Division of Labor (I Cut YouChoose Worker Placement) v2.0

The Story So Far

Some time ago I posted about some ideas about, and even a first playtest of, an I-Cut-You-Choose Worker Placement game that I so cleverly (haha) called Division of Labor. I thought the theme was sound: in search of a new home world, we were bringing specialists of various types on colony ships, and as officers, we players would boss the specialists around, then divvy them up and send them to their next assignment. 

Mechanically, you'd place a worker where there were Specialist cubes, do some actions based on the color (type) and number of specialists present, then split the cubes into 2 piles, sending each to a different adjacent location. In this way, players would take turns sort of *choosing* a pile, then *splitting* a pile for future players. This worked, technically, as a sort of procedurally generated worker placement game, but it really didn't feel like I-Cut-You-Choose at all, which was the feel I was going for. 

At that point, I had to decide whether I wanted to pivot to a procedurally generated worker placement game, or find a way to make it feel more like I-Cut-You-Choose, or abandon the project altogether. I decided to give ICYC one more chance, and tried to identify what makes that mechanism really work in the first place. 

What makes ICYC tick?

As I mentioned before, I-Cut-You-Choose has roots in something called Fair Division. I came across a video one time about fair division of a cake between more than 2 people, which was interesting, but which is kind of irrelevant when it comes to using ICYC as a game mechanism.

You see, in Fair Division the goal is to make splits that are *as even as possible*, while in a game, you kind of want the opposite - you want as big a difference as you can get away with! In order to accomplish this, the things you're splitting need to have a few aspects to them:

* They can't be worth the same to everyone.

If you were to split some pocket change into 2 piles, it would be trivial which pile is better - you'd just take the one with more money in it! But if you're splitting something that could have a different value to you than it does to me, then it's a lot more interesting 

* I think it helps if there's a "poison pill" in the mix. 

I don't actually like things that are strictly negative, but many ICYC games have a dynamic where a certain type of thing is good *unless you get too many of them*, then it's a problem. Or an item could be bad, unless paired with another type of item. In Zooloretto, any type of animal is kind of poison if you don't have a pen to put it in, but you can spend money to discard the extra animals, thereby getting rid of the poison

Things like that seem to help give players a sense of agency over their splits, a way to try and engineer a situation wherein they can get what they want, even though they pick last.

For this to work, I think it's important to know for whom you are making the split, and you need to be able to tell what that player may want or not want. If you have no idea who you're splitting for or what they might want, then you can't really "make them an offer they can't refuse," if you know what I mean. 

For these reasons, I also think that splitting for 2 players at a time works better than trying to split for 3 or more players. Not that the latter is impossible, just that it's hard to do well, I think. 

In my original game, when you split cubes, it wasn't clear who would be choosing them, so it failed to feel like you were even doing ICYC at all. Some of my thoughts to change the game were along the lines of trying to make players split more explicitly for a particular other player. However, I never got around to trying a 2nd draft. Disheartened, I shelved the game until I had some epiphany or something.

New Blood 

Despite having shelved Division of Labor, I kept it on my mental list of things to work on next, and when I'd done what I could with Taiko Kiri, Eminent Domain: Coalition, The Great Goballoon Race, and The Sixth Realm (and stalling out on Isle of Adventure), I needed something to work on next, so my thoughts returned to Division of Labor.

I mentioned the premise in a few different online design forums, and somebody said they had a friend who was working on a similar idea for an ICYCWP game, but the main mechanism sounded a lot more straightforward than what I had originally tried to do. Rather than each worker placement trying to be both a "choose" and a "split," it would only be one or the other -- worker spaces would take 2 workers each, one would split and the other would choose.

I felt inspired by this much more explicit ICYC format. Each worker space could be seeded with cubes related to available actions, as I had originally planned, and could take 2 workers. I could see four ways it could go:

1. First worker to a space splits the cubes, second worker to the space chooses
   One problem here is that you'd never know what player you're making a split for - so that's not ideal, given my above conclusions
2. Second worker to a space splits the cubes, first worker to the space chooses
   In this scheme, the splitter would know who they're splitting for, which seems better
3. First worker to a space chooses whether to split the cubes, or choose
   I strongly suspect it'll be vanishingly rare that a player is so interested in making a particular split that they would pick "split," without even knowing who would be doing the choosing
4. Neither worker splits the cubes immediately - after all placements, first worker decides who splits and who chooses
   Unlike the last option, players splitting the cubes would at least know who they're splitting for. This sounds like the most agency for the first player into a space, but as above, I suspect that the vast majority of the time, the first worker will decide to choose rather than to split

Of all those, the second option (2nd splits, 1st chooses) makes the most sense to me. Option 4 sounds like a better deal for the 1st worker, but in practice I strongly suspect it'll be the same thing, so might as well use the simpler, more straightforward rule!

Division of Labor 2.0

So there we go... I modified my old Division of Labor prototype on Tabletop Simulator to sort of shoehorn this new format in, and gave it an initial test with Rick, and was very promising! Rejiggered a few things and had a 3 player test a week later, and it felt a lot like a real game!

At that point I still didn't really have all the values of things, I was telling players things like "this is supposed to reward you for having done a lot of building -- so if you build a lot, just assume you get an appropriate bonus." These last couple of tests went so well though, I filled in the values and we played a 3rd game a few days later and I think the structure of the game is in really good shape. I have made some more detailed changes for the next playtest, and I'm excited to get it to the table again. I'll post about the current state of Division of Labor 2.0 in a separate post, including the current rules. 

I had been inspired to combine Worker Placement and I-Cut-You-Choose in the first place because of Jamey Stegmaier's top 10 favorite game mechanisms video, wherein his top two mechanisms are, you guessed it, I-Cut-You-Choose, and Worker Placement. Now that I have a working prototype, if I can clean it up and make it good, maybe I should try and submit it to Stonemaier games. Stonemaier has some pretty clear submission guidelines for games they publish - relevant points from their website:

We’re looking for tabletop games (not RPGs) that capture our imaginations.

This is a tricky one, as I tend to be attracted more to clever mechanisms, but the story of the game is probably what captures most players' imagination. The story of Division of Labor made more sense with my original conception of it but less sense with the new version, so I could stand to revisit the story of the game and find something better 

The player count must accommodate a minimum of 2 players without a bot (we’ll add a solo variant to take it down to 1) and an upper range of at least 5, 6, or greater (without adding significantly to playing time or downtime). We’ll ignore submissions for 2-4 player games.

 My current prototype only supports 4 players, but it could easily expand to 5 or 6 -- the biggest question form e in that case being downtime - will there be too much? Will the game take too long? Is it OK if the game takes too long at high player counts?

We’re looking for event games–the featured main course at game night, not the appetizer or side salad–that play in 1-2 hours.

This is my wheelhouse, and Division of Labor seems to be in that range 

We’re looking for unique games–your game must feature something that has not been done before.

I haven't seen a combination of ICYC and WP mechanisms before, so I think Division of Labor offers a new twist on Worker Placement, and uses the underused ICYC mechanism which appears to be becoming popular 

We’re looking for games that flow well, which typically means each player’s turn is short and there are no rounds to break the flow. If your game has a number of phases (either within each player’s turn or within each round), please don’t submit it to us.

Division of Labor does have rounds, like most Worker Placement games do. To an extent I think that's part of the genre, and there's not a lot of bureaucracy between rounds, so it seems reasonable to me. Hopefully that won't disqualify it!

Hmm... I wonder if there's a way to do it without rounds, like you just place your worker, and if you place 2nd in a space, you split, the other player chooses, and then you both get your workers back -- and if you have both of your workers out and your turn comes around, you're just skipped or something. For flow-of-game purposes, I wonder if that might be worth considering

We’re looking for designers who are open to constructive feedback and who are willing to work on their game well after we accept it for publication, as our version of the development process is a collaboration.

I am definitely such a designer!

I don't see it on their list, but there's one other criteria I thought Stonemaier looked for -- maybe I heard it on a podcast or video somewhere, or maybe it's old news -- that they like to have a notable component that stands out and grabs people's attention, such as the Mech minis in Scythe, or the sculpted buildings in Tapestry. In Division of Labor, you are able to build higher level buildings on top of lower level ones of the same type. I was thinking a way to make that very clear, and maybe provide an interesting component, that perhaps the building pieces could be like those in the abstract game Gobblet. In that game you have little upside-down cups of various sizes, and you can place a bigger one over the top of a smaller one, thereby "gobbling it up." So what if the Level 1 buildings were a little sculpted mini, and the Level 2 and Level 3 buildings were similarly sculpted, but bigger, and hollow, such that they fit over the top of the smaller ones, enveloping them. That seems like it would be pretty cool!