Card Drafting

Drafting can take many forms. It’s perhaps best recognised in deck building games like Dominion where everyone has equal access to a shop, or in set collecting games like Sushi Go where players must make a discrete choice based on what it currently in their hand, or engine building games like Century: Spice Road where players attempt to gain he best cards for continued sequential play. Card drafting, however, is by no means limited to these instances.

The ‘card drafting’ mechanic is probably best defined something like this: “a player either makes a choice from a selection of cards, or receives a choice from a selection of cards, to gain for their personal use”. There are probably some holes that you are welcome to poke in that statement, but it’s a good starting point.

So what makes a mechanic ‘card drafting’ as opposed to simply drawing?

NOTE: for clarity, I’ll be using the word ‘card’ from here on out, but of course you could replace this term with ‘tile’, which functions much the same as a card. There are of course other components that could be drafted such as workers or resources, however those mechanics result in very different effects, and so aren’t explored here.

First, a player must usually have some degree of control over their decision; drawing a card blind from the top of a deck or being forced to draw from only one option is not typical of drafting. Second, and following this first point, there is usually a selection of cards from which to choose. Where exactly those cards come from and where they end up does not define the act of drafting, though obviously both have a large impact on how the mechanic affects the game.

There are many variations of drafting. Many games employ the use of multiple variations of card drafting at the same time. Let’s look into some of those variations, and further into some examples to see how they are used, and perhaps why that particular version of card drafting was chosen by the designer.

NOTE: many of the examples I have chosen use more than one variation of card drafting within the same overall mechanism. For each example, I have chosen to focus on a specific part of the mechanic as a means to explore and compare.

Open Pool

This title may not be a hugely technical title, but the mechanism is about as simple as you can get. Within the scope of card drafting, here I use ‘open pool’ to refer to a consistent set of cards that once a card is drafted from, that set is then replenished to its former size.

This simple setting is probably also the most common form of card drafting, and as a result also forms the basis for most other variations. After all, in order for a game mechanic to qualify as drafting and not drawing, there must be some amount of options available and some ability to choose between those options. If there are no further rules that apply, then you’ll have this basic, open pool form.

  • Point Salad is a great introduction to card drafting games. Its ruleset is simple, and the game plays in a smooth and flowing way. The only component in the game is a large deck of cards. Those cards are double sided: on the face up side are vegetables, and on the face down side are points. In the centre of the table are six cards showing the face up vegetable side, and next to them are three decks showing the face down points side.

    On any given turn, a player has nine different cards to choose between. They may take two of the face up vegetable cards (which are then replenished from the face down decks), or they may take only one of the face down points cards. There are some other rules that apply, but that is the whole game pretty much. Players are then faced with selection pressure of a couple kinds.

    One consideration is that the points cards are the only source of points in the game, and so the particular points cards you draft will incentivise you to draw vegetable cards that fulfil those points cards. Another consideration is that you can see what other players need to fulfil their points cards, or what vegetables they have, and can therefore prioritise the blocking of either vegetable or points cards accordingly.

    As this is such a simple setting of card drafting, I think the designer made a crucial decision in having the cards double sided. Selection pressure would exist regardless, but there would be far less pressure if the cards were separated into two groups.

  • One of the modern classics, Ticket To Ride uses an open pool for drafting cards in the game. Although the main focus of the game doesn’t feel centred on drafting of cards, being able to select which cards you acquire in the game is crucial for completing sections of track on the board before another player beats you to it.

    In Ticket To Ride you are attempting to lay your tokens onto various predetermined lengths of track on a common playing board. In order to lay claim to a length of track, you must play a set of same-colour cards from your hand. The open pool of cards to draft from is only five cards in size, and although it is always kept at that size (even during multiple card drafts), there are many colours in the game, making the acquisition of a particular colour situationally quite restricted.

    Obviously this is a step up from just drawing blind from the top of the deck or from the top of a discard pile, from which card drafting evolved. Even if you are unable to get the colour you want, there will likely be an advantageous choice available that will help complete a different section of track or help you get closer to completing one of your goals. In addition, the game features a joker card which can be used as any colour, however this is restricted during the draft. Usually you may draw two cards, if you choose to draw cards as your action that turn, however you may not knowingly draw two of these joker cards. This has an interesting risk reward effect on the drafting mechanism, where players are randomly rewarded for drawing cards blind rather than drawing sub-optimally from a selection of known items.

    There are certainly other examples of this particular variation of card drafting, but I wanted to point up Ticket To Ride as a clear example where the game itself is not entirely dependent on drafting ‘good’ cards. The value of each card is determined by the current game state rather than having an intrinsic value.

Diminishing Choice

I would categorise any game that reduces the amount of options of a set of cards over a given time period as card drafting with diminishing choice. This can be structured in many different ways, but the key element here is the time period in which it takes place. Some games restrict choice over the course of an action, a turn, a round or even over the course of the entire game.

Diminishing choice is a very common aspect of games, not least because there will often be a finite amount of cards in a deck, and a deck’s composition is (usually) determined during a game’s setup. This isn’t diminishing choice in card drafting however, which refers not to a deck of cards (of which not all are immediately available) but to a selection of cards whose attributes are known, and that can be compared against each other.

  • In Wingspan, one of the four possible actions is to draw bird cards. These can be drawn blind from the deck, or from a display of three face up cards. Although the action always reads “draw”, unless it is directing you to draw from the deck (i.e. blind) then you will usually be drawing from a those face up cards.

    At the beginning of the game, if you take the “draw bird cards” action, you will likely be taking just one card from the face up cards on display. As the game goes on, your ability to draw more than one bird card within the same turn increases, and so the choice available to the player is reduced (face up cards in the display are not replenished until the end of a player’s turn).

    This is a neat version of diminishing choice, nicely selected here (among other reasons) to limit the power of players who have greater ability to draw bird cards.

    In Wingspan, the ability to plan ahead is key. More options of cards to play means a greater ability to plan ahead, therefore giving an inherent advantage to players who can gain many cards (whilst also not falling behind on gaining the resources required to play those cards). Should the designer have chosen for the game to replenish a face up card in the display as soon as it was drafted, then perhaps we’d have a more predictable version of the mechanic, but there would be less balance.

    Further to this, card actions exist in the game which allow a player to immediately discard then replace all cards in the face up display. This has the opposite effect from before, instead granting even greater choice to the player who triggers that action. A player who is ahead on card draw might feel very smug about being able to draw many cards as well as being able to retain greater choice deeper into their turn than normal, and a player who is behind on card draw might feel like they have a good catchup mechanic for the same reason.

    There are plenty of other actions that interact with gaining cards, but there’s one that I feel is under-utilised but is actually very powerful. This is the action that allows a player to draw an extra card, then to discard any card from their hand at the end of their turn. Because this is set against other cards that allow you to use a card and draw a card, it can seem less strong. However, by drawing and retaining a card (instead of playing then drawing), you are delaying choice until the end of your turn thereby extending your ability to draft. With bird options posing arguably the largest impact on an individual player’s strategy, more drafting ability almost always equals greater ability to plan.

    Interestingly, Wingspan also utilises ‘resource drafting’, which side by side with card drafting offers a continually different experience from game to game, massively increasing its replayability.

  • Seven Wonders is an old favourite. It is technically a set collecting game, as that is principally how you will be scoring points, and also utilises card drafting with diminishing choice, but in a quite different context to Wingspan. Each player begins each round with a hand of cards. Each turn they will select one card from that hand to play, then pass their hand of cards to the next player (receiving a new hand at the same time).

    In Wingspan, the choice of cards available diminished during the turn to be replenished at the end of the turn. During any given turn, a player has perfect information about the face up cards on display and imperfect information about the face down cards that make up the decks. In Seven Wonders however, on any given turn players have perfect information about what is in their hand, but imperfect information about what is in every other player’s hand. And instead of experiencing diminishing choice during a turn, this is experienced instead over the course of a round.

    The pressure of card selection is different in Seven Wonders than in Wingspan. In Wingspan players are only minimally affected by which cards another player in the game is choosing to play, however in Seven Wonders your neighbours’ cards are very important to consider in your decision making (to a lesser extent all other players too). If you can see that your neighbour is going for a particular strategy, then you have the power to minimise the effectiveness of that strategy by drafting cards that would otherwise help them.

    What makes this setting of the mechanic lovely to play, is that the cards also form the basis for the resources required to play cards, for gaining money, and for completing stages of your wonder. There are some other neat little actions too, but it is this flexibility of choice at the point of draft that makes Seven Wonders a good game. If you take away discarding for gold, choosing for resources for future flexibility, denying a neighbour by using a card to build a wonder stage, then all you would do is choose a card to play and pass on. It is these choices surrounding the card drafting mechanic that actually make the game fun to play, and also separate it from games like SUSHI GO (which is still a very enjoyable game).

Scaled Cost

Scaled cost here refers to the idea that not all cards are equally available at any given time. An important distinction to make here is that this has nothing to do with a card’s subjective desirability to a player at a specific point in a game, but rather a rule imposed on a set of cards that increases the cost of acquisition based on the relative position of that card in that set.

More often than not this mechanism is coupled with an incentive being introduced to increase the desirability of any card that has was not selected within a given time-frame. Often this is achieved by attaching an economic reward of some kind to each card that was skipped or left behind.

  • Not all games that utilise card drafting value all cards able to be drafted equally. In Village Rails your goal is to gain the most points you can whilst completing a 4x4 grid of train tracks. Cards are drafted from a face up shop to which all players have equal access. The card furthest away from the deck is free to take, but for each card closer to the deck you wish to draft, you must pay one pound extra (placing that pound on each skipped card). Once a card has been drafted, all cards are moved as far away from the deck as possible before a new card is placed into the row, directly next to the deck.

    Village Rails has a tried and tested incentive creation mechanism that is a direct result of skipped cards gaining extra value. This is by no means unique but is well selected here. Perhaps a more well known example would be in “Century: Spice Road”.

    Without an incentive to take a card that has been skipped, scaled cost makes little to no sense from a gameplay perspective. If the card furthest away from the deck is free yet undesirable and therefore no player wants to draft it, it is simply reducing the overall amount of draft-able cards, in which case the designer might as well have only given players x-1 cards to choose from in the first place. And, if a second card is viewed this way, players are left with less and less viable options and are forced to take cards they don’t want, which never feels good. The incentive is there to offset that bad choice. Yes you may be weakening your overall power curve, but you gain something beneficial in the short term. And a further benefit to the player who takes the less desirable card (plus incentive) is you will usually be more able to draft any card you wish at the next opportunity, as you have more resources at your disposal.

    Village Rails is interesting in that it also has a similar scaled cost drafting system for its points multiplier cards, adding incentive there too. I’m sure there are other games out there that do this, but this is the only example I can think of off the top of my head. It’s a small incentive when compared against the points possible from other areas, however the game balances this draft incentive against the fact that it can be quite hard to secure a steady flow of money, further increasing the appeal of skipped cards.

  • This game is a great example of an alternative method of dealing with scaled cost. Instead of relying on incentives to alleviate selection pressure, Fungi uses a system which places all draft-able cards on a continuous conveyor belt.

    Fungi (also called Morels I believe) is a two-player, set collecting game, where players draft from a selection of eight cards that constantly move away from the deck. The two cards furthest away from the deck are free to take, but any cards further along will cost. However, at the end of every turn the card furthest away from the deck is discarded before the selection is replenished, ensuring constant turnover of cards that are free to take.

    This clever system also introduces block picks as a viable strategy, and also provides a consistent game length as it sets the rate at which the cards are drawn (once the deck runs out the game ends). I should also mention that this game also pulls players in different directions by way of various card types that give players extra hand capacity, access to random but powerful cards, and extra scoring opportunities. This creates the opportunity for many different decisions despite having a very limited underlying mechanism.

    Just as with Village Rails, it’s the combination of scaled cost card drafting, and the very particular options that the designers have chosen to pair with it, that makes the game interesting. Without these extra options, both games edge towards ‘draw a card, place a card’ mechanisms, which, with low selection pools, run the risk of being too restrictive.

Economic Cost

This mechanism describes the act of a player spending personal resource(s) to obtain a card from a given selection, which is a fancy way of saying that you have to pay for it. This cost could be levied in a variety of ways. We’ve already explored scaled cost which is (usually) a situational form of economic cost. A true economic cost mechanism I would say must have an inherent and stable cost regardless of the specific game state.

Games that utilise this method tend to display the cost of a card on the card itself, usually meaning that that card will have the same cost to acquire at any given point during the game. The introduction of economic barriers or pressure into a card drafting system can create the basis for a very powerful mechanism, or group of mechanisms. Seven Wonders (along with other examples already explored) has a good degree of this in that cards may cost resources to play, however there are quite a few cost mitigation opportunities in the game that make the economic aspect of the game less punishing (e.g. permanent resources, upgrade paths).

  • A clear example of economic cost for card drafting is Dominion. I’ll refer to the base game only so as to avoid confusion of the multitude of other mechanics the game has introduced through many expansions.

    Dominion is a deck building game. On a typical turn, you have a hand of five cards made up of points cards, action cards and money cards. On the table and available to all players are stacks of various action cards, points cards and money cards. The aim is to have the most points at the end of the game.

    Effectively you have a budget on each turn based on the total value of money cards (plus certain action cards) in your hand. Dominion manages this by setting a drawn hand size of five cards, giving predictability but also an initial power limit.

    Each card in the game has a cost to acquire, with the more valuable cards costing more. Since you begin the game with low value cards only, your ability to gain high value cards is very limited, and so you must use stepping stone cards in order to eventually gain the cards you really want. The cost to acquire each card in the game doesn’t change over the course of the game, which naturally leads to some neat gameplay options. The concept of early game, mid game and late game cards becomes available, which in turn results in power curves and the ability to manipulate them.

    What I find fascinating about Dominion is that it is fundamentally predicated on probability. You don’t draft cards into your hand, you draft cards into your discard pile to be drawn later in a random hand of five cards. You have complete control over which cards you acquire (with a few exceptions), but little to no control over when they will appear in your hand to be used.

  • On the other end of the spectrum, Everdell is not a deck builder but a town builder. Again I will refer to the base game and ignore its expansions. Everdell and Dominion share a similar quality in that each card costs a certain amount which is printed on that card and remains the same throughout the game. In both games there are ways of reducing or removing that cost, but only through the acquisition of other cards that will give you the ability to do so.

    In Everdell, you are trying to play cards in front of you to build your town. You have a hand of cards that only you can access, but there is also a selection of eight face up cards that are available for any player to claim. It would be easy to gloss over this aspect and to lump it together with playing a card from your hand, but the designer clearly made a choice to have this shared pool of cards to draft from so as to increase player interaction.

    In order to play a card from this face up selection of eight cards you must have the required resources to play that card immediately, and must return those resources to the supply. This means that players can look around the table and assess who can afford what, and as a result this introduces the pressure to prioritise as well as the possibility of block picking. In this game, block picking comes in the form of combination disruption, as well as hampering players from being able to gain points from preset goals in the game which are based on specific cards or card attributes.

    Without this shared pool of cards to draft from, there is very little interaction between players other than in the worker placement aspect of the game, which results more in reducing available options rather than a direct interaction. Having a card drafting mechanism as a fundamental part of the game’s system massively increases the player’s sense of competition, thereby cementing the feeling that you’re playing a single game together, rather than separate games at the same table.

I Split, You Choose

Though probably a mechanic in its own right, I thought it would be odd not to at least have a small entry here. ‘I split, you choose’ games make one player split a larger group of cards into two smaller groups of a size defined by the game. Once that has been done, another player will then choose which of those two groups to acquire, with the other group going back to the splitting player or on to some other end.

This mechanism has its own entry in the library.