Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / The Draft

Transcript

The Draft · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:04
  Welcome to you pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio
• 0:07
  recorder as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I
• 0:10
  walk home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good evening, friends. It's
• 0:23
  a dark evening here in suburban Chicago. I'm walking home from the train,
• 0:28
  and we are post daylight Savings time, and so at six pm it is
• 0:33
  dark as Christmas. So I am walking in the dark, but we have
• 0:37
  plenty of streetlights and stuff. I'm not too upset. I just may have
• 0:40
  trouble reading the notes that I wrote for today's episode. So today's episode might
• 0:46
  represent a failure in research. I say that because this feels like an episode
• 0:53
  I should have done before, but I couldn't find it. A bit inspired
• 0:58
  by my own previous episode on that feeling of just not enough, kind of
• 1:02
  returning to an originating idea. I was looking through my most played games of
• 1:08
  all time and then looking at the podcast archive to see what I've said about
• 1:14
  those games, and I realized that I'd never done an episode focused on Seven
• 1:18
  Wonders in some ways. Sure, why would I? Because Seven Wonders is
• 1:23
  sort of universally acclaimed as a great game. It's kind of like a film
• 1:26
  podcast going out. We never did that episode telling you how good Citizen Kane
• 1:30
  is, or I don't know that. I don't know that Seven Wonders hit
• 1:33
  Citizen Kane's status, but it certainly is widely renowned and generally enjoyed by most.
• 1:38
  So why, Brendan, do you feel a need to do a Seven
• 1:42
  Wonders episode? And I don't know that I have a good answer for you,
• 1:46
  but I felt like doing one, so I thought I would. But
• 1:49
  I'm not just going to talk about Seven Wonders Instead what I would do,
• 1:52
  I thought I would talk about different ways that drafting shows up in games I
• 1:56
  enjoy, because why not, let's jump right in drafting if you're not familiar
• 2:00
  with that phrase as a discussion of a game, mechanism is a process by
• 2:06
  which there is an allotted group of things to choose from, and players take
• 2:09
  turns choosing from that allotted group. Now that draft can occur with a shared
• 2:19
  supply of things, like in the middle of the table, and people take
• 2:22
  turns taking from them, or more often, when people talk about a drafting
• 2:27
  game, often they're talking about hands of cards and taking from a hand of
• 2:31
  card and then passing the hand of card along in a genius bit of explaining
• 2:36
  a mechanism by explaining what you do game right. In publishing, Sushi Go
• 2:40
  called it the pick and pass game. That's right, you pick a card
• 2:45
  and pass the hand. So that works really well. So I thought what
• 2:47
  I would do is talk about four different kinds of drafting, some games I
• 2:52
  like from each type, and what I like about them. So I'm going
• 2:54
  to start with the kind that is sort of least common for me, or
• 2:59
  did not to mind right away when I thought about drafting, but definitely fits,
• 3:01
  and that is a zool or that is shared pool drafting called I'm just
• 3:07
  giving these names. I don't know what they're really called, and I didn't
• 3:08
  take the time to look them up, but I'm gonna call it shared pool
• 3:12
  drafting. Both the two games that I'll use as examples of this are games
• 3:15
  I've talked about often. In fact, have games that I put in a
• 3:19
  duel against one another, and that is Azul and Segrata. Both these games
• 3:22
  came out pretty close to the same time, and they have a shared pool
• 3:28
  of resources and players take turns taking from that shared pool in various ways.
• 3:34
  In the in regular segrata you just go around in a circle, or in
• 3:38
  sorry azool you go around in a circle, and Segrata you use a snake
• 3:40
  draft, meaning that you draft from the first player to the last player,
• 3:46
  and then the last player takes another turn and you go backwards to the first
• 3:49
  player. So the first player who gets the very first choice also gets the
• 3:52
  last choice, and if you're in the middle, you get or if you
• 3:55
  were the last player, you get the two middle choices. It's a good
• 3:59
  system to kind of balance out the ups and downs of the advantage of position.
• 4:04
  And if you do it like Sigrata did it, where they also rotate
• 4:08
  first player, then everybody gets a turn at the front end of the line
• 4:12
  and everybody gets a turn in the middle, so it works out nicely.
• 4:17
  A zul, on the other hand, starts with the player who's in last
• 4:24
  place and just goes around in a circle, so the player who's in the
• 4:27
  last place gets the best drafts of the whole thing. Both of these games
• 4:31
  involve taking from a shared pool items that you're going to be putting into a
• 4:36
  display, and there's usually rules about how those items will go into the display
• 4:41
  and things that let you score the tension. The interesting tension from this mechanism
• 4:46
  comes from the fact that for each player, different items will have different value.
• 4:51
  A drafting game like this does not work if everybody has the same value
• 4:56
  for the items in the draft, because then it's just obvious which one you
• 5:00
  would take. What you need is you need to have the system that you're
• 5:02
  playing into have varying values so that you're providing varying motivations about which one to
• 5:09
  take. So for an on the table drafting game, I would point to
• 5:13
  a zul or Segrata. Now, some of people might point to some of
• 5:15
  the modern wonders like or modern marvels like Calico or Cascadia as really interesting modern
• 5:25
  drafting games, and I would agree to a point, but I actually don't
• 5:29
  think that those are drafting games in the definition that I've offered, because in
• 5:32
  both Kaliko and Cascadia, each player gets a full complement of things to choose
• 5:40
  from from the draft. When you draft a tile in Cascadia, or you
• 5:46
  draft a tile and a chit in Sorry, tile and chit in Cascadio,
• 5:50
  or a tile in Calico, then the next player the market refills and they
• 5:55
  get a full group of choices. I think that is not the same thing,
• 6:00
  and I would not even call that drafting, at least not in the
• 6:01
  same way, because a crucial part of drafting is knowing all the options your
• 6:06
  opponents have and taking or having a limited pool of options. I guess I'll
• 6:12
  put it that way. So I think probably in board game Geek, Calico
• 6:16
  and Cascadia are called drafting games, but I'm not thinking of them in that
• 6:19
  way. So Azuela and Sigata are both games you're drafting from a shared pool.
• 6:25
  But there are three other kinds of drafting games that I want to point
• 6:29
  to, all of which use hands of cards that you pass around. The
• 6:32
  first one I wanted to is engine building. Of course, engine building is
• 6:36
  a game mechanism that comes up in other ways. You could do engine building
• 6:41
  in Race for the Galaxy does not have a draft. There are many other
• 6:46
  engine building games. Chocolate Factory, for instance, does have a bit of
• 6:50
  a draft. Now that I think about it, I could fit into this
• 6:54
  category. But so what I'm looking for for engine building is the drafting portion
• 7:00
  gives you the pieces that you then assemble into the engine, which you then
• 7:04
  churn for points or victory. In some way, and there's a kind of
• 7:09
  back and forth to it. The least the two examples, I'll give you
• 7:12
  one of them as less drafty, one of them is more The less drafty
• 7:15
  would be res Arkhana. Res Arkana is, of course a game where you
• 7:18
  have a set of cards available to you and you're going to take turn.
• 7:23
  You're going to draft them and pass them around like Sushi Go or in these
• 7:26
  other games, and you're gonna do that twice, and by the end of
• 7:30
  the second draft you have a deck of eight cards, and those the eight
• 7:33
  cards are going to be your engine. But then you have to kind of
• 7:35
  get them into play. So there is the drafting part is just the first
• 7:41
  quarter of the game, and then it's about taking that engine that you've drafted
• 7:46
  and making it run as efficiently as you can to try to get to ten
• 7:49
  points before your opponent. It works pretty well. It's interesting. I really
• 7:56
  like res Arkhana. I've talked about it many times on here. I think
• 7:59
  there are a lot of people would say, yeah, that's a game that
• 8:01
  has drafting in it, but I don't think of it as a drafting game.
• 8:03
  It's an engine builder. On the other hand, one of the games
• 8:07
  that comes up often in conversation with Seven Wonders is a game called It's a
• 8:09
  Wonderful World. I've talked about it before on the podcast, and It's a
• 8:13
  Wonderful World. You are drafting from a hand of cards, much like Seven
• 8:16
  Wonders or many of these other games, and then after each draft, you
• 8:20
  are putting the card into a tableau. And really what you're doing is you're
• 8:24
  assembling the cards that you're drafting for that round. Once you get the whole
• 8:28
  assemblage, then you can decide you put some of the cards into the building
• 8:33
  area where you're trying to build them, and you put some of the cards
• 8:35
  into the recycling area where you discard them and get point and get resources which
• 8:41
  you then use to build your buildings. There is then this sequence in which
• 8:46
  the different color buildings activate and produce the stuff that they produce. It's a
• 8:50
  really interesting game of careful thought about when things will trigger, because often you
• 8:58
  start around with a building that's not completed, and after say the gray buildings
• 9:03
  trigger, then your building is completed and it goes into your tableau in time
• 9:07
  for it to trigger when the blue buildings build go or whatever. It's really
• 9:11
  interesting I like it's a Wonderful World a lot. I think there's a lot
• 9:16
  to be said for what's going on in the game, and it is satisfying
• 9:20
  tactically because you're always trying to figure out what's the best combination of things to
• 9:24
  go with the cards that you have right now. So that is an engine
• 9:28
  builder of a more direct type that I think fits the idea of drafting better.
• 9:35
  I think most people, if you say it's a wonderful World is a
• 9:37
  drafting game, Nobody's going to go like, nah, it's really more of
• 9:39
  an engine builder. I mean, I think you are building an engine and
• 9:41
  you have to do that well, but all know it's great, So it's
• 9:46
  fun. Wonderful world another engine builder. The second kind of game I want
• 9:52
  to talk about are games where you draft to manipulate something else, in particular
• 9:58
  a board, I would say, so area control drafting games. The two
• 10:01
  that I can think of that fit this mold are Blood Rage and Bunny Kingdom.
• 10:07
  In both Blood Rage and Bunny Kingdom, you are drafting cards and passing
• 10:09
  them around, and then you activate the cards in order to do things on
• 10:15
  the board. In Bunny Kingdom you are claiming lands as well. As putting
• 10:20
  out special tokens and getting scoring cards. In Blood Rage, you are upgrading
• 10:26
  your tribe or your clan or whatever you call it. You're deploying soldiers onto
• 10:31
  the board, You're maybe having battles, and all of those happen with the
• 10:35
  cards that you've drafted as well. In both games, there is a pile
• 10:39
  of cards that you're drafting from. Bunny Kingdom just has one pile of cards
• 10:43
  that you shuffle up and play a certain number of rounds of I can't remember
• 10:48
  how many rounds, maybe five or maybe three, it might be three,
• 10:54
  whereas Blood Rage you also are playing three rounds, but they have three distinct
• 10:58
  decks, like I think in bun Kingdom it's all one deck and you're just
• 11:01
  doing a third of it. So in both of these games you are drafting
• 11:03
  cards and manipulating the board space in order to earn points by taking control of
• 11:11
  different pieces of it. Now, Bloodage is much more confrontationally, you're actually
• 11:13
  pushing each other in and out of spaces. Bunny Kingdom is slightly less so,
• 11:18
  although you still can really ruin somebody's day by getting in their way or
• 11:22
  by taking the card they wanted. Both games have this two part structure in
• 11:26
  which you are drafting cards and then using the cards to do something on the
• 11:30
  board. It's this back and forth they think works really well and makes for
• 11:35
  interesting gameplay. Now, blood Reage is a game I've often talked about as
• 11:39
  being not really for me. I don't particularly enjoy it, or when I've
• 11:45
  played it, I haven't really had a lot of fun with it, in
• 11:46
  part because I'm not good at it, but that never clicked for me.
• 11:50
  Whereas Bunny Kingdom I do find pretty interesting, and like I have a copy
• 11:54
  that I bought when it came out and I have kept it, So Bunny
• 11:56
  Kingdom would be one of those ones that for me, I think is really
• 12:00
  interesting and you should play if you get a chance. Although frankly I'd say
• 12:03
  that about blood Rage too. It is a really interesting game, it just
• 12:05
  wasn't for me. I will say, this is not a category I was
• 12:09
  able to think of a lot more. I think maybe Inish also uses card
• 12:13
  drafting this way, but this isn't a super common mechanism. I know that
• 12:18
  Midguard does, but Midguard is basically Blood Rage round one, so I wouldn't
• 12:24
  offer that as a separate game per se. So i'd be interested to hear
• 12:28
  over in the forums on board game Geek Guild three two sixty nine is the
• 12:31
  pick up and Deliver guild. I'd be interested to hear. Do you have
• 12:33
  other drafting games that involve boards and how do you interact with those? What's
• 12:39
  the deal? So that's the second. So we've got drafting from a shared
• 12:43
  pool, We've got engine building drafting, and we've got board manipulation drafting,
• 12:48
  and then finally we have what I think a lot of people assume to be
• 12:52
  the granddaddy of, or the main result of drafting game, which is tableau
• 12:58
  building. There's an argument you've made that tableau building and engine building are so
• 13:03
  similar that it's not worth having a distinction. I think Seven Wonders points to
• 13:09
  a reasonable distinction because Seven Wonders is not an engine builder. It is a
• 13:13
  tableau builder in that you are accumulating a set of things that will then lead
• 13:20
  to other things being available to you, but you aren't having to build the
• 13:26
  kind of synergy where one card feeds into another card feeds into another card,
• 13:30
  and you don't run your engine at all. I think running the engine is
• 13:33
  a crucial part when somebody has an engine builder. That is not a thing
• 13:37
  in Seven Wonders nor in most tableau building games. The game Sushi Go is
• 13:43
  another one where tableau building is a part of it. The tableau aspect is
• 13:48
  pretty minimal. You could just call it a scoring pile. But a key
• 13:52
  part of it is that your opponents can see what you have drafted, and
• 13:54
  they can see what you're doing with it. And from that regard, I
• 13:58
  find what what you're doing in Seven Wonders and what you're doing in Sushi Goo
• 14:03
  to be similar, and I think it is. It feels like the sort
• 14:05
  of purest sense of drafting, because it is all about knowing the card pool
• 14:13
  and kind of playing the odds about what cards are still coming versus what cards
• 14:18
  are not, and then sort of reading the other players as well. In
• 14:22
  Seven Wonders, this happens with the green cards. If you and another person
• 14:24
  start going for green cards a lot, you can kind of disrupt each other
• 14:28
  without really knowing it. Same goes for the blue cards. If you have
• 14:31
  one person go for blue cards and nobody else really is doing it very heavily,
• 14:35
  that person can run away with the game with a lot of points.
• 14:39
  In Sushi Go, you'll have something like the green what is it? Is
• 14:43
  it the sashimi? You have to get three of them in order to score
• 14:48
  any points from them. If you only get one or two, you score
• 14:50
  zero points for them. That's a really interesting gamble to take. And if
• 14:56
  multiple people take that gamble in the same turn at the beginning, then nobody's
• 14:58
  going to get those, So that's really interesting. It also does put you
• 15:03
  in the place of like you can see the person to your left has two
• 15:05
  of those and one comes along in your hand. Do you take that to
• 15:09
  keep the points out of their hand, even though it'll give you nothing?
• 15:13
  Maybe you do. You know, if you're in second place and there in
• 15:15
  first, or you're in first place and there in second, it might be
• 15:18
  worth sacrificing the points you would get from another card to keep them from getting
• 15:22
  the ten points. Perhaps this happens in Seven Wonders as well. These sort
• 15:24
  of pure drafting games in which you're making a tableau, I think are really
• 15:30
  pretty exciting, And if you haven't had a chance to play a Sushi Go
• 15:33
  or Seven Wonders, you really ought to because they're great. So that's my
• 15:37
  commentary on drafting games. Which ones did I leave out? I'm sure there
• 15:41
  are some that you think are really great that I didn't even mention. You're
• 15:43
  mad at me, you're hitting your dashboard, or you're you're pounding on your
• 15:46
  earbuds to say, Brendan, you fool. You've left out such drafting game
• 15:52
  that I think is amazing. You could argue charifoning Mars, perhaps the drafting
• 15:56
  game in which you're building a board and building a tableau, but you don't
• 16:00
  have to draft that game, so I don't know. Well, thanks for
• 16:03
  joining me. I'm gonna walk today. I hope your next walk is opposed
• 16:06
  to mine. Was good Bye brought to you by rattle box