Drafting (feat. Terraforming Mars)
October 5, 2020 | ≈ 1809 words | Terraforming Mars Greed
Rambling on Drafting
Okay so basically in Quintin Smith’s (blessed be thy name) review of Bargain Quest, he said there’s just something nice about passing something to someone else and that it was a kind of like giving little a gift to the person next to you. That’s an apt statement for most drafting games I like playing and breaking it down even further, when I take an action or take a turn and pass the game along, it’s almost as if I’m giving the next player a little puzzle to solve, or a little problem they have to deal with. It’s the kind of thing that originally caught my interest in games as a whole. I didn’t ever care about getting points, or tempo, or economy, or engine building, or set collection, or points again but this time at the end of the game, but I cared a lot about seeing reactions from other people and talking about the thing we were doing. To translate to something more direct, I was actually just a piece of shit when I played board games.
So Greed is a drafting game. The first time I played Greed, I had no idea what I was in for. I had gotten it purely because it was 5 dollars on Miniature Market and Rahdo had said it was one of the best drafting games (I’m probably making that shit up but I’m pretty sure he said that). I brought it to a board game day I was invited to and it was the first time I was in this particular person’s house, and it was one of the first times I had personally taught a game, and it was the first time I realized that teaching a game is a huge pain in the ass (a topic for another time). Part of teaching a game is explaining why the game is fun or interesting, and as someone who has never played Greed or read the rules, you could imagine how that could literally be impossible. Also having never met the person that was inviting me to their house really brought the whole experience together.
After the game, the group agreed that:
- Take-that cards are dumb
- Having a turn where you literally play nothing because you can’t meet a card’s requirement is dumb
- The game is dumb
So after playing this dumb card game, the group proceeded to play a nice game of Feudum until after 2 hours everyone decided it was time to go home (a topic for another time).
I didn’t play the game again until 4 months later with a friend who is near and dear to my heart because he has the brain the size of a peanut. This is important to me because I, too, have a brain the size of a peanut. After quickly going over the game, we proceed to spend 6 hours sitting on the carpet playing this dumb drafting game, reading all the card’s abilities and just seeing just how dumb it could be. It solidified itself as one of my favorite games of all time (at the time). It didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t the game that was good, it was the fact that I was playing a game with someone who I had an identical peanut-brain as me. We were both having fun with the game, period. The game could have been Uno, or Monopoly, or even worse, Monopoly Deal, but for them it was just hanging out with a close friend, while for me, it was a game I was presenting to them, kinda like a little gift. I cherish that experience and it was formative in how I enjoyed games back then, even though that feeling has long since been faded and my preference of how I enjoy games have changed.
Greed’s good because it’s dumb. There are other drafting games but only this game has Big Thugs. It’s also good because it’s just 12 turns of drafting cards and playing those cards. The entire game revolves around the draft. You can’t play this game without that draft. There are cards that let you sometimes not care about the draft because it lets you draw cards from the deck which is absolutely cheating 100% but 79.99 out of 80 cards will have you play the actual game which is drafting. The game intrinsically makes you care about the draft because you can only take one Thug out of the 12 cards in your draft hand, and there’s a chance that if you don’t take the best one now, there will be 2 people will enjoy the presence of a Big Thug. After you start caring about taking thugs, there is a chance that you might start caring about what cards the person next to you might want, and that thought of starting to think about what other people do is definitely What I Call A Very Good Board Game Thing. It’s that thing that makes you feel like you have to do something, even though there’s nothing in the rules that say “hey, do this thing because I’m the game and I’m telling you to do it. Take these turns in this order. You have no emotions, you robot.” You take that thug because your bird brain says “hehe thugs” and it makes brain happy.
There are games that include a draft as a phase before the actual turns that people take, and my opinion of those games are: yeah those exist. If there’s a drafting phase in the game then the rest of the game better be as important as the draft. Specifically, if the draft isn’t as good as drafting in MTG, then just don’t have a draft. In Magic, the draft is a completely separate part of the actual game and it is a separate expression of skill and experience. So much of drafting is being able to continuously play through combinations of moves and even entire games with the current cards drafted, then picking the card that increases your chances of winning. Drafting is inherently a random part of a game (that can be fun), so being skilled at drafting can become a huge display of personal style and preference. Drafting is obtuse. Drafting is hard. And drafting does not need to be in every fucking game.
So here are some games I’ve playing that include a drafting phase before taking an actual action. I’ve played Blood Rage. It’s aight, pretty good game. It’s got a draft, but the thing about that game is that the actions you take are literally the cards that you draft, which makes both the draft and the actual game equally important. There’s 7 Wonders, but that can pretty much be a game where you randomly drew 15 cards off the top of the deck and played them in the correct order and honestly it would be just as good (aka Imperial Settlers). 7 Wonders Duel is better, but it’s pretty dry when you start calculating if you’re gonna be able to get a certain card. Also I realize this paragraph started with games that have a drafting phase and 7 Wonders is a pure drafting game but oh well I’m bad at writing. Bargain Quest is kinda good. It’s got some stuff in it that makes you want certain cards but the adventurers are fucking random and make you lose the game and I can’t believe you get to pick first and I’m literally not going to be able to get points this round what the fuck. So maybe it’s good. I regret being an idiot about Fairy Tale because it had potential but also that’s a pure drafting game idk. These are all games where the draft is the entire focus of the game and it has that stuff where you pick based on what you need and take things your opponents need and determines what you get to do. Basically what I’m trying to say is that Terraforming Mars doesn’t need a fucking draft.
The whole deal with Terraforming Mars is a tableau builder that rewards building economy so that players who plan for getting the most points with the cards they see will be rewarded. The direct reward is points which rewards winning, but the intrinsic reward of seeing your stuff grow faster and bigger is as big of a motivator. “Well this thing gets me a lot of points, but my monkey brain wants my plants to grow big and strong” is what everyone says probably. What does this have to do with the draft? Well drafting makes it easier to see more cards that you want and pick those, instead of getting cards that you don’t need and being stuck with only seeing a few cards per round. That’s pretty nice actually. There’s not that many ways at all to see cards in this engine building game. And actually being able to see and draw cards is a very cool ability specific to certain cards in the game. Do you know what the problem with having a draft in an engine building game is? It’s because the game suddenly becomes a drafting game, and the things you actually literally do in the game, become secondary to getting the cards you need and becomes tertiary to caring about the cards you draft. Like literally every game that exists where you put together atomic parts from a random pile can be a drafting game, but not every game needs to be a fucking drafting game. The game of Terraforming Mars is completely different than the game of Terraforming Mars Featuring: The Drafting Mechanic. My personal idea of Terraforming Mars is that it’s an economic simulation where my plants can grow big and strong. But with Terraforming Mars Featuring: The Drafting Mechanic, it is drafting game where once a round I can draft 4 cards and there are multiple drafts over the course of the game each with only 4 cards but I don’t know the cards that are going to be drafted in the next round, and I don’t know how many of these drafts there will be, and this draft is integral to playing the game correctly, and I care very much about how the draft is played and what cards other people care about, and then after some amount of time it’s the same exact economic simulation where my plants can grow big and strong.
But like the draft is pretty good though.
And seeing 10 different cards can be cool.
And it’s funny when you give someone a dead card.
Alright you convinced me the game is probably more fun with the draft idk whatever man don’t talk to me the game’s a solid 7/10.
Greed though? 10/10 will thug again.