I had a few ideas lately to make a worker placement game. It's not my favorite genre, so I am not much familiar with it.
Still, by thinking about it, there seems to have a lot of correlation between Worker placement, role selection and action cards. From my analysis:
Action cards: Play a card from your hand and resolve the effect. Normally, the cards is discarded, therefore not reusable. Multiple copies can be included in the deck.
Worker placement: All players share the same hand of actions. Actions are reusable from turn to turn and have a limited set. Sometimes actions are exclusive to the player that used it.
Role selection: All players have access to the same hand of actions. The players do not share the actions, only 1 role er player.
I think those mechanics could be easily substituted by one another depending on the desired exclusivity, quantity and availability of the actions.
There are some exceptions to the rules, especially when it does not imply a unique effects. For example, in "Leonardo da vinci" putting workers on a lab makes the invention progress by 1 point per worker. In that case, the worker is more itself like a resource.
What are your thoughts?
Second questions, how do you define the possible action of a worker placement / role selection game?
From my analysis of puerto rico, san juan, lords of waterdeep and leonardo da vinci, the "basic actions" or roles, must contain everything necessary to interact with the game.
It's like if the game was static and immobile, and to move things around your board, you required those actions. It's a form of indirection, instead of manipulating the components in front of you directly you need those actions to do it.
I guess afterwards it's just a matter to making each of those actions attractive enough to they they all have an equal weight. Else
Some worker placement can be like civilization, you place a worker on a tile and it gives you X resources.
But in order games, the worker is placed on a complex action. It's like if an action set is shared by all the players. One of the problem with such mechanism is player scaling issues. Like there is too much or not enough actions depending on the number of players.
In Puerto Rico, one player chooses, the others follow the action.
Indeed, all worker placement game seems to have some sort of central board where workers are placed. I always found this fascinating, but on the other hand non flexible. I rather have cards with action on them that can be easily be replaced if there is a bug, or for variety.
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Recently, I came up with solo game inspired by Star Trek Deep Space 9 idea, where you place workers or different colors(professions) to different areas of the station to accomplish various things, trying to fix problems.
Originally, I was thinking Battle Star Galactica events that required certain colors of workers to solve. The problem is that the event card becomes the action, and there not really other actions that can happen on the station.
Then I though of having more generic actions, like there could be, like in Puerto Rico, placed to build modules inside a free space of the station. Then this module, could be activated by placing worker on it afterwards. When special events occurs, they will add stuff to the board, like damage or problem tokens that requires fixing, instead of being themselves the target to resolve. I could use a combination of both system.
Then when alert arrives, you engage in battle mode, and the position of the worker in the station influence how they can be used to patch things up in battle.