Haunted Walrus lives! I certainly didn’t intend to take a two month break from a month-old newsletter, but that’s how it goes sometimes. I have been absolutely swamped in the weeds preparing for the kickstarter of Uneasy Lies the Head, my gmless royal court roleplaying game. It’s been live for two weeks and is almost over, so I’m doing my best to resume normal life which includes writing the walrus!

In celebration of the kickstarter’s launch and recognition of the fact that designing and marketing the game has occupied most of my skull for the past few months, I’m gonna talk about a core piece of Uneasy Lies the Head in this issue of Haunted Walrus.

Worker Placement

Worker Placement was foundational in the development of modern designer board games starting in the late 90s. The explosion of the board game industry we’ve seen in the 21st century owes a fair bit to worker placement games like Bus, Agricola, Caylus, Tzolkin, and plenty more. Quite often worker placement games had dry themes about farming or something else that’s relatively boring, but the core puzzle is pretty fun! I’ll also argue in a second that it’s got the potential to be narratively compelling.

 In a game with worker placement, each player has some number of playing pieces (“workers”) that get “placed” on actions on the game board. When you place a worker, you perform the corresponding action. The key piece that makes it worker placement as opposed to any other form of action selection is that a worker on an action space blocks other players from taking that action, typically until it’s removed.

With that key rule in place, you suddenly have to consider what other players are interested in when taking your turn. Sure, taking the harvest wheat action this turn might be the best thing for you, but maybe you should mine some stone so your opponent can’t complete their grist mill?

Here’s an example from the game Dungeon Petz by Vlaada Chvatil. It’s a game where you’re a family of imps trying to raise monsters to sell off to the local dungeon lords. There are two spaces in this picture where you can send an imp and a coin to grab one of the baby pets on the market. One has already been taken by the red player, which means only one other player can take this spot. There are two pets on the market, but I guess the shopkeeper only has time to make two sales.

Roleplaying Games

Worker placement can be a great tool in roleplaying game design because it ties up player choices, scarcity (both mechanical & fictional), and an interesting mechanical motivation for player actions.

Player Choices

When designing a game with worker placement, at some point you have to decide on a list of actions that the players in your games can perform. It’s intrinsically limiting; by including worker placement, you can greatly set the scope of what players can do on their turns. If you played a wide open trad rpg about raising petz for dungeon lords, players would get to craft their own course of action, and chances are it’s something the designer never once thought of. In the Dungeon Petz example above, you can’t go hunting for new petz in the woods or something like that. You buy your petz at the market.

Limiting the scope of player actions is a great way to enforce the themes you want your game to embody. Worker placement is so good at cutting off potential courses of action that players often don’t notice that they’re being limited. If the actions have clearly defined procedures and consequences, then the whole thing is like a playground for the roleplaying aficionado; there’s no sense in wondering why you can’t chop down a tree or raid a dungeon when you’re at the playground shouting weeeeeeeeeeee down a slide.

Scarcity (mechanical & fictional)

Why do workers block other workers from the actions they’re placed on? Often it’s a mechanical scarcity: the game becomes interesting to play when your choices affect other players. Usually the game at least gestures at some narrative reason for the blockage, like there’s only so much wheat in the field. Sometimes the answer to the scarcity question is to give a way around it. Perhaps you can replace their worker by paying some price, or by meeting some other condition in the game. If there’s only so much wheat in the field, maybe paying a cash price would represent you importing wheat instead of getting it local. Or maybe you have your own field which lets you take the wheat action regardless of if it’s already occupied.

Mechanical Motivations

Weird mechanical motivations for fictional actions is the secret sauce that worker placement can offer a story-driven rpg. When you give players a non-fictional reason to want to do something, your game will essentially generate story prompts as a result when they resolve that action. And the best part is that it works both ways, if your player makes a fictional choice and tries to replicate it in the fiction, they’ll need to pick a particular mechanical choice which will have implications of its own.

This one is the hardest to explain in broad terms, so let’s move on to…

Two Ideas That Haunt the Walrus

Like I mentioned in the intro, this is a special edition of Haunted Walrus. Instead of pitching you three games I will probably never make, I’m gonna talk about the ways I’m using worker placement in a game I am making: Uneasy Lies the Head which is on Kickstarter (for the next 72 hours at least).

Mechanical Motivations & the Uneasy Prologue

The Prologue is the built-in “session zero” phase of Uneasy. Each player takes three turns total, and here are the basics of a turn:

1. On your turn, you’ll pick one of the big boxes on the three sheets. Place one of your pieces on the box you selected; no other player may choose this.
2. The box’s label becomes true in the game’s fiction, so if you take the Monarch you become the monarch.
3. Each type of box grants you an asset notecard: choosing a title gives you an artifact, describing a law or rumor gives you a resource, and selecting where you hail from gives you a holding. 
4. Each box also grants you two of the playing cards. If the listed playing card hasn’t been claimed by a player yet, you’ll make a new asset notecard based on its suit (either an NPC, artifact, holding, or resource). If the listed playing card has already been claimed by a player, you’ll take it from them and also take the asset notecard they created.

Players then are driven by two competing motivations:

• Choosing things they’d like to make true about their character. Sometimes this means you accidentally steal something from other players, which creates drama!
• Choosing things that will give them the cards they want so they can properly steal cool stuff away from other players. Sometimes this means making a choice and having to deal with the repercussions. I guess I’m the heretic now? 

These competing motivations get all the players invested in the outcome of the prologue one way or another, which kicks the game off with a bang.

Scarcity & Plan Selection

 The main part of Uneasy Lies the Head is a combination between free-form roleplaying scenes and the mechanical resolution of Plans. Plans are a combination of PBTA-style moves, Firebrands-style minigames, and projects from The Quiet Year. After a player sets a scene, they get to prepare one of the plans, worker placement style. That plan will resolve with a built-in scene and dice roll after a certain number of turns pass.

There are only twelve plans to choose from, and you’ll be blocking other players off of taking a plan by selecting it yourself. It’s an artificial, mechanical scarcity that ends up having some great narrative implications. The main reason I put it in the game was to make sure that players press a wide variety of the game’s buttons each time they play, resulting in a nice varied royal court story.

The implications of this scarcity have been incredible. You can try to predict your opponents movements and get ahead of them. Oh you thought you were gonna spread rumors about me? Not if I do it first! But uh, let me try to think of a rumor. When paired with the delayed resolution I mentioned before, you end up with moments in your story where your past choices really start to catch up with you and the events at court truly spiral out of control

That’ll do it! Check out the Kickstarterif you can

and look forward to the return of Haunted Walrus! I'm looking forward to getting things back to normal soon.