Discussion on this in the past concluded that worker placement was the same as action drafting or something similar, although I can't seem to find that in the mechanics list right now.

"Worker placement" has always struck me as "resource management". That is, it's not really a mechanic to break out...

Resource management. Feh.

Discussion on this in the past concluded that worker placement was the same as action drafting or something similar, although I can't seem to find that in the mechanics list right now.

"resource management" as a mechanic seems bogus. I mean, isn't that just playing a game? I have resources (money, workers, etc) and I have to manage them. By that I mean, I have to play the game..

Worker placement strikes me as essentially the same thing, since it's common enough. But the problem is each of the instances can be very different from the others, thereby reducing the effectiveness of drawing comparisons between the two games in the first place.

"Worker Placement" is only a valid description when you are placing components that can be recognized as "workers." It's therefore a rather narrow category.

It's really just an action-selection mechanic. In a game I've had brewing for several months, I came up with what I thought was a unique method for choosing actions. But recently I determined that everyone would just call it "worker placement" even though there aren't really any workers that you're placing.

Personally, I'm not that nitpicky about what it's called. If it makes more sense to generalize the mechanism to cover more games, that's fine.

That said, there currently is no Worker Placement, Action Drafting or Action Selection mechanism in Games->Mechanics, so we have nothing in BGG to track this mechanism.

Jim,

I can't seem to type what I mean these days. I try to be concise, and I miss stuff. I meant that "resource management" as a mechanic seems bogus. I mean, isn't that just playing a game? I have resources (money, workers, etc) and I have to manage them. By that I mean, I have to play the game..

Worker placement strikes me as essentially the same thing, since it's common enough. But the problem is each of the instances can be very different from the others, thereby reducing the effectiveness of drawing comparisons between the two games in the first place.

PR or Yspahan's action selection mechanism is actually the same as Caylus. You could as well put a worker pawn on a PR role to claim it. The main difference with Caylus or Pillars of the Earth is that you can only choose one action per turn. For Yspahan, the available actions are not even the same each turn (depends on the dies).

To answer the OP's question, yes there should be. If the BGG list of mechanics had been designed today, it would be included. Surely it is as important and relevant a mechanic as say simultaneous action selection. But worker placement wasn't around when the list of mechanics was created.

So evidently adding a mechanic to that list is not as easy as we would like to think it should be. Also, if it were easy to add I would also think it would be easy to change its name, therefore it wouldn't matter if we just called it worker placement today or action drafting tomorrow.

So is it easy to add or isn't it. And if so, then why not? I think all the games that have it clearly make the case.

There isn't a technical reason at all. I merely wanted to contribute my two cents to the conversation.

I agree that resource management is too broad a term to list as a particular game mechanism.

But is worker placement really the same thing as resource management? IMHO, no. worker placement is a subset of resource management. resource management is pretty broad. managing your resources in Settlers of Catan and Power Grid are on some level resource management, but would you consider SoC and PG to have the worker placement mechanism? Of course not.

So, again, my point is more that so called "worker placement" (as described earlier in the thread) is a particular mechanism that is prevalent in some of the more popular designer/euro-games. So why not track it along side other game mechanisms?

I've only been involved in the gaming hobby for a couple of years, and maybe I'm missing something, but this just seems obvious to me.

First, let's realize that changing the Mechanics list (or the Category list) is a huge undertaking! It's even bigger than the project to add ages to the DB if only because mechanics are somewhat a matter of judgment.

Second, realistically, we probably ought to think and discuss long and hard so we change things only once. So, it's not as simple as, "Let's just add this one little mechanic." The mechanic(s) have to be added to the listings of over 35,000 games and added to the advanced search system.

This is where the collective knowledge of the BGG community can be put to good use, as it has been with determining the optimum number of players for each game. Rather than sticking the admins with the huge and ongoing task of determining which mechanics define which game, add a Mechanics Poll to each game wherein BGG users can vote yes/no on whether or not a game has particular mechanics. The interface for this could be identical to what you currently see under Advanced Database Search. In the mechanics section for the game, list all mechanics which a minimum number of users have voted for with a minimum number of dissenters - say 75% support with at least 20 in favour.

And while we're at it, let's have polls on actual playing time, and let's make Weight a whole lot less ambiguous by splitting it up into Rules Complexity and Strategic Depth.

Hmmm, speaking of the Advanced Database Search, I just noticed that Worker Placement is listed as a mechanic there. But it returns 0 hits.

Interesting! So apparently the mechanism is in the database somewhere, it's just not linked to any games!

First, let's realize that changing the Mechanics list (or the Category list) is a huge undertaking! It's even bigger than the project to add ages to the DB if only because mechanics are somewhat a matter of judgment.

Second, realistically, we probably ought to think and discuss long and hard so we change things only once. So, it's not as simple as, "Let's just add this one little mechanic." The mechanic(s) have to be added to the listings of over 35,000 games and added to the advanced search system.

That's new! It wasn't there this morning. Huzzah!

Edit: So now it seems, in order to get the "worker placement" added to the game description, you'll have to click "Submit Corrections" for each game that has this mechanic. I just submitted corrections for AOEIII.

Interesting! So apparently the mechanism is in the database somewhere, it's just not linked to any games!