Don’t Put All Your Workers in One Quarry: What Architects of the West Kingdom Teaches Us About Risk Pooling

A few years ago I played my first game of Architects of the West Kingdom and learned a valuable lesson. Having played other worker placement games, I felt fairly confident going in and I was enjoying the mechanic of having numerous workers available from the start. Thinking myself pretty clever, I began stacking multiple workers on the quarry, generating a lot of stone each round before my empire came crashing down. Another player rounded up all my workers and sent them to jail, collapsing my economy and setting me back several turns. It was a humbling reminder not to put all your eggs, or workers, in one basket.

What is risk and why does it matter?

In today’s post, we will be discussing risk, and no, I don’t mean that friendship ending game from your childhood. In business, risk is any uncertainty that can impact your objectives, whether it’s a missed deadline, losing a client, or being blindsided by a market shift. Risk is unavoidable, but it is manageable.

Risk is a broad and diverse topic, and whole books have been written about the nuances involved. For now, let’s focus on a specific set of strategies for dealing with risk: Mitigation and Risk Pooling. Risk mitigation is the process of anticipating potential problems and putting safeguards in place. This can include avoiding risky activities, reducing the potential impact, transferring the risk to someone else (like insurance), or accepting a certain level of risk by having a contingency plan in place. The goal of risk mitigation is to avoid being caught off guard.

Risk Pooling: A strategy for shared resilience

One particularly powerful form of mitigation is risk pooling. The idea is that by spreading risks across multiple people, departments, products, or actions, you reduce the impact any one disruption can have. Risk pooling is why insurance companies exist. It’s why diversified investments like mutual funds perform better over time. And it’s why businesses often operate in multiple markets or regions. Instead of betting everything on one outcome, risk pooling smooths out volatility by sharing exposure.

This principle played out often during my time at early-stage startups. We ran lean and agile teams with very low headcount in the early days due to necessity. We just couldn’t afford to have multiple redundant roles throughout the organization. This is what made cross-training such an important policy for us. We wanted to make sure each member of the team could perform the roles of as many of their colleagues as was reasonable, to ensure we weren’t left in the lurch during call outs, vacations, and unexpected departures. Cross-training made the entire system more resilient and better able to weather unexpected disruptions.

Architects of the West Kingdom: Worker placement with a twist

In Architects of the West Kingdom, players assume the roles of nobility during the middle ages of a fictional nation. Each player is working to gain favor with the king by building up the infrastructure, donating resources to the nation’s coffers, and backstabbing each other. In classic worker placement fashion, players assign workers to various locations around the board to gather resources like stone, wood, and money, as well as gain or lose virtue (the game’s karma equivalent).

At the beginning of the game, each player starts with 20 workers that they will assign to the various action spaces, one at a time. These actions will grant resources to the player, allowing them to afford hiring new apprentices, build new buildings, or help build the cathedral in the center of town. Play continues until a certain number of building actions have been performed, triggering the end game. One of the standout mechanics in the game is the resources you gain increase based on how many of your own workers are already assigned to a particular action spot. This is what sets the stage for our discussion on risk pooling.

To pool or not to pool?

The benefit of concentrating one’s workers on a single space is so obvious it begs the question, what’s the downside? Enter “The Town Centre” action space. By assigning a worker on this spot, a player captures all the workers of a single color from any one action spot on the board (with some restrictions). This mechanic introduces a risk of losing control over your workers — you don’t just lose access to your workers temporarily, you also pay to retrieve them or lose future productivity. It’s not just tactical; it’s a cost in both resources and momentum. This leads players to the tactical decision “do I spread my workers across multiple locations or do I accept the risk in exchange for the additional resources?”

Risk pooling vs. concentrating resources

The question posed above highlights a simple but important decision players face when considering risk in the context of the game. Let’s take a look at those two options through the lens of the mitigation strategies introduced earlier:

• Avoid risky activities: By spreading out workers across multiple locations, players avoid the risk of concentrating too many workers in one spot, making them a target.

• Reduce the potential impact: Despite your best efforts, you will likely end up a target by the end of the game regardless. By spreading your workers out, no one location targeted will be too painful.

• Transfer the risk to someone else: In the board game hobby, table talk among players is often referred to as the meta. This concept also includes things like generally accepted best strategies and social dynamics like trust and betrayal, however, for our purposes it includes musing aloud that Sharon “already has 5 workers on the mine and one more means she’s getting three gold next turn.” Sharon might not appreciate you pointing that out, but it also means your four workers at the silver smith are safe for another turn.

• Accepting risk with contingency plans: Our final point here deals with something known as risk tolerance. Sometimes the payoff is worth the risk so you choose to concentrate your workers in one spot for the short term gains. Having a plan ahead of time for the eventuality of losing those workers is not only a great idea, it’s highly encouraged.

Putting it all together

Risk is unavoidable but as we’ve seen, it doesn’t have to lead to catastrophe. By taking the time to understand the risks and developing a strategy to deal with them, you put yourself in a better position to make smart decisions. Knowing when to risk it for the biscuit and when to play it safe is a universally valuable skill that will serve you well in all areas of your life and business.

In the coming week, when faced with a decision, take some time to consider the risks of your favored action. Ask yourself:

“Is there another action I can take with less risk?”

“How can I reduce the likelihood or impact of the potential risk?”

“Is the risk worth the payoff?”

“How can I spread the risk out over multiple actors or actions?”

In time, thinking about risk in this way becomes second nature and an automatic consideration for future decisions. Whether you're managing a business or managing your medieval workforce in Architects of the West Kingdom, the principle remains the same: risk is inevitable, but smart mitigation, especially through diversification and risk pooling, keeps you in the game and in business longer.

So next time you find yourself stacking workers in one spot or pouring all your efforts into one project, take a beat. Look at your board. Look at your business. And remember: a diversified strategy isn’t just safer, it’s smarter.