SFR, Inc.

[jbarron81]

Hey this is Jonathan. I played a little Dragon Dice at gen con 2014, also a little at gen con 2013. This year I came in last for Battlefest, but I came in first for single race sealed on Sunday. Anyway, I was talking to some of the guys also in the single race sealed and got on the topic of doing a dragon dice draft. Obviously there's a few problems, but the idea of a draft seemed fun so we tried to work through them.

Problem 1 as we see it is the races. Doing as many races as people in the draft would cause so much rules complexity, it wouldn't be fun. Doing all the same race would be boring. Our solution, do 3 races that share colors. You pick 3 of the 5 colors and the races that use those colors. For example Scalders (red/green), Treefolk (green/yellow) and Dwarves (yellow/red). This makes magic rolls less insane, and you only have to worry about 3 racial abilities.

Chuck mentioned the fact that all the races aren't always available, but there's still a few combinations we could use and if you're missing the third race there's always Amazons as a wild card, or undead if the other two races have black in them.

Problem 2: How many people to have in the draft. In Magic you draft with 8 people from card packs of 15. In Dragon dice though there's only 8 dice, meaning with 8 people you'd only get 1 die out of any pack, but that might not be a problem. I think 6 people would be a good number, but you could probably do as few as 4 people since the packs have a small amount of choices.

Problem 3: Health of armies. In a draft it can be in your best interest not to take the rare dice in a pack. In a card game this isn't a big deal, someone can play a deck with less rares or more rares then someone else. Dragon dice has a unique problem with this which is rarity also is tied with health and you don't want one army with 35 health while another has 25. So you are most likely going to want to make it so people make armies with less health then they open, giving the option to draft lower health units early on if they choose, or not use dice they drafted but does not fit their army. I figure 2 packs are 30 health of dice, maybe make armies with 26 or 24 health of units.



So with all of that here's how I'd run the draft if I could find enough people. First get at least 4 people and up to 8. Figure out what colors you want to do, this will probably be limited by the races you have available. Then figure out how many packs of dice you'd need for all the players, (player x 2 = packs) and divide that number by 3. That's how many packs of each of your three races you'll need. Obviously this is not always going to be a round number, so you can pick a race to have less packs of, or another fun idea is to add in one or two packs of Battle Chest.

At the start of the draft, don't give out the packs until all players are arranged around the table. Then give each player a random pack. Each player picks a die from their pack and passes to the right. Repeat until all dice from all packs are chosen. Then again give all players a random pack (I wouldn't give them both packs at the beginning, but that's up to you) and again draft, but this time to the left.

If possible while drafting Battle Chest packs, make sure at least one or two rare items in the pack are the correct colors for the races being played.

When the all the dice are drafted each player gets to makes a 24 point army. They should have somewhere around 28-32 health in theory, but you never know. Also some random terrains and dragons will have to be handed out.

I'm going to Gen Con next year and I'd be very excited to play this format, hopefully some more people would too.

[cliffwiggs]

Jonathan, congrats on the single race win! I hadn't heard much about it. were any good dice pulled during it?

We've had a few people try Dragon Dice drafts before and they all discovered some of the same issues that you found.

Races - In the past they've just used starters and had those two or four or six races. They also required the draft to follow a starter format (monsters, rares, uncommons, etc) that is how they got around the health problem.

Draft size - Last time they did this it was just one big pile of dice. they didn't try to hide the draft. So it took quite a while to do.

Health - if you really wanted to allow for an open draft, then you could follow your suggestion or you could limit the health value that they draft from a box. If you take the rare, maybe you get less from that box.

I'm the one who enters the events for Gencon, so I'll have to consider this format as one of the events!
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[jbarron81]

Thanks Cliff! I think we briefly talked on Sunday.

The sealed was a lot of fun for me. I got Lava Elves, which I enjoy, they're like my 3rd or 4th favorite race. What really won it for me was the fact that both my rares were magic users. Then I played against people I shared colors with and just summoned dragons and cast ash storms until they were dead. Against Pat, who was playing undead, I even summoned all three black dragons to a terrain she had control of over a few turns. Her army got killed off because of 5 ash storms I had cast on her the previous round, and she lost control of the 8th face as John called time, making it a win for me. Otherwise it would have been a tie. Those Undead are just so hard to kill.

As far as the draft, I could see doing a draft from a huge pool like you said. You can do that in Magic as well, it's called Rochester, but it never caught on in popularity. Booster drafts tend to be much more fun.

The problem with doing a kicker draft in Dragon Dice would be each person is pretty much going to have an army with a very even mixture of however many races you choose to use. It's hard to specialize in one race if you want to. It'd be like if in Magic you got packs that only had one color of card, you want to play white, but you're forced to take the same amount of blue and red cards.

What if you gave each player two packs of different races, still keep the number of races down low (I really think the 3 races sharing colors could work), but give them both packs at once. Then draft and pass the two packs as one. There'd only be one round of drafting, but people could specialize in a race if they liked, or specialize in melee, missile or magic or whatever they want to do.

[cliffwiggs]

I'd like to hear from others who have tried this.

Dave? did you ever try to do a very open draft?
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[dproman]

I tried 2 separate draft-type of formats. I didn't feel that either one was highly successful, fun or popular. It may have just been my lack of experience as a gamer and event organizer. My favorite (maybe not the participants' favorite, because I didn't get much feedback) was the draft event at PAX a couple of years ago.

We had 8 players. Everyone bought a 2-player starter. We dumped out all of the dice, and separated them into groups. Monsters, Rares, etc. The draft order was determined by the sign up sheet (I just went down the list). Every player received a first pick, but what they were picking was the random part! I had the draftee draw straws to determine what dice we were going to pick from. After all of the dice were chosen, I gave players 5 minutes for trading. Set up the pairings, had the tournament.

Cliff, remind me at PAX, and we can discuss my draft experiences at length.
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[jbarron81]

Any chance of trying at Gen Con this year? I know it's 6 months away, but I'm so excited!

[cliffwiggs]

I'll be finalizing the event schedule this week, but this one is on the short list.
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Multiplayer Champion Gencon11/Battlefest Champion(tied) GenCon10/World Champion GenCon07/National Champion Origins05/Intermediate Champion GenCon02/Novice Champion Origins99