woodland creatures and brewing potions can help offset chance die-rolls or create an engine to help you tame the lands.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Dice Rolling
  • Open Drafting
  • Take That
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.33

Barbearian Battlegrounds

| T3d-1978
Barbearian Battlegrounds

Barbearian Battlegrounds

Become one of four clans of adorable bear-warriors out to build the best neighbearhood in the forest! Don’t expect this to be a picnic as your bears aren’t the only ones fishing for glory, so be prepared to ward off attacks from your furry rivals. By gathering resources, pillaging your neighbears’ villages, and developing your home turf, the tale of your clan will become legend.

BarBearian Battlegrounds is a simultaneous secret-action, dice-puzzle, worker placement game for up to four players. Are your bears worthy enough to be every cub’s bedtime story for generations to come? It’s time to gather your clan, bear down, and hold on to your honey.

Game Mechanics:

  • Bluffing
  • City Building
  • Dice Rolling
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 20 – 30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

Atlantis Rising

| T3d-1978
Atlantis Rising

Atlantis Rising

The isle of Atlantis, your home, is sinking. Will you be able to save your people in time?

Atlantis Rising is a co-operative worker placement game in which you must work together with up to six other players to deploy citizens across your homeland, gathering resources in order to build a cosmic gate that can save your people. Workers placed close to the shoreline are more rewarding, but are more likely to be flooded and the actions lost.

Every turn, each player draws a misfortune card that will flood certain locations along the ever-shrinking Atlantis shoreline, or may otherwise work to undermine your efforts to save your people. So you must race to gather the necessary resources to build and power the gate, before the island disappears beneath the waves forever.

This edition contains all new art and graphic design, created to bring even more attention to the thematic setting of the game. The Athenians Attack phase has been replaced with the Wrath of the Gods phase, requiring more strategic planning and adding to the sense of urgency. Now, instead of placing workers in an Atlantean Navy, players must cooperatively decide to flood a set number of tiles at the end of each round. To further aid them in their task, Councilor player powers have been expanded and made more impactful, and the knowledge deck has similarly been revised and expanded. The variable gate components, once built, no longer offer one-time bonuses, but create new worker placement spots where players can send Atlantean workers to unleash actions to help save their island.

Game Mechanics:

  • Civilization
  • Cooperative
  • Dice Rolling
  • Push Your Luck
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 7 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.44

Asking for Trobils

| T3d-1978
Asking for Trobils

Asking for Trobils

Asking for Trobils is a worker-placement boardgame where the player is trying their best to rid the star system of Trobils (space pests). You play a Trobil Hunter – flinging the space vermin into the star, and dealing with unsavory folk just to get the job done.

Players start with one ship, placing it at various locations to gather resources that will allow you to trap Trobils. But just one ship may not be enough, so you can fly through a wormhole to create two or even three ships to help you gather resources.

You can make connections to gain more resources or hang around the local Riffraff. Send pirates, bounty hunters, or gangsters out to make areas rougher for your opponents, or enhance locations for everyone by sending out traders and courtesans.

For every Trobil card you capture, you gain victory points. The player with the most points at the end wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Pick-Up and Deliver
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 7 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.08

Almanac: The Dragon Road

| T3d-1978
Almanac: The Dragon Road

Almanac: The Dragon Road

Your caravan is ready, the wagons are packed. The path ahead is fraught with peril, but such is the price for unimaginable fortune. This first step is one of many along the Dragon Road, hard as it may be. Adventure is just a page turn away.

Almanac: The Dragon Road is the first entry in the Almanac series of games from acclaimed designer Scott Almes. Each round of the game is played on a different page in the game book, each page representing a unique location with a special twist on worker placement. Combining rich narrative and intuitive yet unique game mechanisms, every game is a new adventure!

Game Mechanics:

  • Auction/Bidding
  • Pick-Up and Deliver
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.08

Alien Frontiers

| T3d-1978
Alien Frontiers

Alien Frontiers

Do you have what it takes to be a deep space colonist? An alien frontier awaits the brave and daring! This new planet will be harsh, but if you have the skills to manage your resources, build a fleet, research alien life, and settle colonies, the world can be yours.

Alien Frontiers is a game of resource management and planetary development for two to four players. During the game you will utilize orbital facilities and alien technology to build colony domes in strategic locations to control the newly discovered world.

The game board shows the planet, its moon, the stations in orbit around the planet, and the solar system’s star. The dice you are given at the start of the game represent the space ships in your fleet. You will assign these ships to the orbital facilities in order to earn resources, expand your fleet, and colonize the planet.

As the game progresses, you will place your colony tokens on the planet to represent the amount of control you have over each territory. Those territories exert influence over specific orbital facilities and, if you control a territory, you are able to utilize that sway to your advantage.

The planet was once the home of an alien race and they left behind a wondrous artifact in orbit. Using your fleet to explore the artifact, you will discover amazing alien technologies that you can use to advance your cause.

Winning the game will require careful consideration as you assign your fleet, integrate the alien technology and territory influences into your expansion plans, and block your opponents from building colonies of their own. Do you have what it takes to conquer an alien frontier?

Roll and place your dice to gain advantages over your opponent and block them out of useful areas of the board. Use Alien Tech cards to manipulate your dice rolls and territory bonuses to break the rules. Steal resources, overtake territories, and do whatever it takes to get your colonies on the map first! Don’t dream it’ll be easy, though, because the other players will be trying to do the same thing.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Dice Rolling
  • Open Drafting
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.57

Agricola: all creatures big and small

| T3d-1978
Agricola: all creatures big and small

Agricola: all creatures big and small

Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small is a new take on Uwe Rosenberg’s Agricola designed for exactly two players and focused only on the animal husbandry aspect of that game. So long plows and veggies!

In Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small, you become an animal breeder of horses, cows, sheep and pigs and try to make the most of your pastures. Players start with a 3×2 game board that can be expanded during play to give more room for players to grow and animals to run free. Sixteen possible actions are available for players to take, with each player taking three actions total in each of the eight rounds.

The player who amasses the most victory points through enclosing space with fences and acquiring the largest number and variety of animals and victory point-generating buildings will be the winner.

Four Standard Buildings and 4 special buildings are available in the base game. These buildings each provide unique special abilities during play and/or VP at game end. Balancing the tension between building infrastructure (fenced pastures and buildings) and acquiring animals (the single biggest source of end-game scoring) is the key to success!

Game Mechanics:

  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.35

A War of Whispers

| T3d-1978
A War of Whispers

A War of Whispers

A War of Whispers is a competitive board game for 2 to 4 players. Five mighty empires are at war for the world, but you are no mighty ruler. Instead, you play a secret society that is betting on the results of this war while pulling strings to rig the results and ensure their bets pay off. A War of Whispers is a game of deep strategy, hidden agendas, and shifting loyalties.

You start the game with five loyalty tokens, each corresponding to one of the five different empires, bet randomly on a loyalty value. Your primary goal is to ensure that when the game ends, the empires you are most loyal to control the most cities across the globe. Gameplay consists of turns broken down into four phases:

  1. Deploy agents phase: In player order (starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise), each player removes, then deploys agents to empire councils, the positions on the board marked Sheriff, Steward, Marshall, and Chancellor.
  2. Empire turns phase: Each council position on each empire council will take an action. If a player has acquired cards, they may play them during this phase.
  3. Cleanup phase: Add the turn marker to the next space on the turn tracker, then each player discards down to the hand limit of five cards.
  4. Swap phase: In player order, each player may swap two of their unrevealed loyalty tokens. If you choose to do so, you must reveal both of the swapped loyalty tokens. They remain revealed for the rest of the game.

Gameplay repeats itself in this order four times. When the last space on the turn track is filled, the game ends immediately and scoring commences. The player with the most points based off their empire loyalties and the cities they control wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Bluffing
  • Take That
  • Wargame
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.57

Tokaido

| T3d-1978

Tokaido

In Tokaido, each player is a traveler crossing the “East sea road”, one of the most magnificent roads of Japan. While traveling, you will meet people, taste fine meals, collect beautiful items, discover great panoramas, and visit temples and wild places but at the end of the day, when everyone has arrived at the end of the road you’ll have to be the most initiated traveler – which means that you’ll have to be the one who discovered the most interesting and varied things.

The potential action spaces in Tokaido are laid out on a linear track, with players advancing down this track to take actions. The player who is currently last on the track takes a turn by advancing forward on the track to their desired action and taking that action, so players must choose whether to advance slowly in order to get more turns, or to travel more rapidly to beat other players to their desired action spaces.

The action spaces allow a variety of actions that will score in different, but roughly equal, ways. Some action spaces allow players to collect money, while others offer players a way to spend that money to acquire points. Other action spaces allow players to engage in various set collections that score points for assembling those sets. Some action spaces simply award players points for stopping on them, or give the player a randomly determined action from all of the other types.

Game Mechanics:

  • Set Collection
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.75

Kingswood

| T3d-1978
Kingswood

Board Game Name

The King has assembled the most prominent village Guilds and issued a challenge: rid the surrounding forest of monsters to earn your Guild widespread fame and glory!

Players take turns controlling the guild’s adventurers moving about the village. The purpose of traveling to different locations is to either build up new or refresh your existing resources. For example, you will visit the Blacksmith for your swords, the Academy for your spell books, the Market for coins, and the Tavern for your hearts. Liquid courage perhaps? There are also 7 other locations in the game, of which you will use one per game. This adds variety to the playing experience as these special locations have a wide range of abilities.

Once you feel like you have enough resources, you will venture out into the Forest. There you’ll encounter a variety of monsters. These monsters will give you points to add to your glory and some of them provide immediate benefits when they are defeated. The first player to gain 20 glory triggers the end game and once all players have had an equal number of turns, the guild leader with the highest glory total is declared the victor!

Game Mechanics:

  • Rondel
  • Set Collection
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 15 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.38