My Top 5 Favourite Worker Placements

10th May 2024 (Friday)

This month’s rambling is delayed because we had our sports day in the school as well as the ongoing IGCSE season. Since I have not been consuming much boardgame media content, it was a bit of a struggle to decide on a boardgame adjacent topic. Rather than forgo this month’s rambling, I decided that it would be okay to talk about my top five favourite worker placement boardgames. Having played boardgames for fourteen years now, I hope I can bring an ‘older’ perspective to this topic. To set some ground rules, a worker placement boardgame must actually place workers, different types of workers qualify but dice placement workers will be in their own category.

5. Caverna: The Cave Farmers

1 – 7 Players | 30 – 210 Minutes | Weight 3.78 / 5

Caverna: The Cave Farmers, from a simple cave, expand your dwarven home through mining, agriculture, and more. For me, Caverna: The Cave Farmers took everything that was great for me in Agricola and made it not only better in Caverna but also with a theme that I am far more interested in. I loved the basic formula in Agricola but could never get on board with the minor improvements and occupations. In Caverna, the basic farming formula is branched towards mining and adventuring as dwarves (my favourite fantasy race), all of which can contribute towards feeding your little dwarven clan. Keeping farm animals alive and thriving is also significantly easier and variation is created through the building of rooms that give players powers and point scoring opportunities.

Some governments actively pursue policies that encourage such wishing

Dwarven clans in Caverna start with 2 parent dwarves and allows a dwarven clan to reach 5 dwarves. There is a constant weighing of the benefits of having extra dwarves earlier (more actions & stronger adventurers) verses the costs of having to feed and house these workers, I mean children (imagine if the game had education costs). Having children in the later stages of the game is also a mental exercise of calculating the diminishing returns against the costs of room and board.

Caverna: The Cave Farmers is my relaxing worker placement boardgame of choice. Can’t find the cow you need? Why not just ‘liberate’ one on one of your adventures? Need a field but someone’s taken the action space? Taunt some giants into trampling over the nearby overgrown meadow. Not enough food to eat? Trade in some rubies for food. By the way, dogs are not food, a line must be drawn.

4. Lorenzo il Magnifico

2 – 4 Players | 60 – 120 Minutes | Weight 3.30 / 5

In Lorenzo il Magnifico, you must avoid excommunication and lead your family to power during the Italian Renaissance. Lord have mercy, there is a reason why they warn you about excommunication up front. Excommunication can cripple you, be almost game ending and can occur as many as three times in a game. And yet, it is always tempting to think you can be the exception, being excommunicado reduces the need to collect faith points and spend what few actions you have on more productive actions. Depending on how the game plays out, I have played games where it takes every action possible just to be able to meet the faith requirement at each phase.

He ain’t heavy… He’s my bother, brotherrr

To help you achieve your goals, the game gives all players two sons of equal genius and one dumb dumb. Thankfully, servants are available to help with the legwork, it is just that their contracts seem to be limited to one single task before they call it a day and go back to the supply depot of servants. With limited servants, players have to decide between assisting the more talented brothers to take stronger actions than other players or stick to the gifts God naturally rolled for them and assist the brother who can’t do anything by himself.

And the rest is just about stacking up the bonuses through cards that honestly makes me feel very gangsta. My only gripe with Lorenzo il Magnifico is that it is suffocatingly restrictive at two players, too many worker spaces are blocked off otherwise this might rise to my third favourite worker placement.

3. Yokohama

2 – 4 Players | 90 Minutes | Weight 3.30 / 5

In Yokohama, claim your fame as the dominant merchant in the Meiji period of Yokohama. Yokohama’s worker placement spots comes with a small twist, the more workers you have at a location, the more powerful the action becomes. And whilst each Player can have up to 20 workers, only the single President (shachō) can reach a location through a line of workers and take an action, like a queen ant being carried across the land by her workers to where she needs to go.

Imports can be “gifted” to the customs office for various rewards

So your President is getting around deciding whether it would be more optimal to get better technologies or rush to fulfil orders with goods collected from the various areas. There are even achievements built into the game where players can gain points by being the first to have X number of things. It’s like playing “Supermarket Sweep” all over Yokohama town, rushing in and out of buildings to grab as many resources as possible.

Yokohama makes me gush because it involves planning a series of actions, adapting to changing circumstances and using technologies to break the rules when needed. There are so many ways attractive ways to move and pivot at the same time, like your first time going to Disneyland or Universal Studios.

2. Dungeon Lords

2 – 4 Players | 90 Minutes | Weight 3.57 / 5

Dungeon Lords, prepare your dungeon, set evil traps, release your monsters, stop the good guys. Dungeon Petz might be the more streamlined boardgame of these two but Dungeon Lords is a worker placement boardgame experience that gives you a story to tell. Designing your dungeon to have long corridors with trapped kill rooms, capturing Paladins and setting loose the undead only to be confounded by the hero party’s new thief and cleric is an incredible adventure from the wrong side of the fence waiting to be told.

Sometimes you just want to play on the baddies’ side

Worker placement here is an exercise in mind reading, cunning and double bluffing. Players will bid for actions spaces in secret and there is always a possibility to be blocked out of an action if it is too popular or to take an action with a small bonus or penalty depending on whether you were first or last to take the action and some action spaces are resolved in reverse turn order. All this on top of the looming group of do-gooder adventurers coming towards your dungeon entrance makes it feel that it is surprisingly more difficult to be the bad guy sometimes.

I love Dungeon Lords because of the complexity and difficulty and I hate Dungeon Lords because of the complexity and difficulty. This could have been my favourite boardgame of all time but for the persistent losses dungeons suffer and the monster upkeep, still a great experience and wonderful story each time continues to endear the boardgame to me.

1. Ora et Labora

1 – 4 Players | 60 – 180 Minutes | Weight 3.89 / 5

Ora et Labora, a boardgame about managing workers and resources to build up the land around your medieval monastery. Players have to carefully plan out their worker placements on buildings that will generate the resources needed to either (a) get higher valued resources or (b) obtain fuel needed to create high scoring settlements. At higher player counts, a satellite view of the game situation is required as players are able to use other player’s workers and buildings at a cost. This can be used to further a player’s progress or hinder an opposing player by using a building before an opponent can do so.

An example of the production chain of alcohol which can be used to get relics and coins

Ora et Labora comes with a building appendix that illustrates the synergy amongst the myriad of building cards and there are many production chains like the one above. The boardgame also comes with two variants in the same boardgame that focus on different types of alcohol: France variant (wine) and Ireland variant (beer). Whilst players will spend time trying to find the most optimal production route, players are never blocked out of making a good move in the game.

Ora et Labora is not just a lot of content in a single boardgame, it is content that is well thought out and rewarding to the careful player who plans their moves and is yet flexible to seize new opportunities. The end game is always an exercise in freeing my mind up to the available possibilities on the table instead of rail roading myself onto a set path. I love finding new ways for things to work together and that is why Ora et Labora is my top ranked worker placement boardgame.

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And there it is, my top five favourite worker placements as of 2024. I am aware that there are other greats such as A Feast For Odin, Dune (?), Obsession and Fields of Arle which I have yet to sample, so let’s hope I get to try some of these interesting titles in the near future.

Until next time, keep calm and play better.