I was putting my collection back together after redecorating over the weekend and noticed a distinct lack of worker placement games in my collection!
We’ve played (and enjoyed!) Architects of the West Kingdom and Tiny Epic Dinosaurs in the past, but both belong to a friends collection and don’t want to overlap with them.
What worker placement games do you own and enjoy?
A couple recommendations:
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Dune: Imperium - Haven’t been able to play it yet but worth checking out
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Viticulture Essential Edition with the Tuscany Essential Edition expansion
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Targi - 2 players only
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I really like A Feast for Odin with the Norwegian expansion.
Dune Imperium is great - it’s a mix of deck building and worker placement
Beyond the Sun has only 1 worker but it is a personal favorite of mine
Just want to say a huge thanks to everyone for the recommendations so far! I’ve got a board game rental subscription with my local cafe, so I’ll have to scour their shelves and give some a try!
Lords of Waterdeep
Raiders of the North Sea
Paladins of the West Kingdom
Everdell has also some worker placement elements and is, overall, a really great game.
What are worker placement games? Something like Puerto Rico?
Games where you put a woker (typically a meeple but can also be a die) in an action spot and no one else can perform that action while you are there.
One with dice that’s fun is Alien Frontiers.
- A Feast for Odin and/or Fields of Arle to get that Uwe in. Both are really good with different trade-offs.
- Lorenzo il Magnifico for a really cool dice worker and tableau building experience
- Everdell is another taken on worker-placement driven tableau building. Lorenzo is a more interesting game but Everdell’s charm makes up for some of that
- Rajas of the Ganges a worker placement game with dice as currency and the cool two-sided score track that Ark Nova uses now too
- Caylus 1303 is a rework of an early worker placement game that somehow still feels very fresh and unique. (I’d go for with the 1303 version unless you already have an attachment to the original)
- Lost Ruins of Arnak and/or Dune Imperium for worker placement combined with deckbuilding. These two are often compared but IMO they are different enough that both are worth getting, especially if you take expansions into account.
- Targi and/or Micro Dojo for small box worker placement for 2
- Tzolk’in for the cogwheels! A “gimmick” that actually works really well
- Istanbul for the really cool grid movement based action selection
I would consider Wingspan to be close enough to a worker placement game that you should consider it if you don’t have it already - it is very good
It’s not worker placement in any sense. It’s a tableau engine builder.
