Popular Worker Placement with Dice Workers Board Games (Mechanic)

Edited to tag @sdirrane. This is also partly in response to his thoughts.

I agree that you this is question of semantics. And, I would be curious to know how our varied backgrounds in language affect how we look at this question.I, for example, while born and (mostly) raised in the US, I speak English as my second language. That will affect how I look at English and definitions of English. I know that the English have very subtle differences in how they view certain words. This is painting in broad strokes, but on a more individual front, we each hail from different backgrounds, and appreciate different nuances in words.

I do continue to maintain, without hope or expectation of converting you or anybody else, that a game mechanism is one of the games smallest consituent parts. I do also wish to state that for most people, maybe even most gamers, talking about mechanisms is not all that helpful in describing a game. Let me give an example. For mechanics of #The Castles of Burgundy, BGG has listed the following mechanics: Dice rolling, Grid coverage, Hexagon Grid, Set collection, Tile Placement, Turn order: Stat-based, Worker placement with dice workers. These are all correct, but give me much less of a sense of the feel of the game, than if somebody were to tell me that it is a, "multi-player solitaire, point salad, euro game."

My stance of course begs the question, what is the good of mechanics then?

They are good because we are nerds and like talking about them. They are also good because as we get deeper in the hobby we can identify the feelings that certain mixtures of mechanics will give. We can, to a certain extent, tell a little bit of the "taste" of the game by reading its recipe.