A casual look through Board Game Geek’s (recently expanded) list of mechanics will reveal a common trend: most mechanics are just a form of drafting. It already has action drafting, card drafting, and, well, drafting, but a few are hidden behind the link. Clicking on worker placement will reveal that it’s actually just another term for “action drafting.” But is there more than that, even?

What is Drafting

Drafting is the process of distributing things among people by allowing players to choose them in some form of alternation between them so that each person gets as close to an equal amount and value as possible. Most commonly in board games, this means one player gets to pick something, usually a card, then the next player picks something, and so on. Sometimes the draft also reverse, so that the player who picks first will also pick last. Drafting is a common way for designers to balance games, since the player who gets the best card will not be able to get the second best card, any dominant strategies will be easy to disrupt by other players, and randomization’s role is minimized.

All Decisions are Drafting

Looking again at the description for worker placement a.k.a action drafting, it says that players must pick from a set of actions available to all players, where picking an action prevents other players from picking it. However, almost every game that exists can be described like that! Drafting is deeply rooted in board games because almost every game is about resource management, even if those resources are not physical, like “time” or “actions.” Since most games operate in turns, that means players get access to these things at different times or in different ways, and each player getting something means another player cannot. Even if a player does get the same exact thing, the fact that they got it after the previous player always affects the game in some way.

All Mechanics are Decisions

Any game with a market is effectively a draft, since players go in turn order buying things from a limited supply, the fact that there is a cost or that you can pass doesn’t means it is not a draft, since those often appear even in real-world drafts. Auctions are like two drafts in one, drafting items by drafting multiple prices. Combat is drafting, too, since you take turns deciding which option you want while your opponent slowly limits them. Even games without player turns can be drafting: in werewolf-style games, the whole group has to slowly whittle down their choices by picking one player at a time while their opponents pick from a subset of those players. Anything that a game has outside of number crunching is a decision, and every decision is drafting.

So What?

If you couldn’t tell by the title, this is more of a ramble than anything. Try not to take it too seriously. Just remember that any time you are asking a player to do something, you are asking them to draft something. All choices they have will limit players in some way, so think of what it would look like if their choices were laid out in front of them like a draft. Maybe it’ll help you think.