Game mechanics are something I think about a lot in my spare time. I won’t make a habit of doing whole articles on single game mechanics, but this one was something I’ve had on my mind recently; I have a deck of Magic: the Gathering land cards that I use to explore drafting and card selection and how it can be done. Without further ado…
What is drafting?
Drafting in its simplest form is multiple people choosing options from a pool of items. One person’s pick reduces everyone else’s and informs strategy. A lot of sports hold drafts where they pick players, which in turn determines the team’s strengths and weaknesses. In games, the most well known form of drafting is the Winston Draft seen in Magic: the Gathering, 7 Wonders and Sushi Go! In these version, you get hands of cards, pick one to keep, and pass the rest to the next player (maybe swapping left and right for variation). At the end of the draft, you have a set of cards.
Drafting takes on a wider sense though, and actually slips into other games in the guise of other mechanics. In Ticket to Ride, you draft cards from the side of the board to complete routes. In Jaipur, you’re picking cards from the table and trading options (colours) for other options and while changing your opponent’s. In Friday, a solitaire game, you draft the card you want to fight that round. (If you haven’t played Friday, when you’re choosing a card to fight, you have decide based on three levels: 1. If you want to fight it at the next stage 2. If you want the card in your deck 3. Can you actually defeat it this round and how much damage will it do to you if you can’t). Drafting then can be seen to bleed a little at the edges as to what it does and how it works.
Parts and variation
Drafts work in a few different ways, but a few principles stand true for most forms.
Direction, not in the literal sense (though the phrase left/right/left is used often) is the key part of a draft. Where is the draft going to take you? Which cards do you want to see as more get passed around? In Magic, you pick colours to lean into strategies. In Ticket to Ride, you grab the card which suits your tactics and then fits into your strategy as the game progresses.
This then leads into narrowing down. Narrowing down is more focused on the trade offs you make at each stage of the draft. With each pick, you remove a card from the table, nobody else now has access to that card. If it’s a good card, it strengthens your ability in that narrow field. At the same time, everyone else is also picking a card, and narrowing your further choices. You may also pick something to stop someone else having it if it’s particularly good against you (this is known as a hate draft).
In this case then, every choice matters. To use a Winston draft as an example, you use 8 players with 15 cards per player. In this case, you get to see 2 cards from 7 of the packs, and then 1 card from 1 pack. This creates a game in itself, when you choose your card, you’re also making a choice on what card you want to make it’s way back to you, and what’s likely to be taken before you see the pack again. In this sense, doing a Winstone draft with 4 players and packs of 7 also produces a similar result.
With this, you need to be able to read the table. Open drafting is also a way to use the mechanic, and that really plays with how players interact (and arguably makes it easier for new players). You can watch people’s choices change as they see what others do; in Jaipur, you can start to take cards and try and beat your opponent to their plan. I’d argue 7 Wonders and Sushi Go! are examples of semi-open drafts: you all choose secretly and then reveal. This is a nice middle ground but gives the same effect.
So drafting is choosing the best combination of items while balancing how it affects your opponents and how they can affect you.
The problems with drafting
Drafting is a brilliant mechanic, it creates a meta-game to the game you’re playing (if it isn’t the game in itself). That being said, there are a few issues with the mechanic
One issue is the number of players. As said before, although drafts are quite internal and individual, the number of players around you also has quite an impact on how it works. Most drafts are quite scalable in terms of time (7 Wonders is heralded for this) but a draft can also depend on the number of players to increase the variety of options available and make everything viable while drafting. You need to have enough players to make sure the variety is strong and varied enough.
(Funnily enough, in Richard Garfield’s Treasure Hunter, if you play with the max number of players, you use all of the cards. This caused issues as you know that the “Double your team’s power value” would be in every round. If you didn’t have the double card, there was no point in trying to play the high value for a dungeon.)
The number of players can also completely change the style of the game (though this to be fair could be said of a lot of games; Puerto Rico is an example of a game that is said to be 3 different games depending on whether you play with 3, 4, or 5 players). Drafts will usually have an optimised number of players based on the interaction designed to go around it. Most solely drafting games will usually have a draft alternative for 2 players as it makes choice and strategy wonky. Learning what your opponent is doing becomes more powerful, but at the same time, it can be harder to stop what they’re doing.
One of the parts this then plays into is knowing the draft ‘format’. I’m going to use this term quite loosely, but I think the most famous example of this is the 7 Wonders science cards (if you don’t know what this means, just Google it and you’ll come across a few articles talking about it). In Magic, you want to get to know a draft format and learn how to pick cards based on what’s in your hand and what gets passed to you. I’ve been chided in drafts before for passing the wrong thing and for taking cards ‘I shouldn’t have take’. This can be quite daunting if you enter a game that others have played before, you change the play experience for other players and ‘skew’ it up.
This one point isn’t related to the rest of the points, but is related to one of my own problems with drafting games, which is last picks. For games that are pure draft, I’ve not seen this done well before. Magic, you get cards that don’t fit in your deck or sideboard. 7 Wonders, you get a couple of points but so does everyone else (or you get lucky). And Sushi Go! those chopsticks are coming for you. One of the unfortunate side effects of having to cut cards, there has to be chaff.
Ditch Draft
This is a form of draft I was thinking about for two players, though I don’t have a shell of a game yet (though it may lend itself to design the game around it). It is a draft designed for 2 players, each with a pack of 6 cards.
First pick: Choose a card to discard from the game, and a card to go into your hand (6-4)
Second Pick: Choose 2 cards from the pack to add to your hand. (2-4)
Third pick: Choose one card to add to your hand and another to discard from the game (2-4)
Each player ends with four cards, gets to see shape the other players choices before they get a pick, and then also gets another pick in response to their opponent. This means you are always making counter picks and reduces the number of bad last picks each player gets. This doesn’t really scale too well, you could increase the number of players and pass left and then back again between picks (meaning you’d always get back your first pack. This would also depend on how players interact outside of the draft and the relevance to a player outside of your trio (you, the player to your left, and the player to your right).
So this was a brief look into drafting as a mechanic. If you liked the article, I’ll explore some others in more detail and try and look at builds around variations.
AF Cowlin 