Description
Buildings, and their corresponding actions, may be added to the pool of actions players may select from. Buildings may also be occupied to prevent or hinder players from accessing those actions.
Discussion
Buildings define available actions in a worker placement game, and how designers manage the availability of actions is critical to the overall flow of the game. Some games retain a static set of actions throughout the game, like Stone Age. Other games introduce new actions in a set pattern. Agricola features new actions that reveal themselves each round, but the actions are drawn from a very small subset, guaranteeing, for example, that the “Family Expansion” action will reveal itself in one of three consecutive rounds. Many games allow players to add buildings and to claim ownership for them. As early as Caylus, players could add a building and receive victory points when another player occupied it. Lords of Waterdeep has variable owner rewards for building usage by others. Some games break the core notion of action drafting by introducing private actions. Russian Railroads themed these as engineers, rather than buildings, but private buildings, themed as buildings, exist in The Manhattan Project. On the opposite end of the spectrum are public actions that are always available to all players, like the resource-gather actions in Stone Age, which are in a public area, or the
brewery actions in Brew Crafters, which are depicted on each player’s board. The section on Ownership (ECO-14) has more details on this concept. Underlying the difference between these actions is the concept of blocking. Worker placement is a kind of action drafting, and drafting denotes a dwindling set of possible choices. Worker placement depicts claimed actions as a building staffed by a worker, so a building that cannot take an additional worker is considered blocked. The typical worker placement game allows each building to be used by one player each round and is blocked when one worker is in it. Modest exceptions allow for two or three players to use a building—an easy way to scale the actions available in a game as the player count increases. Some games eschew “hard” blocking in favor of “soft” blocking. In Coal Baron, players don’t block buildings by occupying them, but they simply increase the costs of other players accessing them. Carson City, a Westernthemed game, has workers in the same space duel to see who claims its reward. Bumping, another kind of soft blocking, allows an occupied building to be reused, but the worker currently occupying the building is removed, and the owner gains some kind of bonus. In Euphoria, a game which otherwise requires players to spend a turn recalling workers, simply the act of being bumped is beneficial to the player being bumped—an especially elegant combination of mechanisms. Blocking is a player-driven placement restriction, but the game itself may impose placement restrictions as well. Some games require multiple workers to be played in order to activate a space, as in Russian Railroads or Sometimes, players must exceed a particular pip value with one or more dice. Other times, a building calls for a sequential run of dice or a pair or larger linear relationship between buildings, such that once you skip over a closer building to activate one further down the river or road, you can never go back. A more prosaic placement restriction is a cost, like in the case of a resource-conversion or building action, which requires inputting resources to build some finished product or obtain some advanced resource. Kingdom of Solomon offers players bonus action buildings that are substantially more powerful than the standard spaces, but which require assigning all remaining workers. This can be viewed as a declining price auction (AUC-08) for these bonus actions, with the price expressed in terms of workers, that is folded into the larger worker placement structure.
Sample Games
Agricola (Rosenberg, 2007) Alien Frontiers (Niemann, 2010) Brew Crafters (Rosset, 2013) Carson City (Georges, 2009) Caylus (Attia, 2005) Coal Baron (Kiesling and Kramer, 2013) Egizia (Acchittocca, Brasini, Gigli, Luperto, and Tinto, 2009) Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia (Stegmaier and Stone, 2013) Kingdom of Solomon (duBarry, 2012) Lords of Waterdeep (Lee and Tompson, 2012) The Manhattan Project (Tibbets, 2012) Russian Railroads (Ohley and Orgler, 2013) Stone Age (Brunnhofer, 2008)
描述
建筑及其相应的行动可以添加到玩家可以从中选择的行动池中。建筑也可以被占据以防止或阻碍玩家访问这些行动。
讨论
建筑定义了工人放置游戏中的可用行动，设计师如何管理行动的可用性对游戏的整体流程至关重要。有些游戏在整个游戏过程中保留一组静态的行动，如《石器时代》。其他游戏以设定的模式引入新行动。《农场主》具有每轮揭示的新行动，但这些行动是从一个非常小的子集中抽取的，例如保证”家庭扩张”行动将在三个连续回合之一中揭示。许多游戏允许玩家添加建筑并声称对它们的所有权。早在《凯吕斯》中，玩家就可以添加建筑，并在另一名玩家占据它时获得胜利点数。《深水城领主》对其他玩家使用建筑有可变的所有者奖励。一些游戏通过引入私人行动来打破行动轮抽的核心概念。《俄罗斯铁路》将这些主题化为工程师，而不是建筑，但在《曼哈顿计划》中存在以建筑为主题的私人建筑。相反的是始终对所有玩家可用的公共行动，如《石器时代》中的资源收集行动，它们位于公共区域，或
《啤酒工匠》（Brew Crafters）中的啤酒厂行动，它们被描绘在每个玩家的棋盘上。关于所有权（ECO-14）的部分有关于这个概念的更多细节。这些行动之间差异的基础是阻挡的概念。工人放置是一种行动轮抽，轮抽意味着可能选择的减少集合。工人放置将声称的行动描述为由工人配备的建筑，因此无法接受额外工人的建筑被认为是被阻挡的。典型的工人放置游戏允许每栋建筑每轮被一名玩家使用，当一个工人在其中时就被阻挡。适度的例外允许两个或三个玩家使用一栋建筑——这是一种随着玩家人数增加而扩展游戏中可用行动的简单方法。有些游戏避开”硬”阻挡而采用”软”阻挡。在《煤矿大亨》（Coal Baron）中，玩家不会通过占据建筑来阻挡建筑，而只是增加其他玩家访问它们的成本。《卡森城》（Carson City）是一款西部主题的游戏，在同一空间的工人决斗以查看谁声称其奖励。碰撞（Bumping），另一种软阻挡，允许重用被占据的建筑，但当前占据建筑的工人被移除，所有者获得某种奖励。在《欢乐建造》中，一款原本要求玩家花费一个回合召回工人的游戏，被碰撞的行为对被碰撞的玩家有利——这是一个特别优雅的机制组合。阻挡是玩家驱动的放置限制，但游戏本身也可能施加放置限制。有些游戏需要打出多个工人才能激活一个空间，如《俄罗斯铁路》或有时，玩家必须用一个或多个骰子超过特定的点数值。其他时候，建筑要求骰子的连续顺子或一对或建筑之间更大的线性关系，这样一旦你跳过更近的建筑以激活河流或道路上更远的建筑，你就永远无法回去。更平凡的放置限制是成本，如在资源转换或建筑行动的情况下，需要输入资源以建造某些成品或获得某些高级资源。《所罗门王国》（Kingdom of Solomon）为玩家提供了奖励行动建筑，这些建筑比标准空间强大得多,但需要分配所有剩余的工人。这可以被视为这些奖励行动的递减价格拍卖（AUC-08），价格以工人表示，被折叠到更大的工人放置结构中。
游戏范例
Agricola (Rosenberg, 2007) - 《农场主》 Alien Frontiers (Niemann, 2010) - 《外星前线》 Brew Crafters (Rosset, 2013) - 《啤酒工匠》 Carson City (Georges, 2009) - 《卡森城》 Caylus (Attia, 2005) - 《凯吕斯》 Coal Baron (Kiesling and Kramer, 2013) - 《煤矿大亨》 Egizia (Acchittocca, Brasini, Gigli, Luperto, and Tinto, 2009) - 《埃及》 Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia (Stegmaier and Stone, 2013) - 《欢乐建造：建造更好的反乌托邦》 Kingdom of Solomon (duBarry, 2012) - 《所罗门王国》 Lords of Waterdeep (Lee and Tompson, 2012) - 《深水城领主》 The Manhattan Project (Tibbets, 2012) - 《曼哈顿计划》 Russian Railroads (Ohley and Orgler, 2013) - 《俄罗斯铁路》 Stone Age (Brunnhofer, 2008) - 《石器时代》