Most games have some form of drafting, and a popular few have what people often consider the most direct form of drafting: card drafting. Whether a form of game setup like in a Magic Booster Draft, a per-round thing like in Terraforming Mars, or the entire game like in Sushi-Go, drafting cards sees a lot of use in board game design. But I’ve noticed something missing in a lot of them that the designers don’t even seem to realize.

A Summary of Drafting

For those less familiar (and to keep us all on the same page), I’ll describe card drafting. Each player is given some assortment of cards, almost always randomized, which we’ll call a “pack,” the term used in MtG. Each player looks at the cards in their pack, takes one for themself, then passes the remainder of the pack to the next player. These actions are usually all done simultaneously, and are sometimes kept hidden from others and other times made public as soon as the cards are chosen. The looking, picking, and passing is repeated until all cards (or a certain number) have been drafted. Sometimes the last card is treated differently, since the player who receives it would otherwise be forced to pick it.

Drafting is very popular among designers because of a couple of reasons. First, it is a great balancing technique. If you’ve read my article on player-centric decisions, you’ll know that just letting your players decide which card is the best of a pack saves you a lot of work. Second, it’s fast. Everything is done at the same time, so you get a lot done in a small amount of time. Third, it’s familiar. If a players has done it once, it’s pretty easy to tell them “it’s like a normal draft but you do this.” On the flipside, though, it can also be incredibly slow if not every player knows the cards, since they’ll have to read every card one by one. despite this or perhaps because of it, enfranchised players really like drafting.

Where’s the Strategy?

Players like drafts because it gives them a lot of control. If you like a certain type of card, you can draft that type of card. Sometimes this is called “forcing” a strategy, since sometimes you won’t get access to those cards, but you pick others under the assumption you’ll get it eventually. Players also enjoy the variety, since you’ll see so many different cards, and you’ll never be able to get quite the same bunch of cards each game.

Players will tell you they like the strategy to the draft, but where strategy exists in a draft is hard to understand. You could argue that it’s a case of risk assessment, such as drafting a card that is great with another card you haven’t seen yet or a card that will be average no matter what. I think this is a little less strategic than it sounds, since every player will have an equal chance of picking any certain cards, you can’t really plan on what will or won’t exist, and you’ll have no idea if a player already took your card’s other half.

So it comes down to information. If you don’t have any information, you’re effectively forced into just taking whatever card is the best in the pack, since you’ll have no idea what you’ll get or what’s already gone. Some games publicly reveal each card taken, such as Sushi-Go, so you’ll have an idea of what other people might end up taking. Other games will alternate draft directions, so you’ll end up getting cards from a player you passed to the last turn. If you gave that player a lot of good cards of type A, then you probably won’t end up receiving any more cards of type A and can plan around that. But I want to talk about what I feel is the most underrated part of a draft

The Wheel

Wheeling is a slang term eferring to cards that are still in a pack that you have already drafted once. So if you have a pack of 10 cards, pick one, then it gets passed five times in a circle before coming back to you, the remaning 4 cards have “wheeled.” This only occurs in games where the number of cards in the pack exceeds the number of players. I think it leads to some of the deepest decisions in the whole draft.

Let’s say a pack has two cards you want. Which do you pick? If nothing is going to wheel, you just pick whichever is the better card. But if wheeling is possible, then you have to think. Of these two cards, which one is less likely to get picked? It will, in many cases, just be the worse of the two cards, but sometimes it goes deeper. If one card has very narrow uses, then even if it’s the better card, you might want to pick the worse card in hopes the narrow card is ignored by the other players. And if it does not end up wheeling, then you just learned that someone else is trying to get the same narrow-use cards that you want, which could be a huge deal! The opposite happens, too: If a card you expected someone to take comes all the way back to you, then you can deduce that no one else is trying to use that card, and you can take advantage of the situation.

When you don’t have the opportunity to wheel cards, everything just feels random. Each pack is a set of cards that you have no idea what’s in them. You just have to roll with it. But if you know what’s in a pack that’s coming to you, then you have a lot more information to work with. All the sudden you can plan, you can learn, and you can hope. All the sudden the draft becomes interesting.

Conclusion

Drafting is fun, but letting player wheel cards is a huge deal. The game gets much more interesting, much more fun, and much more strategic. Please, if you can, include it in your next drafting game.