Games use a lot of different mechanisms to work, like an engine. You might know something like Monopoly or Chutes and Ladders which use a roll-and-move mechanic—roll a die, move spaces on a pre-determined path. You might have played Yahtzee or Blackjack which have a press-your-luck mechanic—you can keep doing doing the thing as many times as you like, but you might end up busting and losing all your points. You might be familiar with Scrabble which on the surface uses the mechanic of spelling, but underneath is an intense area-control game.

There’s a mechanic called “worker placement” where players have a limited number of tokens (workers) they can put on board spaces to take an action—the token doing a job, as it were. Rather than rolling a die and moving around a path, the whole board is an open playing field for players’ to craft a plan. Often, each action space can only hold one or two workers, so an added mechanism is a kind of action-blocking—players must weigh how important certain spaces are and prioritize actions because they simply can’t do all the things they’d like to.Worker placement games we have in the library include Stone Age (explored a little more below), Dune: Imperium—Uprising, Everdell, and Trails.

These kinds of games break you out of a familiar way of playing and ask players to consider: where do you put your energy? What are the choices you have in front of you and what are the restrictions you’re under? With seemingly endless options in our actual lives, that question of where to put our energy can feel overwhelming. Could a game help us to reflect on how much energy and time we have in the real world, and to be honest about what’s important to use them for? This question is not meant to be yet another overwhelming thing, but an invitation to ponder—in this moment right now, where do you need to place the worker that is you? Is that too earnest? Maybe, but we have time, as my friends and I often say to each other.

Alice C, board game librarian

Play Stone Age

Stone Age is one of the earliest and most well-known worker-placement games. It’s fairly easy to learn compared to other games of the genre, but offers a complex game-play similar in weight to Catan.

Players place workers on a beautiful valley map to claim opportunities to mine for stone, build huts, increase their capacity for agriculture, and expand their families. Workers placed in the resource-gathering spaces (food, wood, brick, stone, and gold) determine how many dice the player can roll to gather those resources, a hilarious and thematic mechanism adding luck (and sometimes despair) to strategy. Players are rewarded for long-term planning, yet key moments in the game often come down to the toss of the dice.

Stone Age is immersive and thematic—the importance of both building up your community and of feeding all of your people is reflective both of it’s historical era and our own. It’s also one of my favorite games!

Matt W, owner and board game enthusiast

Try our chips and guac

Just need a snack with your game and drink? Look no further than our delightful, house-made chips and guac. The warm, fresh chips really sell it, according to bartender Cole Finley. Salty, limey, and satisfying, it’s also a good starter for a longer evening of play.

Have some with a friend and a game of Stone Age this weekend!