Worker Placement

Worker Placement is a mechanic in which players take turns sending a limited pool of tokens ("workers") onto a shared board of action spaces, and once a space is occupied it's unavailable to everyone else until the round resets. The scarcity that drives the game isn't a resource cost attached to the action — it's the fact that the slot itself can run out before your turn comes around again.

Caylus is generally credited with codifying the mechanic; Agricola and Lords of Waterdeep are the games most players actually learned it from. The interesting decisions in a worker placement game are rarely "which action is best" in isolation — they're about timing and denial: taking a mediocre action early to deny it to an opponent who needed it more is a legitimate play, sometimes the best available one, which gives the genre a needling, passive-aggressive social texture that resource-cost games don't have.

The mechanic is often confused with a simple action-point system, but the distinction matters: an action-point game lets you repeat an action if you can afford it again, while a worker-placement slot is gone the moment someone else takes it, full stop, regardless of what anyone can afford. That's what makes going first genuinely valuable in a way most modern designs feel obligated to compensate for, usually with a rotating start-player token or a bonus for going late.

Worker placement games commonly graft an Engine Building layer on top once the placement puzzle is solved — the same board slots, but occupied by workers who now also trigger a cascading resource chain, turning "which slot" into "which slot, in which order, for which downstream payoff."