Card Drafting

Everyone knows the “dudes on a map” genre. You plonk miniatures on territories, build armies, and smash your neighbours until someone controls enough stuff to win. Blood Rage does it. Kemet does it. Risk has been doing it since your grandparents were young. Inis does something different. It puts warriors on a map, gives you every tool to fight - and then makes winning through combat almost impossible. This is the area control game that rewards the diplomat, the reader of the room, the player who knows when not to act. And it’s been quietly sitting at a 7.8 rating on BGG with 23,000 ratings while its louder cousins steal all the attention. ...

You’re holding five cards. You need one. But the person to your left - the one building military - also needs one of these cards. Do you take what you need, or burn what they want? That’s card drafting in a single moment. And it’s why, three decades after the mechanic entered the mainstream, designers keep coming back to it. Card drafting is simple enough to explain in ten seconds (“pick one, pass the rest”) but deep enough to sustain thousands of plays. ...