F$@& Mechanics part 1: Draft based games.

Mechanics part 1:  The Draft.

Starting a series exploring how games play, starting with games that feature a draft.

“Draft” is kind of vaguely defined as a game mechanic.  In general a draft occurs when a player has a choice to make and that choice eliminates/limits options for the other players.

My 3 readers will be very familiar with drafts; we’ve been drafting simulation hockey players for 2 decades.  Implementing a draft strategy is one of the most rewarding aspects of the RLHL (I. Am. A. Genius!) so we are pretty well educated on draft position and what that means tactically speaking.

I think the purest ‘draft’ board game that we have played is Settlers of Cataan.  Starting positions are drafted, and for the rest of the game those initial selections dominate tactics.  There are a lot of hybrids, like Notre Dame or 7 Wonders.  Those don’t seem like drafting games at first glance but they really are.  The draft pool is your hand and you select the best card available before passing the leftovers down the line.

So how do draft games play?  That depends on a lot of factors, most importantly how well balanced whatever gets drafted is.  Like a broken item that is always picked first makes a game uninteresting pretty quick.  Likewise if items have too much parity draft position becomes pretty unimportant, so why have a draft mechanism in the first place?  Just deal something out randomly.

In theory, if a game is reasonably well balanced a draft game will have quite a bit of replay.  Because when to take something is an opinion.  

Discuss amongst yourselves.