What's that noise? Clapping. There's a theater like right there. There was something weird going on over there that was messing with me. All right. So, let's move on.
Drafting. Oh, baby. So, the word drafting, right virtual casino games Malaysia? There's a lot of things that are drafts, and people don't realize they are drafts. What a draft is, for anyone who doesn't get it, is the kickball field. It's, "I'll take Jimmy." - "I'll take Bimmy." - Yeah. That's a draft. You have an array of visible things and you pick. You see resources and you say, "I want that one. I want that one." Seven Wonders. You get a handful of cards. I'll take this one, and you pass it. It's the same. NFL draft. "I want that college player on my team." "I want that one on my team." All of these things are drafts. In Ticket to Ride, you see five, face-up, train cards. "I'll take a black and I'll take a yellow." That's a draft. Drafts are everywhere. And when you're a player, all you have to do to succeed in a draft is two things. Number one: You need to be able to evaluate, correctly, the value of all the things. When you're looking at those players, you have to know which one is better than the other. Kickball. You get that kid, who's bee in 5th grade for three years, on your team. That's right. You know, if you don't know which kid is better, you're in trouble. The order of picking also matters, which is why Seven Wonders is kind of good because everyone gets cards at the same time - and picks at the same time. - We'll talk in a minute about the different kinds of drafts. The different ways it's done. The other thing you need to do is not only know the value of any particular one of the items for you you need to know the value of the items for other people So, let's say I see that there's that really good card, it's a science card, this would give me one point. You also need to know that it's worth seven points to your neighbor who already has a bunch of science's going on. Now, if you're in second place and that person is ahead of you, denying them seven points effectively gets you seven points. Well, six because it would've been one to you. Yeah. But basically denying points to players who could beat you is tantamount to victory points in most cases. So, it's better to hurt the person who's ahead of you more than get a less number of points for yourself, in general, on average. Not all the time though. And this is the mistake a lot of people make, when there's a draft, they'll just pick the most powerful thing every time for them, neglecting to recognize that the second or third most powerful option was actually more powerful than the powerful option, to a neighbor or opponent. The best quarterback, I could've taken him but I have a quarterback. Oh, but that other team in our division is screwed if they don't get one. I'll let him be the backup, who cares? It worked for San Francisco. There's a lot of different kinds of drafts. There's the everyone sees everyone, and you just take turns picking. There's ones where you sort of pick in different numbers. If you look at Settlers, it's pick one spot, a second spot. You're drafting the spots on the board when you start Settlers. The first player gets the best spot, the second player, third, fourth gets two spots. And then you go back up. So that way, the order evens out. Whoever gets the best spot also gets the worst spot. Sometimes when you're doing kickball, it's actually more fair to let one person get the first pick, and the second person should get second and third picks, which really outweighs the problem of; there's only one guy who's been in 5th grade for 3 years and everyone else is a little kid. But it doesn't work out if there are exactly three kids who have been in 5th grade for 3 years. No, it doesn't. But you still go one, two, two, two. It's better than one, one, one, one. Anyway. What other kinds of drafts are there? There's drafting in race cars, following on behind someone. That is actually a different kind of drafting. It is different, but it is related in one sense. Remember we talked about the left, right and everything? In Seven Wonders, notice how you pass in one direction, then you pass in the other direction? You keep alternating the way you're passing. If passed all the cards clockwise, the player to your right is going to have influence on you for the entire rest of the game and that would really make the game un-fun. If you start with science, and then the player to your right just never ever passes you a science card again, they control your whole game. So, it has to alternate to make Seven Wonders make sense, to let you have the ability to try to choose a strategy, instead of being dependent solely on what the person to your right is doing. So, drafts are frigging everywhere and they're totally awesome. If you're making a game, when do you put in a draft? Oh, there's drafting in magic too. There's that. Same thing. When do you put in a draft? You put in a draft when you have resources that the value of is not obvious. It's stupid to say, have a draft where, "Who wants the 7 point card, and who wants the 5 point card?" It's obvious, so it's really boring and dumb to have a draft. What you do is, when you have a card, "This card does this weird thing and this card does this weird thing." Which one do you want? And you want to see if the players can figure out which one is better. When you have lots of different options that have non-obvious values, a draft is a great way to test the players. Like, "Do you know which one is better?" And then the game is about; can you tell? Can you calculate? Now, they also add a sense of fairness to games that have some randomness. A good example of this is a mod you could do to Agricola. Many of you are probably familiar with Agricola. *You get passed out all those little improvement cards and the family members early in the beginning of the game. And you use those to kind of guide your play. Like, advanced players, their strategy is basically dependent upon the two or three of those that they plan to build. If you do a draft, Seven Wonders style, of those cards, it removes that random element and now, all players have an equal chance of trying to construct their strategy ahead of time. It adds this whole element to Agricola that isn't there, normally, that doesn't matter to most players but if you've played Agricola a thousand times, that potato dibber is way better than a lot of other cards you could get. And having that gives you a better chance of winning. But if you can tailor your strategy around other things, you can augment the game and continue playing it when otherwise, it would've started to feel stale to you.
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