all right here we go we're on to our second mechanic uh this today we'll be talking about drafting with uh i guess a particular emphasis probably on card drafting games uh specifically so let's get going with that and what is drafting well you could talk about drafting is basically a kind of resource distribution mechanic where you're going to take a pool of resources and you're going to split them as evenly as possible roughly between players assuming the players are all making good decisions in general this is really effective when things are more complex and the particular research resources that you are drafting are unique so you may be wondering wait a second this diagram is the same diagram that we used to talk about worker placement did professor pointers just forget to change his slides the answer is no i did not forget to change my slides the point is actually to say that worker placement games are a sort of drafting game where you are taking a limited supply and you are splitting it up in some way amongst people uh and so in this case this particular game uh and so for example i you're going back to what i did in the last the last lecture when we talked about work placement my purple player picks this lighter cannon spot and basically drafts it out of the the pool of available resources now one of the things if you looked at this definition and you look at this particular um the drawing here you can see this probably does not make a good drafting game right because more they tend as you see here it says they're more effective the more complex and unique each resource unit is and so you'll notice when you look at this uh this diagram there are a lot of spaces that are not unique they're basically identical so you've got cargo cargo stores here's more cannons and cargo cargo cargo cannon cargo maybe we could differentiate between lighter cannon and heavy guns somehow cruise quarters also have cannons there's light cannons up here at the all there's there's not very many unique spaces so one of the best ways to do this would be to take this and make each space um special and unique in its own right which would add some complexity to the game basically uh so work replacement is a kind of drafting but we i i think when most people think about drafting it particularly with respect to board games i guess maybe tabletop games is particularly more accurate in this respect we mean card drafting and so i'm showing here uh sushigo which is a classic example of a card drafting game where you are given a hand of cards like the one that's shown here and you pick one so you draft one card from this hand and that card then belongs to you and then you have to pass that hand along you're given a new hand and then you draft from that hand and so you you basically creating a private pool of cards that you have drafted that represent your team or your collection or in this case your sushi plate uh i guess um and so by the end of the game you have some sort of collection that then gets scored or valued or compared to the other players or something like that um so sushi goes a good example of this so why does this work well well drafting in some ways it allows you to avoid some of the issues you might run into with balancing otherwise because it gives the players lots of agency so instead of you having to worry about well are all the cards super balanced and everything you should still worry about that a little bit but the players are going to do the balancing for you in the sense that the most valuable cards are going to get drafted higher like if all the players recognize oh these are the really good cards um they're going to draft them first and uh that will kind of take care of that now you don't want to have just two or three cards that are super powerful and kind of um we used i used the phrase oped or overpowered or broken would be the other we talk about a card being broken usually what that means is that it it's it's too powerful it's two key or something like that so you can't just kind of make up whatever you want and throw it out there but there's a little bit more freedom because uh the players are going to do the valuation of the cards for you there's also a lot of different levels of strategy for this kind of thing there's usually a lot of ways to win and there's a lot of opportunity costs so if you've got a hand of cards and you pick one you're basically saying i'm going to pick this one and give up perhaps on these others i'm going to forfeit the opportunity to get these i may not get them later on there's also what we call heat picking which i don't i don't love that phrase but the idea is essentially you can draft a card or draft something to spite another player not it's spite sounds terrible that's not really true if you know if you can see what another player is doing what their strategy is and you see a card in your hand you go well this card would really really help that person so you can draft it into your hand to keep it away from that other player uh and so there's it's not necessarily direct conflict so you're not like actually attacking the other player but you you're indirectly doing that you're indirectly trying to prevent them from winning or prevent them from having too many benefits and there's other things here as well so when it comes to drafts in general they can be categorized in different ways and so i've listed here five different kind of categories that drafts can fall into clear and obscured open or closed complete or incomplete unrestricted or restricted common or private and so when we think about draft at least when we i don't know evolve you're this way but when i think about uh the most common use of the word draft you think about a sports draft or that i don't know how many of you had this experience in like elementary school where you're out on the playground and you say all right we're going to split up into teams and so they pick two people to be captains and then they just kind of grab they pick people out of the group one at a time all right you for me team like it's it's it's a draft basically um we talked about the nfl draft as a fairly big deal and so uh that those are drafts those are those are exactly this kind of thing so a sports team draft like the one i talked about where you've got you've got two captains and they just gradually pick from a group we can categorize that using these using these components so a sports team draft would be uh will be clear because everyone can see everybody uh it would also be open because when let's say i'm a captain and i can see my opposing captain i can see what he chooses so it would be open it would be complete because we keep picking until there are no people left uh to be picked it would be unrestricted because when it's my turn to pick i can pick any of the remaining people uh i'm not it's not like i can only pick well the ones on the left or something like that and it's a common pool because we're both picking from the same group of people uh and so you can see i've just just knocked out like i just classified this particular kind of drafting game mechanic using these categories but you can do this for card games too so for example seven wonders which is going gonna say is it the most well-known card drafting i don't know we could debate about it if you really want um but it's a very well known and very popular card drafting game uh so we could we can categorize it using these categories so for example uh it is an obscured game so uh you actually don't have access to all the resources and at a given time and so yeah you don't know what else other people have it is open because once a player picks you know what they've picked it's revealed it's incomplete because not all the cards in any given round get totally drafted it is also restricted because sometimes you cannot draft a card because you cannot pay for it or you don't have the necessary resources for it or something so you you can't actually always draft every card that that you can see and it is common so there's a there's a common kind of share of uh resources so if you want to do a card drafting game you need to think about these categories and what what category do you want your game to fall into and then why so if you want to be if you want your game to be your card game to be complete versus incomplete that's great that's fine but i just want you to have a reason for that if that makes sense um so so that's one way of categorizing things then there's a different another way of kind of categorizing things this is maybe a little less rigorous just kind of different types of of drafting mechanics generally so seven wonders again would fall under the pick and pass category in this this idea so you've got a hand of car and sushi goes this way as well you've got a hand of cards you pick one and then you pass the hand to the person on your left or the person on your right and then you're going to receive a card of hands from the person next to you and then you're going to pick one from there and you're going to pass it so you keep doing that you pick and you pass and so on and so forth so the hand that you keep getting gets smaller and smaller and smaller the options you have to pick from get smaller and smaller traditional drafted like the sports team draft that i talked about like something like the nfl draft or sagrada is a game that's like this as well where it's just a pool of dice and everybody just takes turns picking the dice something called the replenishing supply so ticket to ride sort of falls into this category so when you when you pick so there's a there's a pool of cards that's laid out there and when you uh pick one then it gets refreshed from uh a deck basically so that the supply never really diminishes there's something called positional drafting so this is a bit more strategic so seven wonders duel falls into this category if you've ever played that uh seven waters duel is the two player specific uh game that is similar to seven wonders but only for two players but in this one um there's there's a whole field of cards and you can you can only pick the cards that are on top and so there's cars that are they're like laid out uh with some of them covering others and so as you pick a card you are going to uncover some cards that are beneath it and so you're restricted that way and so you gotta control to a certain extent the options that your opponent is going to have right so okay if i pick this card that means that i reveal the two cards the two cards underneath it and i give them those options well if i i really don't want them to have those two cards or maybe i'll pick the card over here yeah so you have some sort of control over that then there's some other kinds of things where you can add from a pool or that makes it look like i'm taking away you can add to a pool or you can take away from a pool so you're picking and choosing large amounts of things at the same time then again you can see these these ideas of this idea of creating value and using the players to create the value so they're creating the balance right so an i split you choose kind of thing like in the game kimono right if uh if i if i take a a pool of resources and i split it but then you're the one who gets to choose right obviously i don't want to split it so that it's super uneven because then you're just going to choose the really nice pile and i'm left with the really bad one and so we're both we're both forced to kind of balance that like i'm forced to try and do it evenly and you're forced to try and assess of the cuts that were made which one is the better one for you the i value you choose kind of thing where in this case in isle of skye characters can put resources for sale if you put those resources for sale too high other players don't buy it and you're forced to eat the cost if you put those prices too low then you don't make the money that you need to really progress in the game um so right it's this idea of am i assessing am i valuing these things properly an auction is is like that as well just this idea all right how much are you willing to pay uh what is it going to take to kind of draft this uh negotiation in drafting as in bonanza uh there's an opportunity for players to kind of figure out back and forth and work amongst themselves there's a bit more freedom there uh and then the final thing would be a pregame draft so in this case um so a lot of the difficulty with a starting hand for example is if you've got a deck of a hundred cards that are all unique if you just dole out five cards to two two or three players one of them may end up just with a really powerful starting hand that just gives them a massively unfair advantage so one way to deal with this is that you instead of doling out you know the way you would do in poker right one one one two two two three three right instead of doing that you you un you reveal the entire hand for all let's say three players so let's say each player gets five cards right um so you reveal 15 cards and then the players take turns drafting those cards so that way you basically are guaranteeing that okay each player is going to get probably one high value card and then you know a slightly less powerful card and so on and so forth so the hands are more likely to be somewhat equal at the beginning of the game or at least the players have decided what what they think they want um in order what kind of strategies they're going to pursue so yeah so there's a lot of variation here as well so i i yeah i encourage you i guess i'm just trying to give you ideas for for things as well in terms of thinking about all right what does balance look like what are some of the options that are out there you should absolutely you know steal borrow and copy things that you think are really good and work well um to try to try and make things work um but yeah okay so that is that and that kind of covers drafting and then yeah we will keep talking about more mechanics as we go forward here and hopefully keep finding out some a bit more