Door 21

Let’s continue our discussion about worker placement games with door 21 of our MechanXmas calendar: this time with dice worker placement! We have talked about deck-building worker placement games and games with unique workers. Though all of them are brilliant, I think my favorite might be dice workers! 😁 I guess dice workers are also actually unique workers, because they do different things depending on their value. It’s even more tricky because their values and abilities might differ from turn to turn.

That leads me to why I love it so much. This random input that you get each round makes for absolutely satisfying challenges and dilemmas. Every turn or round can feel like a randomly generated sudoku puzzle that you have to solve to the best of your abilities. 😅 Of course you might get screwed by some bad luck if you really needed something specific - this is why it is important to always have some tools to mitigate randomness or change die values.

The game of that day is none other than the newest and shiniest dice placement game: 🏞️ Wayfarers of the South Tigris! 😍

In Wayfarers the dice 🎲 are rolled each time you rest, so you get random values to use. The ingenious idea here though is that values don’t have specific abilities from the beginning. You get to buy bonus tiles and put them on your action board to assign icons to certain values - some actions will need these icons in order to use them. You could also put +/- modifiers down - for example if your value ‘4’ is really powerful you could add a minus icon to your ‘5’ and a plus icon to your ‘3’ so you basically get a higher chance to make ‘4’s.

This is of course coupled with the fact that you have an ever growing tableau of cards that give you more and more possible actions to use, so deciding where to go with which dice can be quite difficult to decide. 🧐 And if that is not enough there are also basic communal worker meeples of 3 different colors that can all visit different action spots, so you can place some workers while you decide where to place your die. 😂