Drafting Mechanic

Drafting is a mechanic used to select or allocate resources (players, characters, items, cards, dice, tiles, etc.) among competitors from a common pool. Drafting tends to take two common forms, "Open" and "Closed". Open Drafting is where everyone sees and shares a single resource pool, while Closed Drafting usually takes the form of "you get a subset of the resource, then take one and pass the rest to the next competitor until all are chosen".

Drafting mechanics often lead to trade-offs between taking stuff that benefits you, and taking something to keep it out of an opponent's hand ("hate drafting"). Hate drafting is at its strongest in two-player games where there's ultimately no difference between gaining a point for yourself and denying your opponent a point. However, as the player count increases, hate drafting may veer closer to Griefing than a viable strategy.

Note that the element of choice is vital in drafting. For instance, drawing cards from the common deck in Uno is not drafting. Neither is buying properties in Monopoly; while the pool of properties is shared and you can choose whether you want to buy a property you land on, it's not drafting because you have no control over where you land. However, it's possible to do a downplayed variation of drafting with a shared deck and open display of a few cards, and give players the choice of which one they want to take a card from.

In Video Games and in real life Sports leagues (and by extension, Fantasy Sports leagues), drafting more often takes the form selecting characters or players to build out a team. In such a draft, players/teams take turns selecting from a pool of eligible characters/players, respectively. In sports, once a team selects a player, that team receives exclusive rights to sign that player to a contract, and no other team in the league may sign the player. The National Football League created the first sports draft in 1936 and now, all four major North American sports leagues (NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL) as well as numerous smaller leagues (CFL, WNBA, MLS, etc.) have all established drafts to allocate incoming players. Even the WWE has intermittently used (scripted) drafts to distrubute its talent between its multiple programs.

Sports leagues typically use a "Round Robin" style draft, where the teams pick in a certain order (often the inverse of the previous season's standings, meaning the worst teams get the top picks of incoming talent) while fantasy leagues typically use a "Snake Order" style, where the order reverses each round (so the team who picked first in the first round will pick last in the second, first in the third, last in the fourth, etc.) to keep relative balance.

Compare Luck Manipulation Mechanic and Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic for other ways to help you obtain resources in games. See Random Drop and Loot Boxes for other ways to distribute resources to players. Picked Last naturally comes into play with the final selection in any draft.

Has nothing to do with the draft or tailgating for aerodynamics (which can be a mechanic in racing games).

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Gaming/Sports Examples:

Board Games

• 7 Wonders:
  • At the start of each Age, you are dealt a hand of seven building cards. On each turn, you take a card and do one of three things with it: (1) paying its cost to add it to your city, (2) discarding it for coins, and (3) using to build a wonder step by paying the costs of the wonder step.
  • The Leaders Expansion Pack has players draft leaders at the start of the game. They get a hand of four leaders, choose one to keep and pass the rest.
  • The 2-player spin-off Duel starts with two open drafts of wonders. Then the main game consists of players taking turns drafting building cards from the structures in each Age. Some of the cards are hidden until all cards covering them have been taken.
• Abandon All Artichokes: On your turn, you draft a card from the Garden Row and put it into your hand. You then use the cards you've accumulated to try and get rid of enough artichokes in your deck so that when you draw a new hand of five at the end of your turn, there are no artichoke cards in it.
• Abyss:
  • In the original game, players buy Lords from a shared pool. Also, Locations that get discarded and Allies that get sent to the Council end up in a shared pool where they can be taken by any player.
  • In the Conspiracy spin-off, discarded cards go to a shared pool where they can be chosen. Many of the major decisions in the game revolve around knowing how many cards to draw, as you have a better chance of drawing something good if you draw more cards, but you'll also leave more discarded cards for your opponents.
• Azul uses a complex drafting mechanic where you can choose to take all the tiles of one colour from a factory display, which drops the rest of the tiles on the floor. You can also take tiles from the floor, but you get a penalty if you're the first in the round to do so.
• Canopy is built around the mechanic of Winston drafting (originally designed for Magic: The Gathering). You start by making three piles of face-down cards — 1 card in the 1st pile, 2 in the 2nd and 3 in the 3rd. On your turn, you start at the first pile, look at it and choose if you want to take it or leave it. If you leave a pile, a card is added to it and you move on to the next pile. If you take it, you have to take all the cards in it, and then add a card to replenish the empty pile. If you reject all the piles, you have to take the top card of the pile.
• Century: In Spice Road, players take cards from a common pile. The leftmost one can be taken for free, but the others require one cube on each preceding card, with cubes placed on cards coming with them as they are claimed.
• Happy City:
  • There's an open draft of the Happy Markets at the start of a game using the "expert" rules.
  • Dwellings and Special Buildings are taken from a shared pool that is determined at the start of the game and never refilled. Dwellings can be bought instead of normal buildings, and a Special Building can be taken for free as long as your city meets its requirement.
  • The normal buildings you draw and don't buy on your turn go to a common area and become available to the next player. However, this is a downplayed form of drafting, as you only reveal cards until there are three cards in the area, and players may discard a card before drawing, so you don't have many options and cards don't stick around for long.
• Jaipur is a 2-player drafting game where players draft cards from a shared pool of five cards. Their drafting options are taking all the camels (which serve as wild cads), taking a single goods card, and exchanging a number of goods cards with card from their hand.
• In Lost Ruins of Arnak, players buy Items and Artifacts from a shared pool.
• Res Arcana:
  • Players choose magic items from a common pool. When they pass for a round, they have to return it and take another one.
  • All players buy Places of Power from a shared pool. They also have a shared pool of Monuments, which use the "shared deck and open display of a few cards" approach.
  • The draft variation has players use the "select and pass" method to draft their artifact decks instead of just being dealt eight random artifact cards to use as their deck.
• At the start of Seasons, players use the "you get a hand of cards, take one and pass the rest to your neighbour" closed drafting method to select their nine power cards. During the game, each turn has the players roll dice corresponding to the current season, and then have an open draft of the dice.
• In Space Base, players buy additional ships from a common pool.
• In Splendor, players can buy cards from a tableau of 15 available ones. They can also reserve cards to hate draft or protect them from hate drafting.
• Sushi Go! is a simple "draft and pass" game where you try to pick the cards that will give you the best combination of sushi dishes. Different dishes are scored in different ways, such as sushi rolls rewarding players who collected the most of them, sashimi only being scored in sets of three, and nigiri giving you a bonus if it's paired with wasabi. The manual references hate drafting with the sashimi lamenting that "we were trying to collect 3 sashimi cards, but the guy next to us kept the last one!"
• Vindication: Each of the resources (followers, artifacts, monsters, and traits) has a shared deck that all players draw from. Each resource has one card left face-up for everyone to see, and when you're given the choice to draw one you can either take it, or draw randomly from that resource's deck. If a particularly good card is left face-up, this can lead to multiple players rushing to that resource's building to try to claim it just to prevent it from falling into the hands of an opponent.
• Downplayed in Wingspan. When players choose to draw cards, they can take one of the three cards in the open display or draw one from the common deck.

Card Games

• The card game Ashes Rise Of The Phoenixborn comes with drafting rules, which involves assembling "packs" of cards from the premade decks in the box and passing them around to players. This is actually the dev-intended way of playing the game "competitively", as it allows a full game to be played with only a single copy of the base game and expansions of choice. Interestingly this is follow by a second draft of the players' resources, as they take turns choosing the special dice used to play cards.
• The Crew's "Quest for Planet Nine" version has several missions where the round's captain (whoever drew the black rocket card) can see all the objectives, and can show a single one to a crewmate who can only answer yes or no when asked if they want to take it. As it's a cooperative game where all missions must be completed, the all players will want to get all missions to the crewmate who can best complete them, crewmates need carefully judge not only how good their hand is, but how likely it is that someone else has a better one for that mission before accepting or declining it.
• A near-universal mechanic in Deckbuilding Games . Deckbuilding games typically revolve around purchasing cards from a common pool to put into one's deck.
• The card game Epic can be played in many formats, and has several drafting rules. One is "rotisserie draft," where you lay out a series of cards on the table and each player has a chance to draft one, and another is "pack draft" where you deal "packs" of cards to each player from which they select cards and pass them on.
• Magic: The Gathering's Booster Draft format, where eight players take a pack of cards, take a card and pass the rest until out of cards. Then they do the same two more times before making a deck out of the cards they picked (and any number of basic lands). Magic also has Winston drafting, Rochester drafting, and Rotisserie drafting, among others.
• The Pokémon TCG has the "Build & Battle Draft format" where four players look at their 23-card Evolution packs (which are kept), and then do a "pick a card and pass it on" closed draft with the booster packs they received.
• Games like Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer and Star Realms are deck-building games where players acquire cards via a drafting mechanism. Cards are purchased from a row of cards dealt out from a central deck. When a card is bought, another card is dealt from the central deck to replace it, meaning that the cards on offer are always changing.
• Some Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments have 4-8 players building their decks using a closed draft.

Fan Works

• The Arcane hockey Alternate Universe fic Run At The Cup deals with a different type of sports draft - how an expansion team like the Zaun Sumprats is created. Each existing team places eight of their players under protection. The Sumprats can pick anyone who is not under protection, meaning that every single Sumprats player was effectively abandoned by their former team. Vi and Caitlyn (both star players of their respective former teams) being left unprotected was very unexpected and had many commentators wondering what the hell the Ironfists and Lone Stars were thinking. The reality is that Vi had wanted to leave the Ironfists, while Caitlyn had been isolated within her team by her former captain, Terri Landsman.

Professional Wrestling

• WWE has used a scripted draft with different names (from just Draft to Superstar Shakeup) in recent decades to distribute talent between it's various "brands" (Raw, SmackDown, NXT, formerly ECW). This is done to create drama (splitting tag teams, separating rivals, etc.), move championship titles between the shows, and open up fresh storylines. It ran initially from 2002-2011 before a hiatus, then was reestablished in 2016.

Sports

• The "Big Four" North American Sports Leagues all utilize a draft mechanic for allocating amateur and international player prospects. To note, by order of draft institution:
  • The National Football League is the Trope Maker for drafting mechanics in professional sports, establishing the first draft in 1936 as a means of improving parity by giving the lower performing teams exclusive dibs to sign the most promising young talent. (who would otherwise just sign with either the wealthiest or most successful franchises). The NFL Draft is a modified "round robin" style where the first pick of each round goes to the team that had the worst record in the league in the previous year, and each selection goes up until the team that won the Super Bowl makes their pick and the order resets for the next round. (Ties are broken via strength of schedule and then, if needed, a coin flip.) The final draft pick in a given year is known as "Mr. Irrelevant" and receives a trophy modeled on the Heisman Trophy, except that the player is fumbling the ball. The "modified" style applies in that the playoff teams are not ordered strictly by record, but by their order of elimination from the postseason. (For example, a 12-5 team who loses to a 10-7 team will pick ahead of that team despite their records.) Another modification is that, starting at the end of the third round, teams who experience a net loss in free agency can earn "compensatory" picks which are tacked on at the ends of rounds 3-7. Starting in 2021, compensatory picks can also be earned if a team has a minority candidate hired by another team as a head coach or general manager. Additionally, the NFL holds the "Supplemental Draft" in most years during the summer after the primary draft for players whose college eligibility has changed. The order is the same as the main draft and, if a team selects a player, they forfeit the equivalent pick in the next year's draft. (Hall of Famer Cris Carter was selected in the Supplemental Draft.) The movie Draft Day was co-produced by the NFL to highlight their draft proceedings. Far more details on the NFL Draft can be found on the league's Useful Notes page.
  • The National Basketball Association introduced their draft in 1947 and is a heavily modified "round robin" style. In the early days, there were numerous factors at play beyond the standard draft picks, such as special "territorial" draft picks that allowed teams to select players from nearby colleges to benefit off of their popularity. (Hall of Famers Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson were territorial picks.) The NBA was the first league to introduce a "draft lottery" to discourage "tanking" (the sports term for act of a team who was eliminated from contention intentionally losing games to end up with a higher draft pick and thus better player) in 1985. In its current form, each team who fails to make the playoffs is put into a "lottery" for the top four picks, with the worst teams having the best odds.
  • The National Hockey League introduced their draft in 1963 and, like the NBA, added a lottery system for the top pick in 1995 to similarly discourage tanking. (Expanded to the top two picks in 2016.)
  • Major League Baseball was the last of the "big four" North American sports leagues to establish a true draft, doing so in in 1965. However, they had draft-like mechanisms for distributing players to minor league teams dating as far back as 1921. MLB also currently holds multiple types of draft which go by their number in the offical rule book. The "Rule 4" Draft is closest to the other sports, where amateur players are selected by teams in inverse order to the previous years standings. In 2023, a lottery will be instituted like the NBA and NHL for the top six picks, with the worst three teams having the best odds. MLB also has a "Rule 5" draft, which is instead for players on teams' minor league affiliates to prevent teams from stockpiling young talent. (Hall of Famers Christy Matthewson and Roberto Clemente were "Rule 5" draftees.)
  • Other North American Sports Leagues which hold drafts include the Canadian Football League, Women's Nataion Basketball Association, Major League Soccer, Major League Lacrosse, Major League Cricket, National Women's Soccer League, Major League Rugby, and many more.
• Fantasy Sports leagues typically begin with a draft before the start of the real life season of the sport on which they're based. There are several popular ways this happens:
  • A "snake order" draft is by far the most common. It is so called becase the order reverses each round (so the team who picked first in the first round will pick last in the second, first in the third, last in the fourth, etc.) to keep relative balance, giving the appearance of a coiled snake. Its relative simplicity makes it popular among casual leagues and beginners. However, there is relatively less opportunity for strategy compared to more complex drafting methods.
  • "Auction Drafts" are another variation where each team has a budget and they make "bids" on the players they want. For example, if you have a 14-player roster to fill and a budget of $200, the most you could bid for your first player is $187, which would leave you with $1 per player for the remaining 13 slots. Each team takes a turn nominating a player for auction, which also typically means placing an automatic minimum bid on them. The currency involved usually isn't real, but more serious leagues may use the real thing. Compared to a "snake order" draft, there is far more opportunity for strategy. For example, you can splurge on a few big name players and then fill the rest of your team out with budget options.
  • "Keeper Leagues", in which teams may "keep" a certain number of previously drafted players from year to year, still hold a draft at the start of each season to select players who were not kept as well as incoming rookies. Usually, keeping a player means sacrificing your pick in the round you used to select him (so if you keep your first round pick from last year, you lose your first round pick this year), which encourages teams to keep their lower drafted sleeper hits. In some cases, these leagues may use a "Round Robin" style like real sports leagues instead.

Tabletop Games

• Collectible minis games such as Hero Clix and Dungeons & Dragons Minis have rules for draft tournaments. Each player buys one or more booster boxes, then takes one figure from the box and passes the box to the next player, repeated until all the boxes are empty. The players then build a force to play in the tournament out of the figures they drew.

Video Games

• Card City Nights 2: As Lemonic Diva explains, on how to win her unique Star pack cards:
  Lemonic Diva: Basically, we pick one of three random cards until we have 30 in total. Then we use them to build temporary decks for the battle only. You don't get to keep them afterwards.
• Dungeons of Aether has a Dice Draft as its main mechanic. At the beginning of each turn, a set of dice of random colors are rolled, and the player and enemy take turns assigning them to their stats. Any dice higher than 1 can be assigned to any stat, but will have its value treated as 1 if it's not assigned to its matching stat, unless it's a yellow Stamina die.
• The Fool's Errand: The Wheel of Fortune game, where the player starts with 2 cards of the Tarot, and the opponent starts with 1. Out of a selection of 3 other cards, the player picks 1, and the opponent gets the other 2, whoever has the best combination wins the round and gets points. The game is won after one side gets enough points.
• Madden NFL:
  • In Franchise mode, a simulation of the NFL Draft is one of the offseason events. Barring a few years where you could import draft classes from the NCAA Football sister series, the draft classes are made up of randomly generated CPU players. It mostly plays out like the real thing, with one difference being that it only has the seven rounds of standard picks, not including compensatory picks.
  • An option before starting up in Franchise mode is to hold a "Fantasy Draft" which allows you to draft your team in a fantasy football style. Every player in the league is added to the draft pool and the CPU selects for the other 31 teams. The result is a major shakeup of rosters across the league.
• Open Sorcery Sea Plus Plus: A game where rounds of six random tarot cards are drafted between two people to form dueling combos of three cards, winning hand gets a number of points based on the hand, winner of the whole game is whoever gets 100 points first, with the player character, Pisces, always going first. It goes by multiple names, "Protagonist Blackjack", "Topple the Tower" (named for the "Tower" of cards, arranged in a pyramid shape), and "Tarot War".
• Unreal Tournament 4: Each round in the Showdown and Team Showdown modes start with the players on each team taking turns in order to choose a spawnpoint. In this case, the advantages can vary from just spawning near desirable items to surrounding nearby enemy players.

Other Examples:

Live-Action TV

• In the Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode "Halloween Part III", Jake and Holt hold a draft of the other detectives (and Gina) to assist them in the annual "Halloween Heist". They decide to hold the draft because, the previous two years, the rest of the precint assisted Jake and Holt (each year, respectively) in winning. Amy is notably Picked Last, as Holt is suspicious of her for being Jake's girlfriend and Jake is suspicious because Holt is her mentor. She ultimately goes rogue and wins.
• Chappelle's Show Parodied the idea of a sports draft in their Racial Draft sketch, where each major race group in America took turns selecting celebrities to call all their own. Those selected all had some kind of multi-ethnic or -race background in some manner. The sketch threw in many elements of sports drafts to make fun of, like the draftee giving a thanking speech at the meeting (Tiger Woods going, "So long fried rice, hello fried chicken!" after being picked by blacks), surprise draft-day picks that confuse the commentators and experts (Latinos picking Elian Gonzalez on grounds that white people had appropriated him in culture), and frantic negotiations and trades conducted while the draft is running (whites and blacks making a bunch of deals after the former selected Colin Powell and the latter initially protesting, eventually involving Condoleezza Rice, Eminem, and O. J. Simpson).